[JPL] Nancy Wilson’s Jazzy Birthday (a Little Late)

[r durfee]

July 2, 2007
Music Review | Nancy Wilson
Nancy Wilson’s Jazzy Birthday (a Little Late) 
By BEN RATLIFF
Nancy Wilson appeared onstage Friday night in a dress
and shoes the same shade of yellow that she wore on
the cover of “Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley,”
her record from 1961. She welcomed the audience, then
disappeared for a while, letting her friends come on
one by one and do the work. 

This was at Carnegie Hall, for a JVC Jazz Festival New
York concert in honor of her 70th birthday, which was
in February. Her absence went on long enough that we
were beginning to miss her. She came back only when
the pianist Herbie Hancock called her out. 

What was this all about? Old-school party etiquette,
maybe: allowing time for everyone to get to know one
another without her hovering presence, then taking
charge when really needed. 

Ms. Wilson’s voice is thin and smooth, but she uses
her own devices, doled out in pinches, that give it an
almost brawny power. Among these are a quick, accurate
upward slide of a whole step in pitch; a quick voice
break, like a yodel; a short, consternated yell; a
flirty whisper; fading out a phrase by singing it out
of the side of her mouth; breaking up her rhythm by
placing mild emphasis on certain words and boldfacing
others. 

When she sang “Guess Who I Saw Today?” — in which the
narrator delicately (and devastatingly) tells her
husband that she saw him with another woman — she used
all these ingredients. The yell came in the first two
words of the title phrase, and they were the two
loudest sounds of the evening. It doesn’t matter how
calculated that gesture was; it did the job. Rows of
people in the audience made simultaneous reflex
motions, startled. 

This concert was jazz as we know it, though Ms.
Wilson’s records have been marketed as adult
contemporary or smooth jazz. The guests all played
with her three-piece band: the pianist Llew Mathews,
the bassist Rufus Reid, the drummer Roy McCurdy. 

The violinist Regina Carter played Duke Ellington’s
“Imagine My Frustration,” making bowed blues phrases
sound vocal. Nnenna Freelon broadly sang two songs,
“They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “If I Had
You”; she’s a generation younger than Ms. Wilson, and
pours it on where Ms. Wilson holds back. 

Kurt Elling performed two of the best songs in Ms.
Wilson’s repertory, “Sunny” and “Save Your Love for
Me,” using more or less her original 1961 arrangement
in the second one; it worked as well as ever. And Mr.
Hancock — an admirer of Ms. Wilson’s who had never
played with her — got off a subtle, highly altered
version of Cole Porter’s “I Love You,” before she
finally returned to sing the ballad “Old Folks” with
him.

But the most effective guest turn belonged to Dianne
Reeves, a supremely self-confident singer who looked
nervous and incredulous that she was being given the
opportunity to sing with one of her idols. She sang
“Midnight Sun” — it’s on Ms. Wilson’s 1967 record
“Lush Life”— and a weird thing happened: The crowd
went bonkers. Before she had finished the opening
verse, she had gotten the biggest applause of the
night.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/arts/music/02nanc.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=login

Roy Durfee
P.O. Box 40219
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87196-0219
rdurfee2003 at yahoo.com


 
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