A standout among many

The jazz singers just keep coming. One after another arrives on the scene with a new album, a promotional push and a suitcase full of hopes and dreams. Few make it past that initial push, their chances diminished by an overcrowded genre or a failure to do anything more than recycle sounds from the past.

Montana-born Kristin Korb may be an exception, even though she has not yet had the exposure she’d get were she on a major record label.

The special qualities of her music were immediately apparent Thursday at the Vic in Santa Monica. Korb’s slender presence was modestly positioned behind an acoustic string bass that reached well above her head. In what is surely a unique jazz combination, Korb is a singer-bassist.

True, there have been bassists who have sung -- hummed, actually, in most cases -- along with their instrumental playing; Slam Stewart and Major Holley immediately come to mind.

Korb occasionally scatted along with her improvised bass lines, but her principal metier is pure jazz singing. And, although her capacity to sing while playing intricate bass lines is impressive, it is the subtle melodic and harmonic linkage between her voice and the bass that makes her a standout in the crowded field of jazz vocalists.

Korb’s rendering of “Alone Together,” for example, was pure voice and bass, with no other accompaniment, sung with great sensitivity to the melodic line, driven by the dark, propulsive rhythms of her instrument.

On “You’re Blase” and “Cheek to Cheek,” she was aided by the other members of her trio -- pianist Alan Pasqua and drummer Joe LaBarbera -- in a pair of startlingly rapid vocal and instrumental romps.

The musical impact was further aided by an imaginative selection of material embracing songs from “I’m Old Fashioned” and “Moon River” (which also featured a stunning solo by Pasqua) to “Nobody Wants to Sing the Blues” and the Carpenters’ hit “Top of the World.”

But the real focus of the set was Korb’s singing and playing, which clearly establish her as a young talent on a fast-rising musical arc.