[Dixielandjazz] Rosemary Clooney - A Five Show Tribute to a late blooming Jazz Singer

[Steve Barbone]

Recalling Rosemary Clooney, Fondly and Lyrically

NY TIMES - By STEPHEN HOLDEN - January 9, 2007

Come gather round the kitchen table and soak in the showbiz tales of your
wise and funny Grandma Rose: that describes the welcoming spirit of a
typical late-career performance by the singer Rosemary Clooney, who died in
June 2002. By that time, she had evolved from a demure ¹50s ³thrush² into an
embracing, matriarchal force of nature. An audience became her extended
family, encouraged to rest its collective head in her lap as she poured out
musical bedtime stories for grown-ups. Though written by others, those
stories, told in her voice, came across as nuggets of personal experience.

Because Clooney was a peerless reader of such yarns, it made sense that
Lyrics & Lyricists, the 92nd Street Y¹s long-running popular-music series,
should make a detour from its usual focus on songwriters to examine the
career of a singer whose interpretations had the naturalness and fluency of
spoken conversation. Rooted in the steady pulse of big-band swing, that
conversation allowed plenty of room for reflection but none for self-pity.

³The Last Girl Singer: Rosemary Clooney and Her Way With Words,² which
opened Lyrics & Lyricists¹ 2007 season, was also the first full-scale New
York concert tribute to Clooney since her death. Deborah Grace Winer, a
friend of Clooney¹s who has written extensively about her, gathered the
singer¹s band, led by the pianist John Oddo, along with a strong cast that
included James Naughton, John Pizzarelli, Paula West, Karen Ziemba and
Clooney¹s daughter-in-law Debby Boone.

Carefully matched with their material, the singers offered their personal
variations on Clooney¹s humane outlook. At Sunday evening¹s show (the third
of five), Ms. West, scooping notes from the bottom of her thick jazz
contralto, offered the finest performance, a penetrating ³God Bless the
Child,² accompanied by Mr. Pizzarelli¹s spare guitar.

That interpretation followed the evening¹s saltiest anecdote, in which Ms.
Winer told about an afternoon a pregnant Clooney spent with Billie Holiday,
drinking gin and orange juice and smoking cigarettes. At the end of their
visit, Holiday asked to be godmother of the unborn child and remarked, ³It
takes a bad woman to be a good godmother.²

In other memorable performances, Mr. Naughton channeled his inner Joe
Williams for a rugged ³I Ain¹t Got Nothin¹ but the Blues.² The high point of
the novelty section found Ms. Ziemba twinkling and twirling her skirt and
dancing a comic tarantella as she sang ³Mambo Italiano.²

Mr. Pizzarelli crooned and played a light, delicate ³Dindi.² Ms. Boone,
considerably more poised than in her cautious 2005 cabaret tribute,
³Reflections of Rosemary,² at Feinstein¹s at the Regency, offered renditions
of ³I Wish It So² and ³But Beautiful,² whose plainspoken directness mirrored
Clooney¹s. Throughout, Ms. Winer wove the songs together with meticulously
assembled songwriting information and biographical tidbits.

If the show was one of the more successful Lyrics & Lyricists concerts, the
format, in which singers are stiffly shuffled into pairs and groups who
self-consciously enter and exit, needs rethinking. There must be a way to
circumvent the series¹s air of dancing-school formality to allow a spirit of
relaxation to take over the stage. That sense of release was something
Clooney could conjure simply by strolling into a room and being herself.