[Dixielandjazz] Barbara Cook . . . who?

[Steve barbone]

Perhaps not 100% OKOM, but still, a neat venue and a wonderful 77 year old
vocalist singing American Songbook. Plus some funny comments about the vapid
TV Show, "American Idol", and a very pessimistic look at the popular music
scene. 

Not sure I share that pessimism because I think American Idol is geared to
the middle aged and up audience, not the kids.

If in NYC, spend the bucks and go see Barbara Cook. She is a treasure.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

April 14, 2005 - NY TIMES - BY STEPHEN HOLDEN
CABARET REVIEW | BARBARA COOK

Welcoming Spring, Recalling Old Friends
 
Sidling among the tables at the Cafe Carlyle on Tuesday evening as she
entered singing "I've Got the World on a String," Barbara Cook made it
immediately clear that her return to the scene of many past triumphs at a
time of sorrow was not going to be a wake. With the death last October of
Wally Harper, her longtime accompanist and collaborator, Ms. Cook, now 77,
lost the musical equivalent of her right arm. At the same time, the recent
death of Bobby Short, an irreplaceable symbol of cultural continuity in
Manhattan, has left the cafe reeling with uncertainty about the future.

For Ms. Cook, whose magnificent voice has the emotional viscosity of time in
a bottle, it would have been easy to wallow in sadness, for no singer pours
a richer mixture of wistfulness and resilience into a song. But this
performer, whose get-up-and-and-go attitude exemplifies an all-too-quaint
attribute called character, wouldn't dwell there.

With her new pianist, Michael Kosarin, and the bassist Peter Donovan, she
set out to welcome spring and to remember her lost friends and colleagues in
the happiest possible way. Mr. Kosarin's gorgeous, oscillating
accompaniments brought a delicate orchestral intensity to the show's few
ballads and a high-stepping lilt to its many upbeat show tunes. Only 4 of
the 14 songs in Ms. Cook's new show, "Tribute," could be described as
seriously introspective.

"I've Got the World on a String," offered as a centennial tribute to its
composer, Harold Arlen, established the upbeat tone of her set on Tuesday.
Out of a song that is often treated, Sinatra-style, as a rooster's crow, Ms.
Cook extracted a deeper message about personal responsibility. "Life is a
beautiful thing/ As long as I hold the string," goes Ted Koehler's lyric.
"I'd be a silly so-and-so/ If I should ever let go." In more mundane terms,
like it or not, we are our own puppet masters, and even in the best of times
the power at our fingertips is precarious, held only by a thread.

Mr. Harper was celebrated as a show-tune composer with four selections he
wrote with a variety of collaborators, including David Zippel, who supplied
the lyrics for the strongest number, the pointedly Arlenesque "Another
Mister Right Left." Mr. Short's playful side was evoked in two obscure
nuggets, "Nashville Nightingale" and "Bojangles of Harlem," which he had
introduced to Ms. Cook; their Southern inflections connected her to her own
roots as an Atlanta ingénue.

Three songs from the show "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" paid tribute to the
composer Arthur Schwartz, whose rock-bottom romanticism coincides with Ms.
Cook's deep-seated core of yearning. Introducing the show's killer ballad,
"Make the Man Love Me," she recalled singing it for Leonard Bernstein in her
audition for "Candide."

While watching "Tribute," I thought back to the Broadway anthology unleashed
on the April 5 edition of "American Idol," whose nine contestants struggled
to articulate fragments of songs like "The Impossible Dream," "People," "My
Funny Valentine" and "Hello, Young Lovers." The paradox of this toxic
singing contest, which is the rough equivalent of the old "Ed Sullivan Show"
in suggesting the median level of mass musical taste, is that it has the
power to canonize songs, which its clueless judges then go on to treat as
stunts in a gymnastic competition that rewards crude physical prowess.

To listen to Simon Cowell dismiss the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic
"Hello, Young Lovers" as a "mind-numbingly boring" song that belongs on "a
washing powder commercial in 1965" was to hear an ill-willed philistine
sneering through a cloud of his own noxious vapors.

The contestants are urged not to be "pitchy" (the program's favorite
pseudo-technical word for off-pitch, which they usually are), and are
congratulated for their high notes and telegenic appeal. ("I admit I'm
falling in love with you," Paula Abdul gushed to one. "When you smile you
melt America's heart," she blubbered to another.) The third judge, Randy
Jackson, doesn't know the difference between a dude and a "dogg" (his two
favorite words).

Let's not kid ourselves: the ascendance of "American Idol," and its turning
of music into sports, signals the end of American popular song as we know
it. Its ritual slaughter of songs allows no message to be carried, no wisdom
to be communicated, other than the screamed and belted song of the self.

Ms. Cook, who gives master classes in how to sing and tell the truth, could
talk herself blue in the face to these people and never be understood. What
a stunning loss we face.


Barbara Cook is at the Cafe Carlyle, Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th
Street,through May 27. (212) 744-1600.