Education and experience as a landscape designer have given Mayita Dino a keen, insightful perspective on how to best incorporate elements of color, line, texture, form and scale on her debut album as a jazz vocalist. As “The Garden is My Stage” opens, Dinos’ voice is immediately appealing as she delivers each lyric with comforting warmth, blithe joy, and convincing emotion. As she sings in Stevie Wonder’s “Come Back as a Flower,” it seems that one of her goals with music is “to spread the sweetness of love.” She colors the set with a variety of seasonal experiences in her creative vocal interpretations of pieces like Thelonious Monk’s “Pannonica,” Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology,” and Freddie Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower.” To create a different mood, an engaging rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” is designed with a contemporary, flowing Latin effect. Several selections sung in Spanish introduce even more variety as Dinos taps the texture and form of that Romance language as a perfect vehicle for expressing love and sensuality. Well produced and arranged, the enchanting repertoire showcases the instrumental accompanists on guitar, piano, trumpet, flugelhorn, flute, clarinet, sax, drums and bass.  It would be exciting to catch Mayita Dinos and her band in a popular Los Angeles club, festival or outdoor venue. Her debut is an unqualified, transcendent triumph.  (Joe Ross, Roots Music Report)