Liner Notes by James Gavin, New York, 2014 　　To see Hilary Kole step onto a bandstand is like watching Gene Tierney make her entrance in Laura: the view is so dazzling that, at first, it’s hard to notice anything else. But Hilary’s musicianship can’t be overlooked. Her tangy-sweet, liquid tone is impeccably in tune; she’s also a conservatory-trained composer and pianist who has studied theory, harmony, arranging, and jazz technique. When she set out to become a singer, she says, “I wanted to know as much as everybody in the band. I didn’t want to be that girl who doesn’t know where to come in.” 　　 What’s new about this, her fourth CD, is the bruised heart that beats inside it. A Self-Portrait is a tale of lost innocence and hard-earned lessons. Hilary laughs as she recalls herself at 22—a jazz Cinderella making her debut as vocalist at Manhattan’s legendary Rainbow Room. “I thought, this is it! Steven Spielberg is gonna come in and cast me in his next movie, that’s gonna be about a 1940s chanteuse.” Hilary became a fixture on the city’s jazz scene; she sang in Japan and at worldwide festivals. Her progress was examined seriously and often in the New York Times. Stardom always seemed just around the corner. 　　 Then she ended a turbulent seven-year affair with the man who had managed her. The fallout was grim enough to become tabloid fodder, and it plunged her into the darkest ebb of her life. “A lot of these songs weren’t ones I was choosing for an album,” she says. “They were songs I was choosing to cope.” 　　 A sense of freedom pervades this CD. For the first time, nearly every artistic decision was hers—aided by the fatherly wisdom of co-producer Jim Czak, owner of New York’s historic, now-defunct Nola Recording Studios, where Hilary made her first demo at fourteen. Veering at last from the standards, she has discovered an important part of her voice through such writers as Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, and Paul Simon. Their songs, as well as familiar chestnuts, sound as personal here as pages ripped from her diary. Most were arranged with a translucent grace by Hilary herself. 　　 While she was at her lowest, Landslide, the 1975 Fleetwood Mac hit, jumped out at her from a car radio. The words, she says, captured “exactly what I was going through. I had walked away from my previous life knowing there would be a landslide.” Fragility, fear, and a longing for peace combine in Hilary’s definitive performance. She delivers another in God Give Me Strength, written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello for the movie Grace of My Heart. Hilary connected with that cry for help on such a gut level that Stephen Holden of the New York Times later called her raw, wailing version “devastating.” 　　 She found While We’re Young via two of her key inspirations, the jazz vocal duo Jackie and Roy. For her, that lilting waltz by Alec Wilder and William Engvick holds profound meaning: “As long as you can hope for the future then you’re young.” That involves leaving room for fun. It’s All Right with Me, Cole Porter’s hard-boiled look at a one-night stand, acquires a lowdown riff, played by pianist Tedd Firth, that could have come from a 1960s detective series. As a jazz singer, Hilary lets loose here like never before. Her dreamy reinvention of And I Love (Him) floats on the sparse chords of pianist John DiMartino and guitarist John Hart. John Pizzarelli, who produced two of her previous albums, suggested Lemon Twist, Bobby Troup’s skittering, boppish ode to cocktail-swilling hipsters of the ‘50s. Hilary breezes through its tricky intervals, swinging all the way. 　　 She includes a song of childlike optimism, The Man I Love, because it came true for her. In 2014, Hilary married Michael Chad Hoeppner, whom she had met on a subway platform. Their marriage, like the album at hand, signals a future that bursts with new beginnings. “I was saved by this music and by family and friends and the support of complete strangers,” she says. “The point is to move forward. That’s really what this record is about.” 　　 　　[James Gavin’s books include Is That All There Is?: The Strange Life of Peggy Lee and Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker.]