It remains one of the most extraordinary songs to surface during the years when the Great American Songbook was composed. “Nature Boy,” by California proto-hippie Eden Ahbez, was a melancholy Eastern-tinged call to “love and be loved in return” that might seem more at home in the ‘60s than in the ‘40s. It’s been performed by everyone from Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole to the Jefferson Airplane and Big Star. Aubrey Wilson brings her dulcet voice to a fresh pop-funk arrangement of the classic, driven by some sharp electric guitar. “Nature Boy” opens her album of vintage songs, continuing with a moody contemporary take on Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose,” making straight-ahead jazz and jazz-inflected pop on the way to the album’s conclusion, a teasing rendition of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.”
