Cheryl Bentyne, veteran songbird of the world renowned Manhattan Transfer, steps into the solo spotlight for a brilliant followup to her acclaimed 2004 Telarc debut, Talk of the Town. Her new album, Let Me Off Uptown, pays tribute to the legendary voice and music of Anita O’Day. One of the most hard-swinging vocalists in the annals of jazz, O’Day imbued every song she sang with a unique tonal quality, a compelling improvisational style and an innate sense of rhythm. A vocalist for Gene Krupa, Woody Herman, and Stan Kenton during the 1940s, O’Day later struck out on her own and reached even greater heights with her pivotal 1955 recording, This Is Anita. She sang at numerous festivals throughout the ’50s, and appeared in a documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival that elevated her to international status. Bentyne is one of the few vocalists on the current jazz scene with the prowess to invoke the same muse that inspired O’Day. The original suggestion for Let Me Off Uptown came from Bill Traut, Bentyne’s manager who played saxophone for O’Day during a string of Midwestern dates during the mid-1940s. In recent years, Traut has come to recognize a certain quality in Bentyne’s voice that is reminiscent of a young O’Day.