Alexis Cole, Taking My Seat: A Musical Inheritance Review

by Icrom Bigrad

The significance of Alexis Cole sitting at the piano on Taking My Seat: A Musical Inheritance is not that she has added another skill to an established career as a jazz vocalist. Piano has been part of Cole’s musical life since childhood. What changes here is its position. For the first time on one of her albums, singer and pianist are presented together, allowing the relationships among Cole’s phrasing, rhythmic conception, harmonic thinking, arranging, and ensemble leadership to become unusually audible.

That makes the album’s idea of inheritance more interesting than biography alone. Cole comes from singer-pianists on both sides of her family, including her father, Mark Finkin, and her late maternal grandmother, Estelle Cole. But inheritance on Taking My Seat: A Musical Inheritance can also be heard as recognition: musical abilities that have long coexisted are finally allowed to function as parts of one language.

Cole recorded the album with bassist David Finck and drummer Kenny Hassler, longtime collaborators whose familiarity matters to the result. This does not sound like a vocalist accompanying herself while a rhythm section follows. Cole’s expanded instrumental role gives her another way to participate inside the trio.

“Get Out of Town” unfolds with romantic piano harmony supporting Cole’s rubato entrance as her voice moves freely through the melody, stretching durations and coloring phrases before the trio settles into swing. Once that swing takes hold, a recurring line cliché and ostinato supply motion, while the ride cymbal and quarter-note pulse give the B section buoyant character.

Cole’s piano touch is light and balanced, leaving room around both her voice and the rhythm section. The clearest integration arrives when she begins improvising. Her scat singing moves alongside single-note piano lines, the two articulating the same musical thought through different sounds. Then the voice drops away and the piano continues alone. Rather than feeling like a transition from vocal section to piano solo, it sounds like an idea continuing after its medium has changed. Both are highly musical.

Finck’s solo reveals another consequence of Cole occupying the keyboard. As his lines move through the bass’s register, her accompaniment adjusts around them while preserving the swing relationship with Hassler. Cole is supporting the soloist as she is listening from inside the rhythm section.

When the vocal returns, she stretches and delays phrases against the pulse before voice, piano, bass, and drums converge on ensemble accents. The performance moves between rubato, swing, and its quasi-Latin character interludes beautifully.

“My Little Boat” places the ensemble inside a Brazilian setting. Cole’s articulation becomes lighter and more syncopated, with phrases sitting slightly behind the beat while the piano voicings inhabit the same stylistic language. Hassler’s brushes and Finck’s melodic bass playing preserve the music’s relaxed motion.

Here the connection between voice and keyboard becomes literal. Cole improvises vocally while her right hand doubles the line at the piano. The timbres are different, but the accents, melodic contour, and rhythmic intention belong to the same phrase. Eventually the voice stops doubling the keyboard and the piano carries the improvisation forward by itself.

The musical thought can begin in one voice, exist simultaneously in both, and continue through the other.

“My Funny Valentine” expands that integration into composition and arrangement. Cole’s treatment begins away from the standard’s familiar melodic profile. A pedal tone anchors a steady lower-register piano figure while chromatic line movement creates tension above it. Finck and Hassler enter as the harmony develops, giving the opening a contemporary character before Cole introduces additional music and lyrics of her own.

A descending melodic figure followed by an upward intervallic leap becomes a recognizable shape as it moves through the harmony. Only later does the familiar “My Funny Valentine” melody emerge. That delayed recognition changes the listener’s relationship to the standard: Cole establishes her own harmonic and melodic environment before allowing the known song to occupy it.

Once inside the familiar melody, she continues reshaping it. Legato vocal lines expand and contract rhythmically, while changes of register and harmonic color keep familiar phrases from becoming routine. At one point, an ascending vocal gesture works against descending bass movement, creating tension between the directions of the two lines before the vocal settles onto the sustained word “stay.”

Cole’s warm timbre remains controlled as she climbs through her register. Sustained notes use vibrato selectively, while short piano responses occupy the spaces between vocal phrases. The trio supports the performance without crowding its harmonic movement.

The later improvisation reconnects voice and keyboard. Cole again doubles portions of her piano line vocally, navigating the harmony with clean rhythmic accents before the performance moves toward a closing section of sustained vocal material, counterpoint, and increasing rhythmic energy from Hassler. Cole has identified her study of Indian classical vocal music as an influence on the improvised endings of this piece and “Night and Day,” providing context for the distinctive melodic language heard near the close.

“My Funny Valentine” consequently demonstrates something larger than Cole’s ability to accompany her own singing. She is shaping the song simultaneously as vocalist, pianist, arranger, composer, and bandleader. Those functions become difficult to separate because each participates in the same conception.

“Night and Day” turns that conception outward toward the trio. An arpeggiated piano figure supports the warmth of the opening melody before descending harmonic movement leads into a more open two-feel. As the performance develops, the ensemble negotiates several rhythmic characters, including a flowing bossa-inflected section.

Cole alters her vocal rhythm along with those changes. On the second statement of the melody, she compresses portions of the phrase, creating forward motion without disturbing the song’s recognizable contour. Her piano solo follows with lyrical right-hand figures and chordal melodies, while Finck and Hassler help define each change of feel through dynamics and rhythmic placement.

Finck’s melodic solo eventually carries the performance toward the vocal return, where Cole glides into the melody. Later, a moving vamp supports expanding vocal harmonies as Hassler increases the energy beneath them.

One of the album’s most revealing connections can be heard here without voice and piano doubling one another. Cole’s piano has a balanced, warm touch that complements the character of her singing. More importantly, both reveal the same concern with the placement and shape of a phrase. Her singing contains the rhythmic awareness of her piano playing; her piano lines possess the breathing quality of a vocalist.

Finck and Hassler are essential to making that integration possible. Finck combines a warm acoustic sound with melodic instincts and strong time, while Hassler can define a groove, alter its color, or increase the dramatic trajectory without forcing the music forward. Their familiarity with Cole gives her freedom to move among singer, pianist, arranger, and bandleader without requiring the ensemble to reorganize itself around every change of role.

That may be the most meaningful sense in which Cole is “taking her seat.” The piano does not introduce another Alexis Cole. It makes audible connections among aspects of the musician that were already there.

On Taking My Seat: A Musical Inheritance, voice and keyboard reveal the same instincts for rhythmic flexibility, melodic shape, harmonic color, and responsive interaction. What has been inherited, learned, and developed across Cole’s musical life no longer needs to be divided into separate roles. The album lets us hear the musician whole.