Review: MARIA CORSARO: YOU TAUGHT MY HEART TO SING Puts Jazz Front and Center at Pangea

Maria Corsaro knows a lot about jazz. She has taken a circuitous route to center stage though. She came to the world of jazz by marriage. Her first husband was a bass player who played with many of the greats including Chick Corea and Chuck Mangione. So Corsaro has a lot of great stories about fraternizing with legendary giants that at the time she didn't realize were a big deal. She always sang and put her heart into music, but music as a profession is a rather recent development in her life. A few years ago she began singing in her church choir. At the suggestion of her choir director, she started taking classes and attending cabaret workshops. It wasn't long until she debuted her own show first at the Laurie Beechman Theatre and then at Don't Tell Mama.

She has teamed up with the wonderful Sue Matsuki, who in her directing debut has fashioned a tight and clever new show that showcases Maria Corsaro's dark, rich voice in a series of songs that started life as jazz instrumentals and had lyrics added to them later, sometimes decades later. The show, YOU TAUGHT MY HEART TO SING, had its premiere last Saturday at Pangea. I was lucky enough to be in the audience. Corsaro has a lovely voice and chose a very ambitious set of tunes that for the most part show her off to great advantage. Besides being a fine jazz artist, Corsaro is a woman with a very big heart that she loves to share with her audience.

She had the great good fortune to have a trio led by Gregory Toroian. Together with David Silliman on drums and Skip Ward on bass, the three sidemen were positively on fire with creativity and musicianship. Toroian is a master at tweaking arrangements to find the warm spot in any singer's voice and then laying down a palette of beautiful sounds around them. All three men had wonderful solos throughout the fourteen numbers that made up Ms. Corsaro's program.

They opened with Dave Brubeck's legendary "Take Five," Corsaro entering through the audience. Director Sue Matsuki added some additional lyrics to introduce the members of the band in a very clever way. Gregory Toroian added his vocals to Corsaro's in Jimmy McHugh's "I'm in the Mood for Love. " She explored the very uptempo "Why Not?" which might have benefitted from a slightly slower tempo for the sake of lyrical clarity. I was particularly fond of a Bill Evans tune originally entitled "For Nanette" which was retitled "In April" when lyrics were added. It was a thoughtful and pensive love ballad that Corsaro mined for all its romantic potential. She followed this up with another Bill Evans tune "Turn Out the Stars" which she delivered in classic torch song fashion.

She paid tribute to her love of Brazilian music with Antònio Carlos Jobim's perennial "Zingaro." The lyric details images of a deteriorating marriage, which Ms. Corsaro related to her own first marriage. Skip Ward did beautiful work with a bass solo in this number. She turned to film music with a tune by Ennio Morricone from Cinema Paradiso, "That Day." The arrangement by Toroian was a peek into the psychology of the character with falling chromatic scales that made the whole number a jumble of emotions. She turned to a familiar tune, Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good," with a lyric written by Annie Ross at the tender age of 17.

She sang a song that she informed us was the only song David Foster wrote for a specific singer. The song was "Through the Fire" and the singer was the great Chaka Khan. She turned to a classic, "Answer Me, My Love" which she told us was originally based on a religious song with a German lyric. She gave us a beautiful torch song in "A Wish" and a great swing tune in " Walking Shoes." The coup de grace of her show was a performance to the Chick Corea masterpiece "Spain" with a lyric by Al Jarreau. The number was very exciting and the ban positively tore it up. She saved the title tune, McCoy Tyner and Sammy Cahn's "You Taught My Heart to Sing" for last. She dedicated it to the audience who she said has a direct line to her heart.

I enjoyed Maria Corsaro's show very much. But in some ways, it had all the classic signs of the first performance of a new show. It had very good structure but it didn't feel quite lived in yet. Corsaro is a fantastic singer with a beautiful instrument, but she has a tendency to not engage her audience in the eyes. She frequently sang to the entire room rather than choosing one person at a time to sing to. In a small room like Pangea intimacy is everything. But it felt more like opening night jitters. With a few performances under her belt, YOU TAUGHT MY HEART TO SING will be a smart, engaging, passionate, sexy evening of jazz and stories. I look forward to that.

YOU TAUGHT MY HEART TO SING returns to Pangea on Oct 16 and Dec 19 at 7 pm, and on Nov 7 at 2 pm. For reservations and more information, visit pangeanyc.com. To learn more about Maria Corsaro, go to mariacorsaro.com or follow her @mariacorsaro580 on Instagram or @maria_corsaro on Twitter.

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