Feeling Down? Let Gabrielle Stravelli Turn You Around

Gabrielle Stravelli TrioBirdland TheaterTuesdays in September“There’s a love song floating on the soft summer air / When you spoke, you left it there”: Those lines are from the last song of the first set of Gabrielle Stravelli’s four-Tuesday run at Birdland, and they caught the mood perfectly. Less than 24 hours after Labor Day, summer was more omnipresent than ever, though the atmosphere and the humidity were more oppressive than “soft.” Yet Ms. Stravell’s singing made the heat more bearable, even on West 44th Street, where the sidewalks bake in the sun. In fact, she seemed to bend the weather to her will; all of a sudden we were enjoying the extreme warmth, even basking in it, rather than complaining about it.Gabrielle Stravelli has that kind of effect on audiences; you invariably feel better at the end of one of her shows than when you first came in. If any singer is a New York favorite, it’s Ms. Stravelli. Over the last 15 years or so, I have seen her not only at every jazz club and concert hall in the city, from 92NY to Joe’s Pub, but at a great many of the restaurants and brunch emporia as well. She does play festivals and other venues worldwide, but somehow I think of her as one of the things that makes music in Manhattan great.As a performer, Ms. Stravelli is a remarkable package, with an engaging voice, an ineffable sense of swing, and a superior musical intelligence, which comes out in her choice of songs as well as the specific interpretations thereof. After singing “Nobody Else But Me,” she informed the house that she had previously avoided that Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein gem because she felt uncomfortable with the line “I’m not very bright” — she needn’t have worried, she had already more than convinced us otherwise many times over.Surely no one has better taste in tunes: Nothing she sang was obscure, but nothing was overdone, either. That number quoted above, for instance, was “I Walk With Music,” the title tune of what was practically Hoagy Carmichael’s only Broadway musical, an epic flop that convinced the great songwriter to avoid the theater from then on; lyricist Johnny Mercer, however, persisted. It’s a superior song that was well-recorded at the time, a major highlight of the relatively brief Mercer-Carmichael collaboration, but Ms. Stravelli is virtually the only singer I have heard sing it live, and she brings out its unique mix of melancholy and euphoria. I’ll never be alone, the song says, as long as I have music.On Tuesday, she was joined by her longtime personal and professional colleague, husband, and bassist, Pat O’Leary. Rounding out the trio was the veteran pianist Michael Kanan, with his familiar, Gershwin-esque profile, who teamed up with Ms. Stravelli on “Stairway to the Stars,” an excellent duo CD from 2016. At Birdland, she finds neglected gems by Irving Berlin (“I Used to Be Colorblind”) and Jule Styne (“You Say You Care,” from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”) and the likes of Victor Herbert’s posthumous classic “Indian Summer,” all of which aren’t performed enough in jazz clubs. The latter was delivered in a sublime bossa-styled treatment by the trio. The closest thing to a song that’s being heard a lot these days is “Love You Madly,” for which Duke Ellington wrote the lyrics to his own melody, based on his frequently repeated onstage catch phrase. Closely associated with Ella Fitzgerald, the song has been much in the zeitgeist lately, though mainly as an instrumental — I’ve heard it by both Benny Green and Bill Charlap in the last month. Ms. Stravelli’s upbeat rendition was more about loving than madness; she made me ponder how Duke’s text is a song about a song, which connects it conceptually to “Stardust” and “The Song is You.” Mr. Kanan, dancing in the bass clef, and Mr. O’Leary essayed a zippy exchange that took a detour via the “A-Train.”Some songs, like “You Better Go Now,” were more serious than others, but there was nothing overtly sad. When I return, as I hope to for some of the remaining Tuesdays, I’d also love to hear her sing some blues — especially the happy and comic variety — as she also does those brilliantly. As noted, she ended with “I Walk with Music,” but a brief 70 minutes earlier she had begun with, “Let’s Fall in Love.” Although it was only the first song of the evening, it already seemed redundant; most of us in the house had fallen in love with Gabrielle Stravelli a long time ago.

Feeling Down? Let Gabrielle Stravelli Turn You Around

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