Her Personal Style Is in Flux, but Duboc Still Impresses

New female artists have been coming down the pike with startling rapidity since Diana Krall brought new life and soaring profit to the genre of jazz singing.

The most successful have been those who, like Norah Jones and Jane Monheit, have carved out their own musical identities, refusing to be limited by standard definitions.

Southland singer Carol Duboc is taking a similar route. On Monday night at Catalina Bar & Grill, in a performance celebrating the release of her new CD, “Duboc,” she convincingly displayed the mainstream jazz phrasing, R&B; grooves and Brazilian rhythms that she has been attempting to formulate into a highly personal musical style.

With a five-piece band and two backup singers, Duboc’s rendering of such originals as “With All That I Am” (the title song from her first album) and “It’s a Feeling” afforded persuasive evidence of her capacity to create material with potentially broad appeal.

In contrast, her versions of Wayne Shorter’s “El Gaucho” and Bacharach & David’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” revealed that her crystal-clear voice and warm interpretive skills can produce similarly impressive work in other stylistic areas, with music by other writers.

There were a few problems, nonetheless, with the way Duboc was presented. It was understandable that she chose her surroundings on some of the tunes to best display her pop-oriented R&B; numbers.

Other numbers--enhanced by the stirring flute work of Hubert Laws, who sat in for a few tunes--placed her in a different sort of energetic setting.

Yet despite this battery of sounds, she was most effective when she was singing in the open, free of enveloping textures, and best of all on the rare occasion when she accompanied herself on the piano.

What became clear by the end of her set was the fact that what Duboc needs to take her career to the next level is a greater sense of focus, a feeling for who she intends to be as an artist and a conclusive answer to the question of whether she can smoothly blend her areas of musical interest into a coherent, uniquely personal musical style.

If she can do so, the sky’s the limit.