BWW Reviews: KATHRYN ALLEN Holds Court On Jazz Singing Great Anita O'Day at The Cutting Room

When Kathryn Allyn, an opera singer now turned Great American Songbook chanteuse, took the stage at The Cutting Room last Tuesday night, she was all va-va-voom in a curve-hugging Valentine red dress. She joined her crackerjack band-musical director Frank Ponzio, bassist Tom Hubbard, and drummer Vito Leszack-to perform homage to her favorite jazz and big band singer Anita O'Day, whose heyday came between the World War II era through the early 1960s.

Throughout the show, Allyn delivered a wealth of personal and musical history about O'Day with an intelligence and conversational style that was like taking a master class at your bestie's kitchen table. Lesson number one: O'Day dug change. Allyn divulged she finds change to be comforting. To illustrate the point (or perhaps not), on her second number "Crazy He Calls Me," Allyn and the band changed the feel, tempo, and time signature throughout the song, including the piano solo. The ambitious arrangement may have kept the rhythm section on its toes, but Allyn seemed overly challenged, out of sync and a bit off key, before ultimately finding her footing and using her voice in a lovely controlled flutter during the final "craaaazy"s.

Now we interrupt this review to voice one of my major pet peeves about most of the cabaret clubs: Why is it so difficult to get good sound? Aren't these sound (mostly) men trained pros? The Cutting Room is a beautiful space; however, for the first few songs in this set, I found the mix to be off, with the vocal mic too hot and dry, making it sound like the band and the singer were in two different worlds. Give her a touch of reverb and let her blend with the boys! Eventually the sound got up to speed, but come on. Work it out in the sound check, please. Okay, rant over.

Lesson number two: Girl singers get Blueses. Billie's Blues. Ma Rainey's Blues. Blossom's Blues. You get the idea. Allyn and the band did "Anita's Blues," giving it a spacious hot-summer-day feel, the bass taking a beautiful solo with all the time in the world to bend the notes and then converse with the piano when it chimed in with it's low twangy comments. Allyn used a velvety vocal texture, as she leaned on the piano. Afterwards, she sighed, "Poor Anita." O'Day was once a ringer for Depression era dance marathons: Grueling, desperate contests.

Lesson number three: Anita O'Day's "superpower was variation." She considered herself a musician who used her voice, and, as Allyn schooled the audience, singers do not appreciate it when they are not considered part of the band. O'Day was adept at singing vocalese.

Lesson number three and a half: According to Wikipedia, Vocalese "is a style or musical genre of jazz singing wherein words are sung to melodies that were originally part of an all-instrumental composition or improvisation." An early pioneer of vocalese was apparently a guy named King Pleasure, which I am telling you because that is the most fabulous name I've heard recently, and I wanted to share. Okay, back to Lesson number three and a half . . .

Hoagy Carmichael's classic "Skylark" was originally performed as an instrumental piece. During Ponzio's demonstration the tinkling keys of the piano mingled pleasantly in my ears with the ice water clinking in the carafe at the next table. Johnny Mercer took a year to add the lyrics that he wrote based on his love affair with Judy Garland. Leszack brushed the snare and cymbals, creating a sandy windswept sound as Allyn sang, without pretension, a gentle, lovely version of the standard. She followed with a song that she admitted was never performed by O'Day. But it is a difficult piece and "I learned it," Allyn proudly declared, before proffering "Moody's Mood for Love," a vocalese set to an improvised jazz saxophone solo played by James Moody at a concert in Sweden one night when he was too drunk to remember what he was actually supposed to play. Allyn proceeded to slay this beast with virtuosic agility.

After a couple more tunes displaying the art of variation-including stealing her own grandmother's variations for the "universally appealing" song "Give Me The Simple Life" (Rube Bloom/Harry Ruby)-we were treated to a story told by Tom Hubbard ("our very own Garrison Keilor") about the good ol' days of "sex, drugs and big band," involving Gene Krupka, Mr. Green Jeans, Upper Michigan, and something about "shtupping Anita O'Day." Oy Vey! I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere, but I'm not fishing around for it.

Allyn rounded out the evening with a vulnerable Johnny Green/Edward Heyman ballad "I Cover the Waterfront" and finally O'Day's arrangement of Green and Heyman's "Body and Soul," which had a little bounce and an ever-so-slight country-western inflection. Or maybe that was just Allyn's Kansas-by-way-of-Texas-roots showing through? (See video above of Allyn singing "Body and Soul" at the West End Lounge last April.)

There was something transporting about the evening-although the crowd was a bit thin for the big room--despite Allyn's periodic struggle to stay on pitch, and her cool demeanor. Allyn's self-possession lacked drama, yet she grew on me, and magnetized me into a world of musicianship and subtle but deep passion. Lessons learned.

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