Nobody Leaves Without Singing the Blues
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The music of Carol Sloane and Freddy Cole is about sizzling rather than catching fire, and about simmering rather than coming to a boil. Both veteran vocalists put these qualities on display in a pair of concerts this weekend, as well as on two new albums.
On Thursday at the Tribeca Arts Center, Ms. Sloane provided the concluding act for the second Highlights in Jazz concert of the season. A pair of pianists opened the show: first Victor Lin and his trio, and then a solo set by Bill Charlap. Mr. Lin, who works regularly at the Knickerbocker (which could be the city’s best piano room if only the crowd would stop talking long enough to let you hear the piano), is a thoughtful and entertaining player who builds to exciting climaxes of cascading notes in the manner of Erroll Garner, and who also doubles on violin.
Yet when Mr. Charlap followed, it was an illustration of the difference between emerging talent and mature talent: Every little melodic phrase played by Mr. Charlap is breathtakingly inventive. He can stay as close to the written melody as possible, as he did on a stunning, single-chorus reading of Vernon Duke’s “Cabin in the Sky,” and still saturate it with his own personality.
This is a skill that Mr. Charlap might well have learned from his long association with Ms. Sloane, which produced roughly half a dozen albums. Ms. Sloane’s set at Highlights in Jazz might also have been a textbook example of this ideal if only the sound had been right, but between the microphones and the monitors, everything seemed to be going wrong onstage. The normally unflappable Ms. Sloane and her excellent accompanist, the veteran Norman Simmons, were thrown at several points; in the middle of a medley of “The Glory of Love” and “Making Whoopee,” she began singing the wrong song. There were no problems, however, with her concluding duo with Mr. Charlap.
Ms. Sloane’s new album, “Dearest Duke” (Arbors Jazz), documents these characteristics in great profusion, if a style as sophisticated and understated as hers can be described in terms of abundance. “Duke” is her third songbook album of the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and it is done in the highly personal and vulnerable setting of Brad Hatfield on piano and Ken Peplowski on clarinet and tenor sax. The emphasis is on Ducal ballads, and Ms. Sloane does include some lesser-known slices of Ellingtonia (the most obscure is Mr. Peplowski’s instrumental feature “Serenade to Sweden”). But she also takes some of the most familiar pieces, like “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” and infuses them with a warmth and a spontaneity of spirit that refuses to let us take them for granted and demonstrates why listeners and musicians made these songs standards to begin with.
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Ms. Sloane, who turned 70 this year, was particularly moving on a collage of two Ellington blues, “Rocks in My Bed” and “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ but the Blues.” Likewise, the two guest vocalists at Friday’s Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra program “The Best of the Big Bands,” Ernestine Anderson and Freddy Cole (also both in their 70s), brought the message home most powerfully when they were called upon to sing the blues. Ms. Anderson seemed like she didn’t fully know the new arrangement on “Sentimental Journey,” but she completely took charge on “Every Day I Have the Blues,” wailing over the whole 17-piece JALCO like she was daring them to try to out-shout her.
We rarely get the chance to hear Mr. Cole with a big band, and he made the most of the opportunity in his three numbers, showing a whole different side of his personality. It already had been an exciting show (the JALCO was most impressive on numbers outside the realm of standard 4/4 big-band swing, such as Jimmie Lunceford’s “For Dancers Only” and Machito’s “Mambo Inn”), yet Mr. Cole climaxed the evening with a loud and outgoing reading of Louis Jordan’s R&B classic, “Let the Good Times Roll,” which had the capacity crowd rocking.
Mr. Cole also has a new album out, “Music, Maestro, Please.” In his more characteristic manner, he sings with such intimacy that a listener would be forgiven for thinking it is his own inner voice that he’s hearing. Here, coincidentally, Mr. Cole is accompanied by the Bill Charlap Trio, and that is the rub. Mr. Charlap is a more accomplished pianist than Mr. Cole (and practically anyone else playing the instrument today), and also a brilliant accompanist, and is full of witty touches. Yet there is no one better than Mr. Cole at playing for himself, a skill he learned from his older brother, Nat King Cole — the greatest pianist-singer of all time — and refined during the last 60 years.
Mr. Cole has worked with a lot of major keyboardists as guest accompanists on his albums (Cedar Walton, Cyrus Chestnut, and John DiMartino, to name a few), but the only pianist one really wants to hear behind his voice is Mr. Cole himself. He has a cozy vocabulary of familiar phrases and licks that I expect to hear, and it takes a while to acclimate myself to the sound of Mr. Cole’s voice in front of someone else’s piano touch.
Even so, the new album features a few tracks that are certain to be regarded as classics of the Cole canon, including a pair of voice-and-piano duos (one of Mr. Charlap’s specialties), “Why Did I Choose You” and a medley of “I Never Had a Chance” and “Don’t Take Your Love From Me.” The title track, “Music, Maestro, Please,” has been reconditioned to fit the legacy of both Cole brothers, since Messrs. Cole and Charlap finesse it into a blues-based saloon song that’s a virtual sequel to the title track of Mr. Cole’s first album, 1959’s “Waiter Ask the Man To Play the Blues,” while Freddy closes with a reference to his brother’s “The Blues Don’t Care Who’s Got ‘Em.”
The point is that nearly everything Ms. Sloane and Mr. Cole sing is music for the ages. Both have recorded most of their best work in the latter parts of their respective careers, proving that jazz isn’t necessarily about building to a big, explosive climax, but about gathering steam along the way.
wfriedwald@nysun.com