Review: Jazz Singer VICKI BURNS Brightens a Sunday Afternoon at 92NY

I was glad to attend the The 92nd Street Y, New York’s recent free (yes, free!) concert by jazz performer Vicki Burns. She shares her surname with some other talented people. Like the late George Burns who also loved to sing, she makes me smile, but she’s not a comedian and doesn’t smoke cigars on stage. Like the Scottish poet Robert Burns, she knows her way around eloquent words. Like pianist-orchestrator-composer Ralph Burns, she’s a recording artist, among other things. Like the leader of the American Popular Song Society (formerly The Sheet Music Society) and The Singing Experience Workshop, Linda Amiel Burns, she teaches singers and champions songs and songwriters. But her sunny personality is nothing like the mean, misanthropic, miserly, mega-rich boss on TV’s animated “The Simpsons,” C. Montgomery Burns. I’m pretty sure she isn’t related to any of these people, but she sure does relate well to music and lyrics.

During the program on Sunday, November 3, her stage manner was confident and relaxed…well, actually, there was no stage as such, since the performance took place in the art gallery with no raised platform, but her musical choices were on a consistently high level. The set list featured numbers from her CD of a couple of years ago, which I’d enjoyed (Lotus Blossom Days), and experiencing them in a live concert was even better, witnessing her grace and command and the dazzling work of pianist Art Hirahara, who performed the same magic on the recording. It was the afternoon of the New York Marathon, so its participants and sideline supporters couldn’t also race to 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue to catch them, but the fleet fingers of skilled music-maker Hirahara raced across the keyboard, making his muscular, lengthy solos quite like marathons themselves. The only other musician was the fine bassist Steve Wood (not on the CD, where the bassist is Sam Bevan, arranger of most of the material, involving also several guest musicians for the recording). Mr. Wood was a sterling partner as soloist and anchoring support.

Vicki Burns’s voice is a warm, clear, rich one, especially strong and resonant in mid-range and low notes. She’s not a show-offy singer strutting her stuff with lots of big, fat notes. She doesn’t take easy paths, opting for some challenging musical architectures and tricky tempi. A true jazz performer, she nimbly navigates the leaps and bounds of the musical lines, crisply delivering the words or (often) scat-singing. As she pointed out to the attentive audience, some of the items in the set started out as jazz instrumentals, with lyrics added sometime later.  Some such melodies, not written with the voice in mind, can be especially rhythmic and complex, even odd, covering a wide range with daunting twists and turns aplenty.  She jumps in, fearlessly and/or diligently prepared. One highlight in this category was “Bittersweet” with Billy Strayhorn’s composition married to deft words by Roger Schore, describing love as “a string of promises tied in a knot of lies.” Her musical instincts are there, evidenced also by the fact that she writes music and lyrics herself. Two examples of that were included: “Love Spell” and “Siren Song.”

The singer and her two partners also scored and soared with three welcome mainstream items familiar to those less steeped in jazz. Two were by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, both from the first half of the 1940s, heard in the movies of that period: “This Time the Dream’s on Me” and “Out of This World”  And to end a satisfying songfest, an encore was requested and we got an oldie with a melody by Vincent Youmans that has a kind of interesting history, planned for different musicals in the 1920s, having different titles and two totally different lyrics (and more than a few pros contributing words for them), ending up as the plucky “Sometimes I’m Happy.” As a reviewer or just regular audience member, I’ve attended quite a few shows.  Sometimes I’m happy.  This was one of those times.

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See www.vickiburnsjazz.com to learn more about Vicki Burns

See www.92ny.org for more events at the venue

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