Fortunately, he remembers what inspired him to figure out a way to stand out. A few years after being asked by the University of North Texas to be the first student to pilot their Vocal Jazz degree program, the singer returned to the U.S. from further studies in Amsterdam with jazz singer Deborah Brown. He started making the drive up from his new home near Philadelphia to be part of the vibrant jam session scene happening in NYC.

"I had been singing standards straight since I was 13, and one day it just hit me, after singing ‘Autumn Leaves' for the 5000th time or whatever, that I just didn't want to sing it like that anymore," says the Abington Township, Pennsylvania born Walter, whose musical childhood was framed by being in church choirs from the age of six and attending the American Boychoir school in Princeton.

"At those jams, I was listening to and performing with cutting edge artists, and I knew I'd never get anywhere sounding like anyone else. But it wasn't just a matter of being unique for unique's sake. This had to develop organically. Even though I sound nothing like her, throughout my career I have been obsessed with Betty Carter, who sounded worlds apart in the years before she died from the way she sang in the 50s. I always wanted to stay open to new melodic and harmonic and rhythmic possibilities."

Walter attributes the development of his free-wheeling approach, soaring improvisational abilities and colorful vocal textures to his opportunities to perform over the years with progressive jazz cats like pianists Orrin Evans and Jean-Michel Pilc, drummer Ari Hoenig and saxophonist Dave Liebman—who recorded a duet album with Walter, Clear Day, released in 2001. Over the last decade, Walter has complemented his vocals with electronic effects and looping devices.

In line with the singer's long held belief that "being a musician is being a verb, an ever changing force," the 46 year old Walter approaches his latest album One Step Away in a very different way than he created his six previous self-produced projects. To fashion an offbeat, completely in the moment, largely arranged on the spot experience, he needed his dream band - which he found in a single package with Tarbaby, the explosive jazz trio of Evans, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Nasheet Waits that released its debut album, The End of Fear, in 2010. Walter invited one of his favorite guitarists, Marc Ducret, to participate in the sessions at Systems 2 Recording in Brooklyn. For the first time, Walter gave the production reigns away - to Evans and Revis.

Recording with one's top choice musicians - including one (Revis) flown in from L.A. and another (Ducret) from Paris - at a famous New York studio isn't cheap. So in 2012, Walter posted a video clip of himself being interviewed by Evans, explaining why he started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money via his global fan base and social media. Walter ultimately raised $13,000 out of the $35,000 he projected for recording, housing his musicians and promoting and marketing the CD. The key phrases he used in the video, which define the goal and spirit of One Step Away, are "unexpectedness" and "get comfortable with being uncomfortable."

The guiding principle for the sessions was a warning from Walter to each of his musical cohorts: "Do not use the word accessible."

"I think sometimes that musicians who produce their own material, as I had done so many times, are too close to it and run the risk of tunnel vision," Walter says. "Having Orrin and Eric in charge gives them a vantage point that makes this a whole different affair. The spirit of their methodology is the true spirit of improvisation. We made some agreements before we started the process that they would have carte blanche over the song selection and arrangements, and they could basically do whatever they wanted to. Sometimes it's hard to capture the spontaneity of a live performance in the studio environment, so I wanted totally unpolished arrangements that happened organically in the moment.

"The fact that we didn't know what was going to happen from one moment to the next was part of the excitement and energy," he says. "Also, in the spirit of true conversational improvisation, there are no overdubs. If someone was not happy with something they did, we started the whole track from scratch."

One Step Away begins with a few tracks that might feel at home on any cool hipster vocalist's collection these days—the lively, swinging title track (featuring Evans' formidable piano harmonies) and the graceful, moody ballad "Pretending To Care." Beyond that, starting with the rumbling, rhythmically schizophrenic, oddly phrased romp through Paul Simon's "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover," it's a free for all jam rooted only in its spirited, off kilter spontaneity.

Two of the most powerful moments fulfilling Walter's envelope obliterating aesthetic are the sparse and plucky vocal/bass piece "How To Die And Where to Fly" and the quirky and dreamlike wordless vocal/guitar duet "Inside Outfluence" - both of which were essentially composed on the spot via improvisation.

On "How To Die," the producers had Walter enter the vocal booth with his lyrics memorized in a certain rhythmic pattern. Then they threw out that arrangement and Revis started playing his upright bass in a completely different groove fresh to the singer's ears. The result, a triumph of Walter's great dexterity, is all at once, weird, hypnotic and thrilling. "We did that in one take and it was unnerving to say the least," he says.

With "Inside Outfluence," Walter entered the vocal booth and "tripped" along for 15 minutes with Waits' "orchestra of percussion" and Ducret's distorted electric guitar, crafting relatively smooth and melodic vocal textures in and around their unpredictable sharp edges. The singer, also a prominent jazz educator everywhere from The Aaron Copland School of Music (Queens College) to the Prince Claus Conservatory in Holland, wasn't sure the final six minute edit of the track would fly until students coming into one of his classes took note.

"To me, the piece was interesting but pretty unsettling," says Walter. "I had it playing in the background one day when I was up front waiting for class to begin, and some of the kids heard it and asked what it was. They thought it sounded like cool soundtrack music. They weren't anywhere near the studio making the album but there again, I had a fresh perspective which shifted my point of view about the music.

"As I look back on my discography," he continues, "I see an interesting trajectory, with my first four albums of straight ahead jazz with a progressive edge, then a few with a lot of electronics and loops, and now One Step Away, which by design is completely outside those boxes. I like the idea that instead of me being a singer backed by a great band, I'm part of the band and there is a true coalescence of voices. As an artist, I believe it's important that we keep pushing ourselves and are less concerned with the fruits of our actions than taking the right and proper action at a certain moment - and that means we are playing and recording without fear. That is especially crucial for the art form in an industry where so many think that doing something different might not equal dollars."

Review of JD Walter’s One Step Away by John Murph, Downbeat Magazine
Downbeat, January 2014

EJazzNews
One Step Away Review
September 2013
By Bill D

JD Walter is one of those jazz singers who seems to be recognized more within the jazz performance community than among the jazz listening public. That status deserves to be changed.

While attempts to describe Walter's singing style compare it to others singers', in the end, Walter is unique with a voice of his own. Musicians enjoy his free-spirited instrumental approach, singing wordlessly what he wants to express as a horn would. Walter isn't called solely a scat singer, even though scatting is one of his numerous capabilities. Adventurous musicians as diverse as Dave Liebman or Jean-Michel Pilc or Ari Hoenig appear to appreciate the way that Walter gets lost in the moment of singing with unrestrained and extemporaneous give-and-take. Indeed, a review of Walter's past recordings on Dreambox Media, DoubleTime, PACT or his own label reveals that he has consistently recorded with jazz musicians of unpredictable improvisatory skills who challenge Walter to spur-of-the-moment recorded results.

And like jazz performers who never stop growing and who surprise listeners with expanding means of expression—Liebman would be an example, as would, say, Miles Davis, Fred Hersch or Wayne Shorter—Walter treats music as a sonic exploration as varying elements of pitch and meter and dynamics contribute to the final originality of the musical results. While remaining with his apparently preferred back-up instruments of piano, bass and drums, on his most recent album, One Step Away, Walter has added the distinctive guitar voices of Marc Ducret and Marvin Sewell for additional blues-tinged shadings, micro-tonal reinforcement and improvisational atmospherics.

Walter follows his previous recipe of seasoning his own originals with total deconstruction of songs by other composers. His originals range from the rubato meditation of “Inward” backed solely by guitar to Bobby McFerrin-like musical sounds—pops, ooo's, sibilances—of “Inside Outfluence.” In both cases, Walter is absorbed within the band as another instrument contributing to the overall texture of the resulting sound. In “One Step Away,” Walter's composition contrasts the initially indeterminate meterless (but not percussionless) rhythm-section energy, particularly Eric Revis's racing bass lines, with Walter's elasticized elongation of the lyrics, until, on a dime, and with a commanding broad chord from pianist Orrin Evans, the entire group falls into a hard swing. That brings metrical resolution and dissolves the tension of the instrumental push versus the vocal pull, reminiscent of the swing of his previous recording of “If I Should Lose You” on Clear Day. After the first chorus, it becomes apparent that the free section at the repeat serves as the basis for roiling improvisation as all the group's members join in the fun. Walter's vocal foundation for “Inside Outfluence” allows him to feature the instrumentalists, particularly the guitarists and drummer Nasheet Waits, as he inserts the wordless rhythmic and atmospheric sounds. Walter's “If I Knew” attains relatively standard singability (that is, even untrained people can sing it) over the strolling bass vamp and drum pattern as he adds his own multi-layered joyous chorus to enlarge upon the lyrics describing attraction and indecision about pursuit.

And then there are the songs written by others that Walter and the Tarbaby rhythm section consider and then adapt to their own musical personalities. Like Paul Simon's “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” with its intriguing title but without much attention from this generation's singers. Walter remains true to the lyrics but reinvents the song by slowing and accelerating the words over Evans's rubato response. Then the back-up musicians start a rollicking rhythm that leads into an extended an aggressive piano solo and an improvised vocal interpretation. Michel Legrand's “I Will Wait for You” is performed at a slower and unhurried pace but with not without re-harmonization as the framework for Walter's version of the song, including his relaxed scat chorus and repeated wordless vamp between choruses.

Walter's long-time association with Evans from their days in Philadelphia comes through in the split-second responsiveness one has to the other throughout One Step Away's emphasis upon first-rate improvisation. Indeed, Walter seems to think improvisationally with one-of-a-kind and remarkable results that wouldn't be identified with any other singer. In other words, JD Walter is an original. One Step Away reinforces that status as Walter experiments with yet another approach of total immersion in the music.