Young Voices (& Reeds) at Lincoln Center

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The New York Sun

About the only thing we can all agree on regarding Jane Monheit is that she’s beautiful – not just her face but her voice, and what comes off as a beautifully upbeat spirit. Other than that, Ms. Monheit’s singing sends a lot of mixed signals: She seems at once highly professional and totally amateurish, a wide-eyed innocent and completely calculated, sweetly sincere and yet somehow thoroughly phony, all at the same time.


Her new album “Taking a Chance on Love” (Sony Classical SK 92495) quickly reached number one on the jazz charts, which would indicate that economically, at least, she’s in the same class with the greatest of contemporary jazz singers, Cassandra Wilson and Dianne Reeves (who were both featured in the first week of Rose Hall’s Grand Opening Festival). But musically it’s a different story.


On Wednesday night, Ms. Monheit launched Jazz At Lincoln Center’s “Visting Presenter” series at the Allen Room (the mid-sized room of J@LC’s newly opened Rose Hall facility) in a concert produced by media mogul Ron Delsener. Both the new album and the Wednesday concert show that the prob lem isn’t her singing or her technique. It’s something like imagination.


When you listened to Ms. Wilson and Ms. Reeves at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s recent opening festival, you were overwhelmed by the flow of new ideas. Ms. Monheit, contrastingly, plays things safe.


On records Ms. Monheit is competing with the immortals – not necessarily Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan, but Doris Day and Jo Stafford – and there’s no way she can win. But with some good ideas, she could at least compete. Last June at the Oak Room, she appeared in a program largely of Dietz and Schwartz songs arranged imaginatively by her talented musical director, pianist Michael Kanin; this was far more engaging than the generally overdone standards on the album.


And on Wednesday, whenever she sang anything that was in the least off the beaten path, she seemed to immediately grow in authority, such as “Haunted Heart” (reprised from June). Complicated story songs, like “Bill” (on the album) and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” are beyond her – she’s still only 27 – but I hope such ambition will eventually pay off.


Ms. Monheit also has a knack for Brazilian songs (and I say this as someone who feels bossa nova is generally overdone): “Remember Me,” “No More Blues,” “Song of the Jet.” The latter, done in Portuguese, was her best vocal of the evening – she seems positively liberated when she doesn’t have to sing in English. She would have done better to do her closing song, “Waters of March,” in the original tongue as well, since she clearly has no idea what the lyrics to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s rhythmic but impenetrably cryptic text actually mean.


Then again, neither does anyone else I know.


***


The received wisdom is that the swing era ended when the big bands were overtaken by pop singers and bebop. Yet the two men most responsible for these sea changes in musical culture were, in fact, lifelong supporters of the big-band sound. Both Frank Sinatra and Dizzy Gillespie helped keep the tradition of orchestral jazz alive for the next five decades.


This aspect of Gillespie’s music is being celebrated this week at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola for the third and final week of the club’s grand opening Dizzy Gillespie Festival.


“Big Band Dizzy” spotlights the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, directed by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s Victor Goines; on nights when the LCJO is working in the Rose Theatre, the veteran bandleader and educator Loren Schoenberg takes over. In addition to the student orchestra, there are two guest soloists, vocalist Carla Cook and trumpeter Tom Harrell. The band consists of undergraduates, all in their late teens and early twenties.


The orchestra opened with one of Gillespie’s earliest classic modern jazz compositions for large ensemble, “Cool Breeze.” Gillespie co-wrote it with arranger Tadd Dameron for Billy Eckstine’s Orchestra in 1945 and continued to play it with his own ensembles for many years to come. They followed with “Voyage” by longtime Gillespie pianist Kenny Barron (which the composer also recorded with Stan Getz); Dizzy never played it, but it seemed close to home just the same.


And then for something completely different: The last thing any of us expected was one of Gillespie’s dizziest novelties, “Umbrella Man” (probably the only song Gillespie learned from Kay Kyser), which was rendered in a new chart that seemed to combine both Dizzy’s 1952 sextet and 1957 orchestra arrangement. Both feature chanting by the band and meters that shift between 3/4 and 4/4; this rendition spotlighted trombonist-cum-vocalist Mike Dees.


Carla Cook then took over for three numbers. I wish some effort had been made to find her material associated with Gillespie (for instance, she could have reprised Ella Fitzgerald’s all-scat version of “Cool Breeze” from 1959). But her performance was welcome nonetheless: She is a fine performer, one of the few big-voiced, soulful-style jazz singers who knows the meaning of subtlety and restraint.


Tom Harrell, a brilliant composer, arranger, and bandleader, closed the show, and it was great to see him just this once as the purely-powerhouse trumpeter he is. He plays with grace, finesse, and as much technique as anyone I’ve ever seen. Mr. Harrell played extended solos on “Groovin’ High,” Gillespie’s famous variant on “Whispering” and “A Night in Tunisia.” Both provided plenty of opportunities to blast out a lot of noisy, loud high notes, but Mr. Harrell improvised solos that tempered power with nuance.


The only way for Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola to top this presentation would be to bring back Mr. Harrell, this time in front of an orchestra playing his own compositions and arrangements.


The New York Sun

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