Whose voice would you take with you to a desert island? Jacqui Dankworth would come close to the top of my list. One might gain comfort – indeed hours of musical companionship – through simply luxuriating in the singer’s warm, velvety timbre and subtle vocals. There’s far more to Dankworth than the ‘smooth jazz’ or ‘easy listening’ categories with which she is often associated, however, as demonstrated on this album of 15 songs with the brilliant Brodsky Quartet.

Dankworth’s association with the Brodsky goes back to 2003, when they took part in an educational project involving student composers writing for the quartet-plus-voice medium. Performing together on several occasions since then has enabled singer and quartet to hone, develop and refine a diverse repertoire ranging from standard jazz and folk-song arrangements to striking reworkings of pop and rock songs, with members of the quartet often lending a helping hand in the creative process.

One need only listen to the final two tracks on ‘Rocking Horse Road’ to get a sense of the stylistic sweep covered across the album’s 74 minutes. Jimmy van Heusen and Johnny Burke’s 1944 hit ‘Like someone in love’ (as popularised by Bing Crosby) is given a classical twist in a beautifully crafted, pared-down arrangement for solo cello and voice by Jacqueline Thomas. The album closes with an evocative realisation of Sting’s song ‘Fragile’, Dankworth’s mournful vocalise trailing off into the distance. Similar contrasts can also be heard in Paul Cassidy’s subtle arrangement of Britten’s own arrangement of ‘The Sally Gardens’ – Dankworth’s understated performance bringing out the folk song’s artless qualities – followed by Björk, David Arnold and Jah Wobble’s ‘Play dead’ in a powerfully dramatic and symphonic realisation where the quartet not only mimic the original version’s orchestral string lines but also its synthesiser-generated sounds.

Throughout the album, Dankworth never loses sight of the song’s message, whether encompassing an entire novel in four minutes, such as in Kurt Weill’s ‘Speak low’, or capturing a single idyllic moment in Harvey Brough’s setting of Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’. Her ability to inhabit the character of the music in such a way as to divert the spotlight away from herself – imparting rich layers of interpretative meaning – is perhaps the main reason for including Dankworth as my desert-island voice. An excellent album all round, and arguably the singer’s best since ‘It Happens Quietly’ (Specific Jazz), the 2011 tribute album to her father, saxophonist, composer and arranger John Dankworth.