[Dixielandjazz] Music in NYC

[Steve Barbone]

Below are 4 Music Reviews of current appearances in NYC. Interesting that
all could be termed as OKOM and all are in High Profile Venues. Must be a
market out there for tuneful music.

Some great sidemen in the accompanying bands also.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


March 10, 2007 - Music in Review - By THE NEW YORK TIMES

MICHEL LEGRAND - Through tomorrow
Birdland - 315 West 44th Street - (212) 581-3080

Not long into his first set at Birdland on Wednesday night, Michel Legrand
playfully scatted the first few bars of the George Shearing standard
³Lullaby of Birdland,² accompanying himself at the piano. Then he abruptly
stopped. ³That¹s all,² he said, in his light French accent. ³Tonight we will
play my music. No one else¹s music.²

Fair enough. Mr. Legrand certainly has more than enough original material to
get him through a set. An effusive eminence of popular music, he has
composed more than 200 film and television scores, along with a sheaf of
enduring songs. It¹s only natural that he would feature them during his
engagement, which was conceived by the producers Pat Philips and Ettore
Stratta as a celebration of Mr. Legrand¹s 75th birthday.

Less officially, the engagement is also a tribute to Mr. Legrand¹s silvery
pianism ‹ the point is driven home by an enormous Bösendorfer that dominates
the stage ‹ and to his longstanding and productive romance with jazz. In
both respects, he has a near-perfect rhythm section in the bassist Ron
Carter and the drummer Lewis Nash.

Still, through much of the set Mr. Legrand seemed to be warding off a sense
of perfunctory proficiency: the downside, perhaps, of sticking to the songs
that everybody wants to hear. On ³What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?²
he sang Alan and Marilyn Bergman¹s lyrics by rote, saving his energy for a
piano solo that briefly summoned Erroll Garner. He delegated the melody for
³You Must Believe in Spring² to Mr. Carter, who diverged from it only during
a cadenza studded with double-stop chords.

Mr. Legrand played much more than he sang, confirming his reputation as a
breezy jazz stylist. But his crystalline technique, which worked to
luxurious and lovely effect on ³The Summer Knows,² felt a bit too florid on
³Brian¹s Song.² There, and in the 12-bar blues that followed, he gave the
impression of figure skating across the music¹s surface.

He broke that surface, quite purposefully, near the end of the set.
Introducing his theme to the Jacques Demy film ³The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,²
he noted that it was a bit too familiar to both the audience and him. ³So
what we want to do tonight is destroy it a little,² he added impishly.

Then, with Mr. Nash and Mr. Carter at his heels, he subjected the melody to
a pastiche of musical styles, including classical, ragtime, tango, waltz and
bossa nova. It was a fun-house romp, not an act of destruction, though it
did leach all the melancholy out of the song. That didn¹t seem like a
setback, however, as Mr. Legrand finished with a parody of a Russian folk
dance and bounced his way off the stage.

He returned to sing ³The Windmills of Your Mind,² with quiet feeling, in
French. His piano accompaniment was mellifluous and rich, a sequence of
cascades in a slow rubato. And after he had made his way through the form,
he set up a breakneck swing tempo, scatting along with his improvised bebop
runs. It was an effervescent jazz moment, and it honored the song. NATE
CHINEN

DIAHANN CARROLL - Through March 24

Feinstein¹s at the Regency - 540 Park Avenue, (61st Street) - (212) 339-4095

When Diahann Carroll sings ³Both Sides Now,² the title song and concluding
number of her new show at Feinstein¹s at the Regency, she emphasizes the
final words of the classic Joni Mitchell song by repeating them: ³I really
don¹t know life at all, at all.² As Ms. Carroll sings it, in the reflective
tone of a woman who has survived many severe storms and remembers every
lightning flash and thunderclap, you are likely to think otherwise. Life may
not make sense, but she has certainly accumulated some valuable knowledge.

Ms. Carroll muses out loud that show-business people are children who act
out the repressed feelings of the audience. Contradictions abound. Although
she prefaces tart capsule summaries of her four marriages by declaring she
doesn¹t like to dwell on the past, as her show progresses she conveys an
awareness that her career and life have been constructed brick by brick into
an imposing edifice.

³Both Sides Now² is essentially the same show Ms. Carroll brought to
Feinstein¹s last year, when she made her first New York nightclub appearance
in 40 years. The major addition is a version of ³Give Me the Simple Life,²
whose verses are interwoven with a running monologue that she read from a
music stand on Wednesday evening.

As a personal summary statement ³Both Sides Now² touches on greatness. Ms.
Carroll, now 71, knows how to transmute controlled anger into defiant
affirmation. And the support of a seven-member swing band led by Dean
Schneider on piano lends her music an extra heft. Her blend of hauteur and
self-evaluating candor recalls Lena Horne in her Broadway show, ³The Lady
and Her Music.² 

The two sides of ³Both Sides Now² are embodied by Ms. Carroll¹s performances
of ³Come Rain or Come Shine² in the beginning and of Sophie Tucker¹s
signature song, ³Some of These Days,² near the end. The first, an anthem of
tenacious devotion, is delivered like a mama lion to her cubs. In the
second, a bitter warning to a lover, her claws come out. In both, danger
stalks the stage. STEPHEN HOLDEN


JANE MONHEIT - Through March 31

Café Carlyle, Carlyle Hotel - 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan (212) 744-1600

When Jane Monheit wraps her sweet, silky voice around ³Moon River,² she
suggests a kitten curled up on a rug, purring contentedly before a crackling
fire. The song, included on her forthcoming album, ³Surrender² (Concord),
becomes a dreamy lullaby with a wordless, semi-improvised middle section
that transforms it into a reverie floating in the limbo between drowsiness
and slumber. 

At the Café Carlyle, where she is appearing with a five-member band, the
indisputable fact of her supple pop-jazz voice triumphs over a number of
liabilities: her ballooning weight, her awkward patter (she needs a writer)
and her tendency to talk too fast. Yet when she sings, these distractions
fade into the background, and you notice how much more attention she pays to
song lyrics today than she did seven years ago, when she was a 22-year-old
jazz phenomenon from Long Island hailed as the next big whatever.

The premature hyperbole heaped on Ms. Monheit has been an added handicap.
People are still waiting for the big whatever to explode. Ms. Monheit has
never been the pure jazz singer that her early publicity suggested. A sultry
torch singer who makes decorous forays into improvisation is closer to the
mark. With some exceptions, including ³Moon River,² her new album, to be
released in May, is a plush collection of bossa nova ballads in the mode of
Diana Krall¹s ³Look of Love.²

The fit of Ms. Monheit and Brazilian music is the most comfortable to be
found on any of her albums. Stevie Wonder¹s ³Overjoyed² lends itself to a
light samba treatment. And in ³So Many Stars² and ³Like a Lover,² Brazilian
ballads with English lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, she immerses
herself in the role of a besotted fantasist stretched out on a couch,
composing mash notes to an imaginary lover.

³How I envy a cup that knows your lips/Let it be me, my love/And a table
that feels your fingertips,² she croons in ³Like a Lover.² As she sang it on
Tuesday, she was not only the cup but also the saucer, the pot of tea, the
table, the chair, the floorboards, the ceiling and, of course, the bed, in
an enchanted pied-à-terre. STEPHEN HOLDEN


TONY DESARE - Through next Saturday
Oak Room, Algonquin Hotel -59 West 44th Street, Manhattan - (212) 419-9331

It¹s almost a rule nowadays that an aspiring performer hoping to perpetuate
the prerock crooning tradition of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin should tip
his hat to contemporary music by ³Sinatrafying² something modern. And in
³Last First Kiss,² his new show at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, Tony
DeSare, a lean baby Sinatra with burning brown eyes and flashing teeth,
leads off his program with a swing version of the Prince song ³Kiss.²

It¹s the only number in his show in which Mr. DeSare dives into relatively
recent music. (³Kiss² was a No. 1 hit 21 years ago, which is actually not
all that recent.) But his sly performance establishes the kind of connection
to a younger generation that has helped make Michael Bublé a heartthrob
among upscale women in their teens and early 20s.

Since I last saw him three years ago, Mr. DeSare has solidified his
considerable talents as a swinging, well-mannered singer-pianist whom Simon
Cowell might dismiss as ³karaoke² or ³hotel bar.² But as he applies his
smooth, rather light pop baritone to standards like ³Oh, Look at Me Now² and
³How Deep Is the Ocean,² his intonation and enunciation are impeccable.

In the show he talks a lot about the importance of lyrics. If he doesn¹t
authoritatively stamp songs with a personal point of view, he conveys a
confident grasp of what they are saying. His pianism is a stylistic hybrid
that at its flashiest combines an Erroll Garner bounce with the kind of
florid display with which Liberace attacked ³Beer Barrel Polka.² In Mr.
DeSare¹s solo piano version of ³Fly Me to the Moon² on Thursday evening, the
song certainly flew: it swooped and glided all over the place.

Mr. DeSare performed five original songs, three of them written with Mike
Lee, the bass player in his quartet, whose other members include Brian Czach
on drums and Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar. ³Let¹s Just Stay In² and ³Lover¹s
Lullaby² showed off his ability to turn out generic traditional pop
expressions of polite seduction. STEPHEN HOLDEN