From the Mouth of Carole J. Bufford Pours Decades’ Worth of Musical History

Carole J. Bufford at BirdlandIn June 1999, the legendary jazz singer Anita O’Day stood on the stage of Avery Fisher Hall, turned to her accompanist, and stamped her feet to count off the time. “Give me a two,” she said, “a Lunceford two.”The contemporary singer Carole J. Bufford, who is finishing a three-night, six show run at Birdland December 11, wasn’t in the audience at that JVC Jazz Festival concert (she was in Georgia, and barely into her teenage years) but among vocalists performing today, she has a unique understanding of all the different kinds of “two” that are out there. Most New Orleans traditional jazz is in 2/4 time, though historians tend to dismiss the “old-fashioned two-beat” as merely a stopping point before the emergence of 4/4 swingtime, which conquered the world thanks to Benny Goodman and the other bands of the 1930s. Cut Time, as 2/4 is sometimes known, remained the province of dixieland bands, and Jerry Herman put his finger on it when he declared, “There is no tune like a show tune in two-four,” in that 90 percent of classic Broadway musicals were in two, just as nearly all of jazz since 1940, Dave Brubeck aside, has been in “common time” (4/4). Then there’s what O’Day called for, referring to how bandleader Jimmie Lunceford and his chief arranger, Sy Oliver, came up with a two-beat sound that somehow was as hip and swinging as what any of his colleagues, including Count Basie and Duke Ellington, were doing in four.Ms. Bufford is one of the few singers of any generation who not only fathoms the differences between all these different varieties of two and four but really relishes and digs into them, and uses these differences to animate her material. Not that it lacks any such animation otherwise; she has a full-on arsenal of vocal techniques, including growls, rasps, and purrs. Her control of the sounds coming out of her throat parallels that of a trumpeter switching between different kinds of mutes. Plus, she has a killer belt that can level a concert hall, and a Southern accent that seems to appear and disappear at will.Ms. Bufford gave her first big solo show at New York in 2011. It was titled “Speak Easy” and co-starred Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. As the title and the accompaniment suggests, Ms. Bufford at that moment in her artistic evolution was fixated on the Jazz Age, and she made it her business to assimilate the oeuvres of iconic, larger-than-life female performers of that era, from Bessie Smith to Sophie Tucker. Around the same time, she was a regular in Broadway-centric sets produced by Scott Siegel at the old Feinstein’s at the Regency. Here, her usual song was what they called an “Eleven O’Clock” number, customarily a big belter that could be counted on to bring the show to an epic climax before the final curtain. Ms. Bufford always brought the crowd to its feet with “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?” from “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” and it seemed that such oversized Broadway anthems were her speciality.Carole J. Bufford is a small woman with big eyes and a voice that is bigger still. Every time I see her, she seems to be taking in more musical territory. In the 11 years that she’s been headlining here, her artistry has grown both inwardly and outwardly. Her major show of 2016 was “Fearless Females of the 1960s”; thus, within five years she’d progressed another four decades, demonstrating an understanding of the idioms of angsty divas from Lesley Gore to Janis Joplin and Dusty Springfield.Her current offering, “Vintage Pop,” covers a still-wider range of chronological eras and the diverse styles associated with them, from the jazz-inflected vaudeville song “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” in 1902 to the music of one-named contemporary pop songwriting superstars Prince and Sting. She covers the two-beat era particularly well, with the quintessential blues — the ones inspired by St. Louis — and the equally bluesy “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Eddie Cantor’s “Don’t Put a Tax on the Beautiful Girls” shows that she understands the uses of camp comedy. “Bye Bye Blackbird,” in a slow, post-Bobby Short/Miles Davis tempo, has allusions to the blues as well. “Blue Moon” brings out her not-so-inner song geek, including three alternate lyrics that I’ve previously only heard sung by the late Mel Torme, and a verse that I’ve never heard anyone perform live. Her treatment of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” the Yiddish show tune that became a swing standard, is a wonder, as Ms. Bufford and her trio (pianist and musical director Ian Herman; bassist Tom Hubbard; drummer Howie Gordon) start slow and modulate upward both rhythmically and harmonically. It packs the same kind of punch as Liza Minelli barreling through “Mein Herr.” Ms. Bufford brings the story up through the 1950s and ’60s, demonstrating that early rock hits like “All Shook Up” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” were deeply rooted in 1920s and ’30s boogie-woogie.The most impressive recent development in Ms. Bufford’s artistic evolution is documented in pandemic-era video performances, like “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” part of a series of duets with guitarist Peter Calo. Gospel, like blues, dixieland, and showtunes, is part of her fundamental musical make-up. Yet instead of belting it, she sings it quietly and intimately, fully trusting that she doesn’t have to ramp up the volume to command an audience’s attention.At Birdland, she concludes with Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” reimagined as a post-nuclear torch tune. Likewise, Sting’s “Every Breath You Take” becomes a contemporary cautionary tale along the lines of Sophie Tucker’s “Mama Goes Where Papa Goes.” By ending her show in the 1980s, the decade in which she entered the world, Carole J. Bufford is, in effect, telling us, “this is where I came in.”

From the Mouth of Carole J. Bufford Pours Decades’ Worth of Musical History

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