Skip to content

Category: Concert Reviews

The Enemy of the Good

Sachal Slouches

Sachal Vasandani at the Hemingway Room, December 28, 2011

The great is the enemy of the good everywhere, but with its relentlessly picked-over archives and hagiographic impulse, jazz seems to suffer from invidious comparisons more than most art forms. Self-doubt, nostalgia and questioning are structures as timelessly improvised upon as the 12-bar blues and the chord changes of “I Got Rhythm.”

Still, some old saws still cut wood–like this one: Where have all the male jazz singers gone? To be sure, there was never more than a handful, even during whichever Golden Age one wishes to lionize, and always fewer notable men than women.

That today seems no different is less anomalous than you might think (sure there are loads of women who seem to want to be identified as “jazz singers”–whatever that may be–but how many of them really sing, you know . . .).

But the men are out there.

Or should we say here? In the 16 months between December, 2010 and this coming May, Erie will have had four visits by two of the three most eminent men singing jazz in the U.S. Kurt Elling played a tantalizing short set at Mercyhurst last spring, a preview of his season-ending D’Angelo bash in May, and last night Sachal Vasandani returned (he was in Edinboro last December, though if you don’t drive a plow, you might not have heard him) and gave us a supple, confident display of his bona fides. It was satisfying a jazz show as I’ve heard all year.

Vasandani is young, and with his slender build, angular features and boyish stage demeanor, he inevitably recalled a young Sinatra. It’s a tough comparison to make (though in my book, Sinatra was not a jazz singer–whatever that may be), but it goes beyond looks.

Vasandani’s voice is high-ish for a jazz singer, a very high baritone or a low tenor. He uses a lot of head voice and falsetto. The old guys tended not to do that, but years of Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye have softened our ears. When he softly scatted off-mic to begin “There Are Such Things” (one of several Sinatra songs he covered), the effect was dreamy.

Vasandani does starry-eyed exceedingly well. There’s an appealingly yearning quality to his voice, and his material was shrewdly chosen to show this off–“I See Your Face Before Me,” “Don’t Worry About Me” and an arresting a capella fantasy on “The Very Thought of You” that opened the show in arresting fashion.

But Vasandani is from Chicago, and he swings, too, though not too hard. He namechecked his hometown for Percy Mayfield’s “Strange Things Happening,” as classic a four-on-the-floor blues as you can find. A musician friend of mind nudged me during this number and remarked, “It’s good, but that’s not the way [Basie drummer] Sonny Payne would play it.” He was right, but the great—always in the Golden Age—is the enemy of the good, and Vasandani, like all good jazz artists, is interested in reinvention, not recreation. He’s not Joe Williams.

If he sounded like anyone here, it was another Chicagoan with a high voice and impeccable time: Mel Tormé, though Vasandani’s voice is lean and clear, no fog in sight.

Lean was also the word for his terrific rhythm section. Jeb Patton, Vasandani’s longtime pianist, was an attentive accompanist and made the most of his solo spots, but what was happening stage left was the show. Kendrick Scott, from Houston, is everywhere these days. He kept things moving; strong enough to power the band but light in the way drummers must be when working behind a singer. His command of rhythms from a modified Brazilian partido alto (Vasandani likes this one) to backbeat funk was complete, and–hooray!–he’s a rare young drummer who can play brushes.

The surprise was bassist Joe Sanders who has impressed me on records with Gerald Clayton among others. A substitute for the excellent David Wong, Sanders brought a beautiful deep tone and great ideas to the bandstand, chief among them a probing musical curiosity. On “Such Things,” he jumped in behind Vasandani’s scatting in a sort of dialogue. It didn’t seem rehearsed (how much rehearsal could they have had?), and it was lovely. He walked four effectively and had some nice solos, most of which he doubled with his voice, a dreadlocked Slam Stewart.

After an overlong set-break a bit of the rhythmic tension that was a through-line in the first half dissipated. The second-set looseness was more fun, but less interesting, but this was a matter of fine degree, the great was the enemy of the good in this case, too. And the band was clearly having fun.

And this was a band. Vasandani is essentially a horn in this quartet. That his song interpretations aren’t yet the last word in depth is perhaps to be expected. He’s young, after all, and not too many years ago he was working on Wall Street in investment banking. He was the 1% then and he is still, an elite jazz singer whose progress will be fun to watch.

A word about the Hemingway room at the Ambassador: it’s maybe a bit large, but last night with soft lighting and a faux-coffered ceiling, it made a very credible jazz club, especially with great sound from the tireless guys at Raven. Would it be too much to ask for a canny promoter to complete the male jazz singer trifecta and book the astonishing singer Theo Bleckmann into this space, and soon?

That would be great . . . and good.

Comments closed

Signposts

AV

Music fans in search of surprises should generally avoid Erie Philharmonic subscription concerts. Transcendent or mediocre, they usually come as advertised.

So, it’s refreshing to report that several wonders were on offer Saturday evening–and no, I don’t mean the inclusion of a work by a living composer (remember “V2 Schneider” last season?). Not that I’m gainsaying the appearance of Christopher Theofanides’ rapt, shimmering “Rainbow Body,” which opened the program.

What was so unexpected was the reception by a Philharmonic audience that treats anything composed after the Brahms Fourth Symphony with deep suspicion. No, there wasn’t a spontaneously hooting wave of approval, but there was none of the tentative hand-patting more suited for the 17th green at Augusta, either.

For this, we must thank music director Daniel Meyer, who not only led a committed and startlingly well-played performance, but had the savvy to tell his audience beforehand what they would hear. This is important, I think, because some audiences need the reassurance of hearing familiar signposts, even in music that is not familiar to them: regular rhythms, a signal return to the tonic, big climaxes that tell you when a piece is over. But more about that last point later.

Now, Theofanides is not Xenakis. His music is tonal and full of ravishing color (my daughter remarked that the music “sounded like Disney music” and I know what she meant). But it’s not made like a Beethoven sonata-allegro, and this, I think, makes some audience members uneasy. Not knowing what to listen for, they feel at sea.

Meyer cleverly and persuasively gave them some direction by briefly explaining the piece’s inspiration: an esoteric bit of Tibetan Buddhist metaphysics (brevity was important here). He then introduced the plainchant, by 12th Century German nun and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, that Theofanides wove into his score. Meyer played the whole thing, and in its own way, Hildegard’s haunting choral work sounded as alien to ears steeped in the Viennese canon as “Rainbow Body” did. But it gave people something to hang on to and to listen for, if only as a sort of musical “Where’s Waldo?” parlor game.

In any case, it worked, and so did the performance. The proof: my daughter, who attended the concert under duress (from me), closed her cell phone and sat up attentively. No greater praise could Meyer and the Phil receive.

The second surprise came when the IATSE guys lugged a small amplifier to the stage for the Rodrigo “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Ana Vidovic is not the first classical guitarist to use an amplifier, and let’s face it, we’ve all heard the Warner’s acoustics swallow up powerful violin soloists. The whispery, intimate classical guitar doesn’t have a chance in there.

Still, the electronics were not expected, though on balance, the sound coming from the amp was modest and not grotesque. It rendered Vidovic’s very clean playing faithfully, though a broad range of colors was not apparent, maybe a function of the sound reinforcement.

This was a performance that was perhaps short of duende, though the cool, somewhat detached aesthetic shared by conductor and soloist had the salutary effect of minimizing the kitsch potential in this now over-familiar music. The famous second movement had a cool, moonlit quality that was a bit jarring at first, but had its own logic. Vidovic’s careful playing and eschewing of splashy emotion drew the ear to her. This might have been a guitar concerto by Stravinsky in his driest neoclassical mode, and even though Meyer used a full complement of strings (another surprise), balances were nicely controlled in all but the biggest tuttis.

Friends of mine, attentive listeners and lovers of Spanish culture, were appalled. I was rather pleased. And may I say that Vidovic looked really sensational in a dramatic, jungle-print gown?

Meyer carried some of his cool into the Tchaikovsky “Pathetique” Symphony that ended the evening. Again, the playing was quite good. And while we’re on that, exactly when did the strings, long the sick man of the Phil’s sections, become the orchestra’s MVPs? Exhibit A: the genuine pianissimo in the opening Adagio that I haven’t heard since . . . well, I don’t recall ever hearing this at a Phil concert. And they achieved the feat more than once, along with being notably unified and (a shaky moment by the celli in the Adagio lamentoso aside) well-tuned.

Big ups, also, to new principal bassoonist Laura Koepke for her sorrowing, eloquent concertante turns. And another surprise: the Phil’s usually off-the-leash brass were relatively under control, though this may not be a virtue in Tchaikovsky (full disclosure: all week I had been listening to Mravinsky’s classic, but highly idiosyncratic recording where the brass snarl, bray and sob with over-the-top emotion).

This was a very purposeful, unsentimental–I’m tempted to say a very Germanic–reading. Those who prefer eye-rolling, bodice-ripping, dark-nights-of-the-Slavic-soul drama would have left unsatisfied. And this is what makes Tchaikovsky such a difficult composer to bring off, despite the arena-rock appeal of all those juicy melodies and danceable rhythms: the emotion is written into the music. How much sauce do you put on a dish such as this before you ruin it?

In the end, Meyer wielded a teaspoon, not a ladle, but the performance was tightly argued and very well-played. He knew exactly what he was doing. Too bad the audience didn’t.

Look, complaining about between-movements applause makes as much sense in Erie as complaining about the weather or the quality of our political leadership, and Lord knows the swaggering march that is the Allegro molto vivace verily screams for a standing-O, but I think Meyer intended to plunge directly into the following Adagio lamentoso. It would have been a neat effect, but the interstitial applause foiled that plan.

Even worse was the moment in the finale when the brass rises to a proclamatory fervor before the main theme returns. Meyer took a bit of a pause there. The audience read this as a customary, all-hands-on-deck climax, and a smattering of premature hand claps were heard. Three minutes later, when the final heavy sighs from the low strings (played with rather chilling control at low volume) came, Meyer dropped his hands and . . . nothing. Even in a piece as familiar as the “Pathetique,” the audience had no idea where the ending was.

See what I mean about those signposts?

Comments closed