Freedom is important to Madeleine Peyroux. Relocated from New York to Paris as a teenager after her parents’ divorce, she soon dropped out of school for a life travelling Europe singing Fats Waller and Bessie Smith songs. An acclaimed 1996 debut, Dreamland, didn’t stop her turning her back on record company wrangles in favour of busking, and even after two best-selling albums of cover versions – 2004’s Careless Love and 2006’s Half The Perfect World – she became notorious for her unnannounced ‘vanishing acts’. “I love my freedom,” she croons on “Leaving Home Again”, one of 11 original songs on Standing On The Rooftop, an album that, like 2009’s Bare Bones, affirms Peyroux’s talents as a songwriter as well as a gifted interpreter. Once again she’s worked with a variety of co-writers – New York colleagues, mostly, but Bill Wyman helped out on a couple of numbers – though at the album’s heart are Peyroux’s frank, poetic lyrics, beautifully animated by her smoky, sensual voice. Rooftop also shows Peyroux is is prepared to take risks. The retro-jazz stylings of earlier LPs – brushed drums, polite piano – are still in evidence, but most of Rooftop’s material has more challenging arrangements. Cleverly produced by Craig Street, best known for his work with Norah Jones, it’s an album rich in atmosphere, its often spartan feel shaped by such talents as freelance guitar magician Mark Ribot and piano legend Allen Toussaint. On the safe side of the tracks comes the opener, a droll, banjo-plucked take of Paul McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” that’s pleasant but undemanding. The same goes for “The Kind You Can’t Afford”, written with Wyman, which playfully taunts a rich wannabe lover – “You got art collections, I got comic books” – without supplying a killer hook. From there the album builds into something more intense. “Leaving Home Again” is a breezy celebration of liberty, while “The Things I’ve Seen Today” strikes a more poignant, nocturnal note, for, as on Bare Bones, the best numbers are small-hours torch songs, introspective and regretful. Here Peyroux rues that “good times seem so poor”. “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love” sets WH Auden’s celebrated poem about the transience of intimacy to an intricate acoustic backing that’s touched by brass, and Peyroux delivers its fragile sentiments with precision. The oft-made comparisons between her high vocal style and Billie Holiday’s aren’t inaccurate, but her delivery here shows how far Peyroux has moved on from her influences. The title track deepens the story brilliantly, its brooding, sawing strings spangled by Ribot’s echoing guitar while Peyroux looks across the city at dawn, wired, alive, reflecting on her triumphs and losses. “Never seen a morning clear as this,” she soars. Her take on Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain” transforms the much-versioned blues into a spooky statement of remorse, a real highlight, against which Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away” proves disappointingly routine. The remaining songs – there are 15 in all – mostly provide relief from the heartache. A tongue-in-cheek “The Party Oughta Be Coming Soon” laments that “Louis Armstrong’s getting too sad to blow” to Toussaint’s agile piano, and “Don’t Pick A Fight With A Poet” is as larky as its title suggests. “Ophelia” complicates the mood with its mystic immersion into the Mississippi waters – it’s about womanhood’s changing role, says the singer – but “Meet Me In Rio” and “The Way Of All Things” take us out on a chugging, upbeat note. It’s a well-judged mix; safe enough to satisfy the easy-listening end of Peyroux’s following, but bold enough to show that among the jazzy, post-Norah crowd, the wayward Maddy stands apart. Neil Spencer Q+A Madeleine Peyroux You’ve been working with a new producer. I wanted to make an album on different terms – this one is even self-financed – and in New York, where I live, with local musicians. Craig reached out at the right time. It was serendipity, like getting Allen Toussaint, who happened to be in town. And you’re writing with different people. Four of the songs are all mine, two are with Bill Wyman, and the rest include Marc Ribot, who wrote the music for the Auden poem. The record is very much an ensemble piece. Auden’s a bold choice. So is Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain”. Craig pointed out it was Johnson’s anniversary. I grew up with his music, and cover versions don’t always do him justice. Blues can be complex, that’s why we gave it an orchestral arrangement, without guitar. Who are you listening to? I just saw Shutter Island, which introduced me to music by John Cage and György Ligeti. Modern classical music will be very important for the 21st century. INTERVIEW: NEIL SPENCER

During his heyday in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Leon Russell cut a wide swathe through rock’n’roll. For a while there he seemed to be everywhere, a Svengali who looked the part, with his silver, flowing locks and beard. This musicians’ musician was revered on both sides of the pond for his status as a living, breathing embodiment of neon-lit American roadhouse music, having logged countless hours in steamy, smoky joints before he was old enough to legally drink. He’d headed west to LA from his native Tulsa in the early ’60s when barely out of his teens, but possessing chops for miles as a guitarist, pianist and arranger, he soon became a top-flight LA session man. Among his myriad early credits, Russell played numerous dates for Phil Spector as a key member of the Wrecking Crew, pounded the ivories on Jan & Dean’s “Surf City”, brought a professional presence to the historic session for The Byrds’ “Mr Tambourine Man” and conducted the string section on his own arrangement for Glen Campbell’s “Gentle On My Mind”. Subsequently, Russell was a mainstay of blue-eyed soul prototypes Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, the producer/arranger of Joe Cocker’s self-titled ’69 LP, and the organiser/ringleader of Cocker’s 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, which spawned a hit album and film, and a mentor to honorary shitkickers George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Russell also founded Shelter Records with expat English producer Denny Cordell, and the label would later sign and release records by the Tulsa-based Dwight Twilley Band and transplanted Floridians Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, as well as Texas blues great Freddie King and Memphis mainstay Don Nix. Given Russell’s status as a wizard behind the scenes, pushing buttons and pulling strings, it’s easy to overlook the fact that he was also a writer and artist of distinction. It’s this aspect of his legacy that is spotlighted on this 16-song career overview, three quarters of it culled from the five studio albums he recorded between 1970 and ’75. As a performer, Russell is known for the strangulated soulfulness of his singing and his kinetic barrelhouse piano playing, in the grand tradition of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. But as a writer, he perpetuated an earlier tradition. Indeed, his stellar contributions to the Great American Songbook revealed Russell as the inheritor of the sophisticated Southernness of Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. By the time he retreated from the front lines of rock’n’roll and left the public consciousness at the tail end of the ’70s, Russell had deepened his imprint, penning a number of rock standards, including the Cocker-sung hit “Delta Lady” (celebrating his then-girlfriend, singer Rita Coolidge), his own “Tight Rope”, the Bonnie Bramlett co-write “Groupie (Superstar)”, a hit for The Carpenters (who dropped the “Groupie” reference, not surprisingly), as was the lovely “This Masquerade”. If anything, his original recordings of these classics make up in elegant understatement what they cede to the cover versions in show-stopping panache. And no subsequent rendition has approached Russell’s own sublime take on the exquisite love ballad, “A Song For You”. Although Russell’s arrangements were often lighthearted, his most memorable lyrics possessed startling emotional weight. “Tight Rope” finds its narrator poised “linked by life and the funeral pyre”, while the refrain of “A Song For You” interweaves metaphysics and heart-wrenching poignancy: “I love you in a place/Where there’s no space or time/I love you for all my life/You are a friend of mine/And when my life is over/Remember when we were together/We were alone/And I was singing this song for you”. The collection is filled out by “Heartbreak Hotel”, his 1979 duet with Willie Nelson, the only Russell single to top the US charts; his blazing medley of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”/ “Young Blood” from 1971’s The Concert For Bangladesh; and “If It Wasn’t For Bad” from his belated return to the spotlight alongside one-time protégé Elton John on 2010’s The Union. The album’s opener, “Tryin’ To Stay Live”, from Asylum Choir II, a 1969 collaboration with Texan Marc Benno, serves as a mission statement for the entire career of a multi-talented blue-collar cat who for a time was the hardest-working man in showbiz. Bud Scoppa