By Ed Enright

Katherine Davis deserves a lot of credit for not including electric guitar on her debut CD.

Dream Shoes is a far cry from the cliché conception of "the blues" in Chicago, where distorted Fenders and Les Pauls have dominated the scene for too many decades. Davis uses piano instead, along with bass, drums and some tasty sax, a format that allows her to reach back into the blues' acoustic tradition. It also provides a more appropriate backdrop for her gentle vocals; she's not your typical Lincoln Avenue blues belter, after all.

Like a Billie Holiday without the melancholy, Davis sings with the nuance of a jazz singer on Dream Shoes. She doesn't need to shout to be heard; by focusing on melody, swinging lightly and keeping volume in check, she draws the listener to her.

Much of the music on Dream Shoes is pretty jazzy to begin with. Davis sings at her most expressive on Duke Ellington's "I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart" (although it seems like a waste to include two versions here, once with a trio and once with piano only). She takes us down to New Orleans on "The Darktown Strutters Ball" and back to old Harlem on "Honeysuckle Rose." Tunes like "Try A Little Tenderness" and "What A Difference A Day Makes," standards frequently heard in a jazz context, reveal Davis as a mature artist who exercises good taste in both her phrasing and her choice of material.

Sadly, though, Davis has scuffed her dream shoes. Her original "Blues And Bulls," a way-too-late party for Chicago's bygone basketball champs, suffers from mundane lyrics and cheap blues-bar enthusiasm. Joanie Pallatto's and Bradley Parker-Sparrow's "You Choose" is another throwaway: It preaches that tired old line about how blues and jazz are really the same thing, then fails to tell any of the "stories" it actually claims to celebrate. The traditional "Press My Button" and "You Can¹t Ride My Train" might go over well live, in a blues tourist-trap; but here, next to Ellington and without the obligatory booze, they come across as base and dull, respectively. The CD's closers, "He Is That Kind Of Friend" (a spoken-word piece that segues into a gospel tune) and a tacked-on a cappella version of "Java Jive," reduce the album to the level of a child's nursery rhyme.

Davis' producers could have presented her in a flattering light that consistently focuses her strengths. They started with the right instrumentation, but didn't follow through and provide the vision required to finish the job. Instead, they built this CD around a spread-too-thin theme of "jazz = blues = gospel, and it's all good, man," a concept that's neither original, interesting, nor enlightening.

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