Review: Catherine Russell & Sean Mason at Dizzy's Are 'My Ideal' Kind of Pair

On Sunday, January 12, Dizzy’s Club was selling drinks and food and, of course, seats for singer Catherine Russell and pianist Sean Mason's 9:30 pm show.  But you know what Russell and Mason were selling? Joy! Their upbeat repertoire, performance energy, and chemistry together all radiated happiness, serving delight through music.  You could say they were also “selling” their recent joint album — the terrific, Grammy Award-nominated set of 11 vocal/piano duets, My Ideal — as the set featured most of those selections and the recording was mentioned prominently. However, it wasn’t a pushy “hard sell” with relentless references to the recording with stacks of the CD that we could see delivered to a cashier and cash register. And the night wasn’t timed to Dot Time Records’ release of the project, as a first-and-only CD Release Celebration situation as it came out back in August. So the ideal audience for buying My Ideal overlapped with the audience at Dizzy’s and included those who’d already procured it in the digital or physical format and that was one reason they were “sold” on wanting to see these two charmers in person. 

With a few decades of performing to her credit, Catherine Russell deservedly has a strong following, deservedly so, after a strong string of albums and gigs as a headliner, following her years as a backup singer.  Juilliard-trained Sean Mason is still in early career mode – he is in his mid-20s – and is still being “discovered” by some audiences.  He’s formed his own band; he composes, tours, and teaches, too, with two other albums released in the last two years.  Together, the radiant Russell and the musically muscular Mason are a praiseworthy pair.  Old souls both, they sound assured and authentic in vintage-centric songs that are almost as old as their combined ages – or even more antique.  The sweet treat that dates back to 1930, "A Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid" (music by James P. Johnson,  lyric by Andy Razaf), their album’s opening track, is even more fun in person, with an easy sway and the way the vocalist’s eyes twinkle as she smilingly handles unspooling the cute lines that personify objects the characters would handle, such as “I will be the oil mop, if you’ll be the oil./  Then we both could mingle, every time we toil” and “I will be the dust pan, if you’ll be the broom./ We can work together, all around the room.”  She graciously gave the stage and the audience fully to the pianist for two sensational solo numbers that showed off his flair and flash even more than his fancy fingering when accompanying her singing and the cool instrumental breaks within those selections.  And the choices for his alone time were ancient gems that were dipped into the fountain of youth, fully alive with vigor and sprightliness, due to the Sean Showmanship. He played (and played around with, magnificently)  1934’s “Let’s Fall in Love” and “Tea for Two"–which is 102 years old. The “Tea” break brought sustained applause for the dexterity and creativity, stride piano stylings, and overall zing.

A kind of trademark of Catherine Russell’s programs is eschewing loading up on material one hears constantly (because so many less imaginative singers sing them and think, rightly or wrongly, that audiences want to hear songs they will readily recognize).  But resourceful Russell is known for her knack for tracking down and dusting off ditties from early decades of the 20th century. She revives relics that reflect a more innocent era’s simpler sweetness and idealistic view of life and love and cheeky choices that have the exact opposite allure.  Those are the noteworthy “naughty” novelty numbers that are full of wink-worthy double entendres alluding to sex – some subtle, some not so much. In the wrong hands, they can seem offensive, embarrassing, awkward, misguided, coarse, juvenile, tedious, lame, forced, or some combination of those descriptions.  Back in the day, with discretion and taboos the general rule, there were a lot of those songs meant to raise eyebrows and draw chuckles, drawing on the same small bag of tricks and puns and euphemisms. Catherine can calibrate how far to go and makes such stuff play as playful, instead of smutty or smug. Rather than go overboard in underscoring the double meanings in her performance or the accents by her accompanist(s), she lets the audience discover the humor, perhaps with a conspiratorial half-smile.  I won’t put in examples here that could be spoilers, but let’s just say when she sings about enjoying the company of older men it isn’t because she’s a volunteer singing or serving soup meals at a retirement home!  

The carefully chosen carefree, freewheeling fare was fairly prominent, but the performers were also very effective when things got serious with the wistful hope of finding the perfect partner (“My Ideal”) and the lament of disillusion described in “South to a Warmer Place.” (The singer must have a special affection for this tale of affection fading, as she recorded it for two different albums.)  I would have enjoyed some banter between the partners, but that was not to be, and the vocalist restricted her comments almost exclusively to her own recordings, acknowledgments of who wrote the songs or who famously recorded them, wishing us a happy new year, thanking people.  So we might be reminded that there were a couple of entries associated with Ray Charles and a couple associated with Fats Waller, but I’m glad to have them all associated with Catherine Russell and Sean Mason and I’m even happier that they’ve formed an association.

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Solo pics of Catherine Russell by Conor Weiss. Header photo courtesy of the artists.

Learn more about the artists on their websites at www.catherinerussell.net and www.seanmasonofficial.com

Find more upcoming shows and more information about Dizzy’s Club on Jazz at Lincoln Center's website.

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