Pájara

On Pájara, Cördoba, Argentina’s Clara Presta stretches well beyond the jazz remit of her first album, Casa. If that album tended a little toward the tentative, Pájara feels musically voracious and alive, and it’s not a surprise to discover it’s an album that accompanies personal transformation. The jazz is still there, of course – always implicit, sometimes rising to the surface – but the connection I keep making when listening to Pájara is a kind of jazz-informed art song, maybe aligned, loosely, with the likes of Anja Garbarek and Stina Nordenstam, though less chilly and poised than that, crossed with the gentle, inquisitive playfulness of fellow Argentinian songwriters Juana Molina and Candelaria Zamar. It wears its avant touches lightly, and even nudges into folk territory, but always, somehow, circles around a lusciously pop core.