I am startled to see that the last Eden Brent album I reviewed here, Ain't Got No Troubles, was posted on 13 November 2010. Though there were two between it and Getaway Blues, I missed them somehow. So it's a special pleasure to be reunited with her, sonically speaking, on a new disc.

Blues is always a big part of the Mississippi-born and -bred Brent's repertoire. It feels particularly so in the present instance. It's a classic form of the blues, too, sung in her passionate but non-histrionic style, in which the lyrics draw their power from emotional precision, not from roof-shaking volume. Not a word or note is cast in excess. If the vocals are not precisely conversational, they're as close as they get in this kind of material, which by nature is kicked into something above mere talk before it opens its mouth. Sometimes way above, into atmospherics high enough to trigger headaches and other symptoms of insufficient oxygen. I am thinking of Janis Joplin, to whom some foolish observer once compared Brent. There are plenty of others, too, of course.

Brent, who is also white, is blessed with a wider range than Joplin possessed. Thus nothing feels forced. Having won just about any award any blues artist would strive for, she feels confident and in full command. She sings in front of a small, jazz-tinged band, playing keyboards and evoking, without reviving or imitating, Bessie Smith and other early performers who invented urban blues and who took it to the world outside the South a century ago.

My own taste in blues will always be centered in the tradition (though I hope, possibly too late, not rigidly so), on the belief that the genre can accommodate only so many hyphens. Most ostensible blues recorded today sounds to my battered eardrums like all hyphens. Which is not to say there aren't various authentic schools of blues. It's just that there are breaking points. Eventually we arrive at places that are far more persuasively represented on one side of the hyphen than on the other side and better appreciated as something not pretending to stand in for the b-word.

For example, blues-rockers who are in fact loud party rockers for whom actual blues is akin to the faint hint of beer flavor in a glass of lite "beer." If you're there, it's for neither the blues nor the beer. Not to be said if you're drinking in the likes of Brent, to whom the additional flavorings are only the organically related tastes of jazz and r&b, present with certain blues strains from their birth. If you complain about that, you probably should go somewhere else.

If you love blues, on the other hand, you surely should be hearing Eden Brent, who can lay claim to rank among the 21st-century masters. Even more happily, the songs are uniformly gems, composed by her and her husband Bob Dowell together or separately. It's easy to fall into gloomy, if rationally founded, anxiety that blues' end times are upon us. We need musicians like Brent and albums like Getaway Blues to make us believe that blues may be eternal after all.