The Julie and Josie in the headline's list refer to, respectively, female vocalists Julie Benko and Josie Falbo, with jazz accents, while Julius is none other than Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who is the focus of a musical sampled with a six-track EP.

JULIE BENKO
EUPHONIC GUMBO
Club44 Records
CD | Digital | Vinyl

A truly fun, feisty celebration of the traditional music of New Orleans and its Mardi Gras parade energy is what you get–with some storytelling, blues, bayou bounce, and plenty of bubbliness–with singer Julie Benko and the band in Euphonic Gumbo. The album contains the material she has sung in person during annual shows at New York City's Birdland Jazz Club, and the last track was recorded there. I's the cozy valentine to the city, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?." The arrangements and production are a particular labor-of-love collaboration with her husband and musical partner, keyboardist Jason Yeager, a jazz talent on his own. He leads a band with the classic sounds, the de rigueur brass and reeds, and musicians who vary from track to track.

This collection is the kind of feel-good, grin-inducing affair that can make you think you're feeling nostalgic for the city and its songs even if you've never had pleasing pre-existing close encounters with them. There's frolicking, festivity, and French words in a couple of spots, too. A tongue-in-cheek revised version of the oldie, "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey," rethinks the request of the song's character, an apologetic woman asking her man to return after she'd asked him to leave, stating her willingness to shoulder all the rent and cooking. The plea becomes, instead, an on-second-thought restatement of the eviction notice as "Don't You Come Home, Bill Bailey."

The party mood is set right off the bat with a packed medley of site-specific sunniness featuring "Bourbon Street Parade," "Go to the Mardi Gras," and "Basin Street Blues." The singer is reunited with John Manzari, castmate from her Broadway stint starring in the Funny Girl revival. He joins her vocally for the high-octane "St. James Infirmary" and is heard tap-dancing on that track and on the "Funky Fête" medley. The old-timey treats are joined by a more recently born cousin, written for a 2009 New Orleans-set animated film: "Ma Belle Evangeline," with music and words by Randy Newman, from the 2009 Disney feature The Princess and the Frog.

While Euphonic Gumbo places Julie Benko squarely in a smiling state in the state of Louisiana, her summer plans take her to three other states of the country: Colorado for a mid-July weekend starring in Guys and Dolls, then her home state of Connecticut for a one-night concert, and New York for a return to her role in Ragtime at Lincoln Center.

JOSIE FALBO
KICKIN' IT
CD | Digital

This 11-track release from 2025 with the appealing, wide-ranging voice of Josie Falbo is full of pleasingly accessible joyful jazz with percolating, invigorating big-band punch and breezy Brazilian romance, plus three songs written for musical theatre productions. Kickin' It kicks off with one of them: "I Get a Kick Out of You," and it's a zesty, zingy rendition of that Cole Porter perennial from Anything Goes. The desired dreaminess inflects a lush "Lazy Afternoon" from 1954's The Golden Apple. Two years later, some audiences heard the peppy "I Just Found Out About Love" written by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson in a musical called Strip for Action, which closed in Boston before it got to its destination of Broadway. The album features an impressively large number of musicians accompanying the singer's crooning, belting, and scat-singing with a wide-ranging, clear voice that the Chicago-based performer employed on earlier releases, in nightclub appearances, as a back-up vocalist for many performers, and doing hundreds of jingles over many years.

Phrasing is warm and natural. Arrangements are atmospheric and impactful, without being cluttered or upstaging the vocals that remain front and center. Instrumentation varies somewhat from track to track, with tasty solos by players on guitar, sax, and piano. Liner notes in an enclosed booklet with the CD discuss the performer's career and the material.

Sadly, Josie Falbo passed away, after battling cancer, on New Year's Day of 2026. She was 82.

CAESAR: THE MUSICAL
STUDIO CAST EP
Center Stage Records
Digital

It's always somewhat difficult–and quite possibly unfair–to judge a musical theatre score by a small number of its songs. That's even truer when it comes to something that is still a work-in-progress and that has yet to be staged. So, we are just getting part of the picture with the six released selections from Caesar, a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's drama about Julius Caesar in a bold, contemporary-sounding theatre style, presented as a digital EP. Genre-wise, it may well remind you of the dramatic "rock opera" approach of Andrew Lloyd Webber's historical/Biblical epics, less so the flavor of some Stephen Schwartz works of a similar stripe. A seven-piece band accompanies, with pianist Yasuhiko Fukuoka as music director, and Alex Arlotta providing orchestrations.

All the roles, such as the titular Roman ruler, Brutus, and Marc Antony, for this studio cast release are sung by women, including the project's writer, Grace Yurchuk. On its surface, it's a (small) mixed bag and I have mixed feelings about the contents chosen and commercially available. Some of the material strikes me as quite worthy and appealing, while I experience some of it as more resistible and problematic, underwhelming and overly bombastic. Particularly frustrating is the inconsistent adherence to using true rhymes; the preponderance of close rhymes mixed with pure syllable matches in the same song becomes distracting and feels clunky. In a couple of the numbers, real rhymes abound, with precision and polish. Likewise, there are redundant and uninspired lines as well as nifty turns of phrase and splashes of wit.

Bits and pieces, earlier drafts, and numbers not chosen for the sampling included on the available digital EP have appeared over the past months on YouTube, TikTok, etc., and some of that is, to my ears, superior. So, I come not to bury Caesar, nor to fully praise it. It's ambitious, with potential. And the deft performance of young Miss Yurchuk (in her early 20s) in the role of Brutus is one of the set's real assets. Intensity finds some respite with "Brutus' Prayer." Samantha Pauly as Julius Caesar is suitably grand and strutting.

The highlight is the sly, slinky "Shall Rome," led by Savy Jackson as Cassius, mocking and questioning the influence of Julius Caesar. Its sashaying rhythm and musical bones remind me, in parts, of Kurt Weill's melody for "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" from the musical One Touch of Venus. And here, and elsewhere, there are pointed comments and illustrations of how, in any century, any country's power-hungry leader can attract fervent followers, divisiveness, and resistance. Sound familiar?

It will be interesting to see what happens with the musical, but this particular mixed-blessing mix–a tossed Caesar salad, if you will (or won't)–begs reserved judgment for now.