Review: SUSAN MACK Delivers an Introspective Evening in YESTERDAYS at Birdland

We all love to reminisce. A trip down memory lane is highly satisfying. In fact, for those of us who are devotees of The American Songbook, reminiscing is sort of our gig. Susan Mack has made it the theme of her evening, SUSAN MACK: YESTERDAYS, which opened yesterday at Birdland. And Ms. Mack is, indeed, a singer worth remembering. She has a voice as full-bodied as honey, with impeccable pitch and delicious taste in music. She put together a program of classy, often rueful, tunes about days gone by, both hers and ours. As she points out, the beauty of calling a show YESTERDAYS is that you can sing anything written before today.

I would venture to say that the problem with calling your show YESTERDAYS is that you can sing anything written before today. Susan Mack is a delightful singer who looks like a million bucks and surrounds herself with first-class musicians playing first-class tunes. But she and director Lina Koutrakos have constructed a show that is hard to grab onto because its theme is too broad. And though Mack is very good about relating the tunes to her own life experiences, it is not a deep enough dive to make this show feel specifically personal.

And it is in those moments when Susan Mack is truly intimate that the show is at its most wonderful. Ms. Mack has the great gift of internalizing a lyric. In fact, she is an introspective singer who is at her best singing ballads as thoughtful as she is. She is particularly gifted with the kind of ambivalent emotions Karen Carpenter made a career of. She is, however, more challenged by some of the extroverted moments, jazzy tunes that require a bit of showboating.

Her arrangement of the title song, Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays," was particularly fine at exploiting the richness of her dark tone. There was something wistful in the way she phrased the classic. I was very fond of her salsa-tinged version of "Love For Sale," which was part of a section that saluted the finest of showboaters, Ella Fitzgerald. Mack was playful, delivering "Black Coffee," which she combined with the bittersweet "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning." She found the cool elegance of Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" and the heartbreak of Marilyn and Alan Bergman's "Where Do You Start?"

The highlight of the evening, for me, was a deeply felt reading of "Everything Must Change." The ambivalence of the song about moving on was reinforced by a beautiful unresolved chord at the end. She was charming and flirty in Jerome Kern's "I'm Old Fashioned" and whimsically exasperated in "Dat Dere," as the mother of an inquisitive youth. She was positively kittenish in a duet with her special guest, Benny Benack, III. Benack is a brilliant trumpet player who added color to several tunes, but in "Pick Yourself Up" he showed off his vocal talents. He provided the most spontaneous moment of the evening when his music went flying in several directions during the tunes. His improvisations with Mack and Musical director, Tedd Firth, while scrambling for the pages, was entirely charming. Ms. Mack saved the best for last with beautiful readings of Stevie Wonder's "Overjoyed" and the Beatles' "In My Life." This sort of pop material really fits beautifully in Susan Mack's warm and expressive voice. In fact, in some ways, it is a better fit for her than some of the jazz tunes that are her bill of fare.

Susan Mack was supported by some of the finest jazzmen working today. David Finck on bass and Eric Halvorson on drums did excellent work, and there's no one better than Tedd Firth, although sometimes his flamboyant style was at odds with Ms. Mack's more internal quality. Benny Benack, III was a joy on trumpet. I look forward to seeing more of Susan Mack. She is a wonderful singer who is refining her style. It will be a pleasure to see what else she has up her sleeve.

Susan Mack's recordings are available on Spotify and all major streaming platforms. For more great artists at the world-famous Birdland, go to birdlandjazz.com

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