[Dixielandjazz] Carnegie Hall Jazz Birthday Party For Nancy Wilson

[Steve Barbone]

Nancy Wilson, 70 already? Hard to believe.

Wish I'd been there to hear/see it. Not all OKOM, but surely "Guess Who I
Saw Today" strikes a responsive chord among many list mates. As do "If I Had
You", and "They Can't Take That Away From Me". Some "heavy hitters" in jazz
were there.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Nancy Wilson¹s Jazzy Birthday (a Little Late)

NY TIMES - BEN RATLIFF - July 2, 2007

Nancy Wilson appeared onstage Friday night in a dress and shoes the same
shade of yellow that she wore on the cover of ³Nancy Wilson and Cannonball
Adderley,² her record from 1961. She welcomed the audience, then disappeared
for a while, letting her friends come on one by one and do the work.

This was at Carnegie Hall, for a JVC Jazz Festival New York concert in honor
of her 70th birthday, which was in February. Her absence went on long enough
that we were beginning to miss her. She came back only when the pianist
Herbie Hancock called her out.

What was this all about? Old-school party etiquette, maybe: allowing time
for everyone to get to know one another without her hovering presence, then
taking charge when really needed.

Ms. Wilson¹s voice is thin and smooth, but she uses her own devices, doled
out in pinches, that give it an almost brawny power. Among these are a
quick, accurate upward slide of a whole step in pitch; a quick voice break,
like a yodel; a short, consternated yell; a flirty whisper; fading out a
phrase by singing it out of the side of her mouth; breaking up her rhythm by
placing mild emphasis on certain words and boldfacing others.

When she sang ³Guess Who I Saw Today?² ‹ in which the narrator delicately
(and devastatingly) tells her husband that she saw him with another woman ‹
she used all these ingredients. The yell came in the first two words of the
title phrase, and they were the two loudest sounds of the evening. It
doesn¹t matter how calculated that gesture was; it did the job. Rows of
people in the audience made simultaneous reflex motions, startled.

This concert was jazz as we know it, though Ms. Wilson¹s records have been
marketed as adult contemporary or smooth jazz. The guests all played with
her three-piece band: the pianist Llew Mathews, the bassist Rufus Reid, the
drummer Roy McCurdy.

The violinist Regina Carter played Duke Ellington¹s ³Imagine My
Frustration,² making bowed blues phrases sound vocal. Nnenna Freelon broadly
sang two songs, ³They Can¹t Take That Away From Me² and ³If I Had You²;
she¹s a generation younger than Ms. Wilson, and pours it on where Ms. Wilson
holds back. 

Kurt Elling performed two of the best songs in Ms. Wilson¹s repertory,
³Sunny² and ³Save Your Love for Me,² using more or less her original 1961
arrangement in the second one; it worked as well as ever. And Mr. Hancock ‹
an admirer of Ms. Wilson¹s who had never played with her ‹ got off a subtle,
highly altered version of Cole Porter¹s ³I Love You,² before she finally
returned to sing the ballad ³Old Folks² with him.

But the most effective guest turn belonged to Dianne Reeves, a supremely
self-confident singer who looked nervous and incredulous that she was being
given the opportunity to sing with one of her idols. She sang ³Midnight Sun²
‹ it¹s on Ms. Wilson¹s 1967 record ³Lush Life²‹ and a weird thing happened:
The crowd went bonkers. Before she had finished the opening verse, she had
gotten the biggest applause of the night.