[Dixielandjazz] Patti Austin sings Gershwin via Ella

[Stephen G Barbone]

Singing Gershwin Ella Style, Salt Added

NY Times - March 19 - by Stephen Holden

Who would dispute that George and Ira Gershwin, Ella Fitzgerald and  
Nelson Riddle were pop-jazz Olympians whose combined talents on the  
1959 album “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song  
Book” resulted in a masterpiece of the LP era? Any notion of  
recreating that album, or even part of it, in concert is a daunting  
challenge. The list of contemporary musicians who could equal their  
talents is very short.

But on Friday evening, the New York Pops and the singer Patti Austin  
performed a partial restoration at Carnegie Hall, where they offered  
more than a dozen selections from that album, using the original  
Riddle orchestrations.

Ms. Austin, who saluted Fitzgerald in a 2002 album, “For Ella,” and  
the Gershwins in her 2007 album, “Avant Gershwin,” is one of a very  
few vocal candidates for that short list. In some of the same ways as  
Fitzgerald’s, her singing is technically perfect. She has faultless  
intonation and a solid rhythmic footing. At the same time she is less  
of a jazz singer and more of a soul singer in the mold of high-gloss  
studio voices, like James Ingram, her sometime singing partner.

Ms. Austin’s voice is more thickly textured and earthbound than that  
of Fitzgerald, who, whether swinging or scatting or dripping honey  
over a ballad, evoked a quality I can only describe as heavenly  
consolation.

Ms. Austin is more overtly dramatic. If the humor conveyed by  
Fitzgerald was a girlish sense of mischief, Ms. Austin has a streak of  
salty wit. Introducing the Gershwins’ “Who Cares?,” a song that  
blithely exclaims, “Let a million firms go under,” she amusedly  
recalled the grim reaction of an audience of corporate high rollers  
when she performed it in San Francisco on one of the worst days of the  
2008 financial crisis.

But because of persistent acoustic problems that muddied Ms. Austin’s  
voice and left it too far in the background, the concert was not all  
it might have been. As is so often the case at New York Pops concerts,  
the communication between the performer and the conductor Steven  
Reineke was minimal. Riddle’s arrangements — classical and cinematic  
with elegant, lacy musical designs floated over a strong, swinging  
foundation — were blurred along with the vocals.

Christopher Riddle, the arranger’s son, also conducted two excerpts  
from his father’s “Cross Country Suite,” as well as his theme from the  
television series “Route 66.” If these are not major compositions, Mr.  
Riddle and the orchestra effectively brought out their pictorial  
vivacity.