Dena DeRose, Mellow Tones Review

by Stamish Malcuss

Dena DeRose’s Mellow Tones (HighNote, 2025) offers intimacy, swing, and musical clarity. Featuring her longtime collaborators Martin Wind (bass) and Matt Wilson (drums), with trombonist Ed Neumeister joining on two essential bookends, the album is a richly curated set of ballads and swingers that distills the emotional heft of jazz storytelling into a cohesive narrative arc. From the opening a cappella phrase to the final blues cadence, DeRose and Co have an ensemble sensitivity that can be felt. This recording is DeRose’s finest, with DeRose’s phrasing rooted in melodic logic, harmonic fluency, and the storytelling heartbeat of jazz.

“In a Mellow Tone” opens the album with just her voice; DeRose invites the listener into a quiet intimacy. The intimacy of the human voice resonating alone with only you and her and the room reverb pulls you into the performance. It’s a daring start, her phrasing already swinging, pulsing with breath and nuance, before Neumeister enters, almost like a musical shadow, shaping the piece into a duo that feels like a lost Ellington arrangement for voice and bone. The ensemble has chemistry, and it’s an authentic joy that they project. The piano cadenza, unaccompanied, adds a personal benediction to the track.

“Autumn in New York” is an example of DeRose’s vocal creativity. The phrasing on the line—“Why does it seem so inviting?”—transforms a declarative classic into a question laden with curiosity. DeRose’s melodic rise and subtle rhythmic compression imbue the line with emotional lift. It’s a musical statement turned into a question as her vocal jazz phrasing refreshes a section so many singers take for granted.

This album marks the first recorded appearance of DeRose as a composer, setting Langston Hughes’s eight-line poem “Dreams” into a stirring jazz trio meditation called “Hold Fast to Your Dreams.” Wind’s resonating bass opens the track like a poetic invocation, evolving naturally into DeRose’s impassioned piano figure. What makes this song enjoyable is the trio’s interaction and common language. Examples of that language includes flowing bass countermelodies, a march-inspired swing during DeRose’s piano chorus, and an elastic vocal that glides and leaps with dramatic expressiveness. By the end, a vamp simmers with interplay, creating one of the album’s most forward-looking moments.

Sung with almost whispered sincerity, DeRose unspools the Benny Carter gem “Only Trust Your Heart” like someone revealing secrets, each lyrical moment turning gently, as if held in the hand. “The rose petal moment” arrives at the cadence: the lyric “your heart,” harmonized by voice and piano, lands with a finality that is neither overwrought nor evasive. It is a moment when voice and piano become one, letting the shape of the phrase do the emotional work.

Closing with Slide Hampton’s classic, “My Frame for the Blues,” with DeRose adding her lyrics. This tune gives the ensemble a final chance to stretch out. Where the album begins with voice alone, it ends with trombone front and center, swinging loosely around a blues form that feels like the closing tune at a favorite New York club. The energy closes the set as if it were the closing song for a jazz set. Each solo—DeRose’s, Neumeister’s, the rhythm section’s groove—is a nod to the freedom and playfulness that undergirds all the emotional refinement preceding it.

Wind and Wilson are involved in the storytelling. Wind, in particular, takes on a co-narrator role across multiple tunes, from his sensitive arco and pizzicato work. His walking bass lines buoy the more swinging tracks. Wilson, a master of lightness and detail, brings drumming that breathes and subtle rhythmic lifts that animate each phrase. Neumeister, featured on the opener and closer, completes the metaphorical “frame” of the album, a kind of musical companion and mirror to DeRose’s expressive clarity.

Mellow Tones reflects DeRose’s ability to tie a set of nine songs together to form a symmetry of moving atmospheres. And while the set contains a range of standards, what lingers is not genre or repertoire but presence: the sense of this artist inviting us to merge with their musical energy.