“Barbara Lea didn’t call herself a jazz singer or a pop singer. Instead, she looked at the songs on their own terms — the notes and words on the page — mining each facet almost exclusively as written, plumbing their depths for more and more meaning. 'On Lea In Love,' the singer’s restraint serves as the perfect foil for casual, lilting experimentation from her accompanists. They improvise, she plays it straight, and the balance makes it sound like the listener is a fly on the wall of the hippest club in Greenwich Village. It is the opposite of the weighty, overwrought arrangements that so many of Lea’s contemporaries — brilliant singers who were on major labels — had to carry; it is bright, airy and new.”