Madeleine Peyroux will perform Saturday, July 26.

There’s a world of difference between music that’s easy to listen to and easy listening music. Madeleine Peyroux absolutely falls into the first category (definitely not the second). She wowed the world in 2004 with her distinctively slinky, sumptuous vocals on her sophomore solo album, Careless Love, filled with songs that were sorta-jazz, sorta-folk, sorta-pop; a collection of jazz standards, pop and folk covers (Dylan, Cohen, Hank Williams etc.), and a few co-written originals in English and French. Peyroux drew oohs and ahs from the public and critics who compared her voice to Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf well-deserved praise with an absence of hyperbole. Like Piaf, Peyroux got her start busking on the streets of Paris after moving there as a teen with her mother, post divorce. Peyroux says playing guitar and singing helped her heal. She eventually joined a traditional jazz group and wandered across Europe performing songs from the Great American Songbook. Peyroux’s honeyed croon caught the ear of the music industry resulting in a series of albums and the brandishing of that gorgeous voice at concerts around the world. Starting in 2018, Peyroux took a six-year break and emerged in 2024 with an outside-the-box new album Let’s Walk, her first LP of all self-penned songs. People who experience Peyroux learn what she learned when she was a busker: great songs wield powerful magic, especially sung with that wonderful voice.

- Eric Rosenbaum