Entertainment

When it comes to changing styles, Dallas musician Lisa Markley pleads guilty as charged: Over the last 20 years, she's changed colors like a chameleon inching across a LeRoy Neiman painting.

"I'm a late bloomer – it's taken me until age 43 to find myself musically," she says, "but now that I've found it, I'm ecstatic."

She's talking about her new solo album, The Sky Is Blue and Sometimes Cries, which she'll feature in concert Thursday night at Sons of Hermann Hall. It's an enchanting CD by an artist who deserves to be better known, but the music is just as hard to pinpoint as Ms. Markley, who began as a trombonist but evolved into a banjo player and guitarist for the Malvinas, the genre-blurring female trio.

Her solo disc is equally eclectic, mixing standards such as "Someone to Watch Over Me" with songs by North Texas writers including Paul Slavens and Little Jack Melody. Ms. Markley's own "Fork in the Road" may be the only jazz strut inspired by a Yogi Berra-ism ("When you come to a fork in the road, take it").

"I don't know what the jazzers are gonna think of this album," she says, sitting in her home-studio in Oak Cliff's Bishop Arts District. "It's not really jazz – it's more than that, and less than that. I don't know what to call it."

Growing up in a small town north of Seattle, she simply called herself a trombonist. When she wasn't studying her dad's Benny Goodman eight-tracks, she was learning all the solos on her Chicago LPs, but her big-band phase went out the window when she got Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark.

"That album just blew my mind," she says. "By the time I hit University of North Texas, that was on my turntable for months. I drove my roommate crazy."

She switched her major from trombone to music composition, but constantly battled writer's block. She eventually earned her degree – but barely.

"I was probably a terrible student," she says. "We songwriters are sensitive folks, but at North Texas, nobody coddles you and says, 'You can do it.' They just say, 'Why haven't you cranked something out this week?' "

After UNT, she played in the Dallas folk bands Akoustik Nerve and Chattervox at night while teaching music during the day at St. Cecilia Catholic School (she now teaches privately in her home-studio). But her best-known gig is with the Malvinas, a trio that also features Quebec-based mandolinist Beth Cahill and New Orleans-based fiddler Gina Forsyth.

Their geography presents a challenge, but they manage to tour a few times each year and play places such as the Kerrville Folk Festival and New Orleans' Jazzfest.

"People are surprised we play together as well as we do because we're so different," she says. "Gina wins over the hard-core Americana folkies with her Cajun tunes, Beth has much more a pop sensibility, and I'm coming more from a jazz background."

Ms. Markley rerecorded one of her Malvinas tunes, "Eve Takes the Fall," for The Sky Is Blue and Sometimes Cries. In her version of the Garden of Eden tale, Eve was an innocent bystander who got framed.

"Having worked at a religious school as long as I did, it's important to reassert my view of Genesis," she says with a chuckle. "And in my take, it was all a great conspiracy."

The album also features tunes by Ms. Mitchell ("The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines"), Denton's Little Jack Melody (the title track) and two songs by ex-Ten Hands frontman Paul Slavens: "Fell Asleep Driving" and "Someone Exactly Like You."

Today, Mr. Slavens is best known for his Sunday music show on KERA-FM, 90.1 at Night. But Ms. Markley knew him when both were students at UNT in the mid-1980s – "back when he still had hair," she says. "I've always considered him like a big brother. He was always pushing me forward and encouraging me."

Brave Combo's Jeff Barnes also plays a major role on the CD, adding sax and clarinet solos that recall Branford Marsalis' work with Sting in the mid-'80s. Mr. Barnes, Mr. Slavens and guitarist Bruce Balmer will accompany Ms. Markley onstage tonight at Sons of Hermann Hall.

But the key instrument on The Sky Is Blue is Ms. Markley's lovely, understated voice, which fits jazz ballads and Latin-tinged folk tunes perfectly. (To hear song samples or to buy the CD, go to www .soonasongs.com.)

"I'm not formally trained as a vocalist – I come at it as a brass player, so at least I have good breath support," she says, laughing.

"But this is the first step of pushing myself as a vocalist and exploring the jazz thing as completely as I wanted to. It took 20 years of soul-searching to find myself musically, and I'm really happy to find it."

E-mail tchristensen@dallasnews.com

Lisa Markley performs Thursday at 7:30 at Sons of Hermann Hall, 3414 Elm St. $10. 214-747-4422.