• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Portland Jazz, Take Two: Bridgewater, Frishberg, Kilgore

February 24, 2012 by Doug Ramsey

More than two decades ago in Paris, Dee Dee Bridgewater began to make Billie Holiday’s music and mystique a part of herself. In the years since, she has expanded, refined and intensified her Holiday role while firmly establishing her own persona. Bridgewater’s tribute to Lady Day filled the Newmark Theater in downtown Portland last night. She demonstrated to the Portland Jazz Fesival audience that she is capable of an uncanny Holiday impression. She briefly employed it to comic effect as a way of emphasizing that imitation is not the point of her Holiday vehicle; music is.

Bridgewater’s musical skills went hand in hand with her ability as a superb actress. She used pieces from Holiday’s repertoire as points of departure to create distinctive jazz interpretations. The songs—well more than a dozen—included “Them There Eyes” taken fast and so laced with energy that it skirted the edge of mania; an amusing revival of Holiday’s first recording with Benny Goodman, “My Mother’s Son In Law,” and a “Strange Fruit” whose message she delivered with anguish so profound that it that sent a chill through the crowd. Pointedly, the house announcer introduced the evening as a performance by the Dee Dee Bridgewater Quintet. The group label is apt. She is the lead instrument in the band, which has all the interaction of a finely attuned bop group, with the sidemen enlisted in just enough schtick to help warrant calling the event a show. Bridgewater is pictured here with bassist Kenny Davis, whom she featured on several pieces, as she did tenor saxophonist Jimmy Greene, drummer Kenny Phelps and her long time musical director, pianist Edsel Gomez. They all soloed extensively and well

For all her acting, which is natural and unforced, the primary impression Bridgewater creates is of a jazz vocalist with unerring time and intonation who gets to the heart of a song. Following a standing ovation, she returned to the stage to sing a non-Holiday song, “Amazing Grace,” alone. On the final chorus, she invited the audience to sing along, but she gave it so much power and feeling that few had the temerity to join in.

A sizeable number of concertgoers circled down the winding stairway of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts to the Art Bar. The space has a bar, a restaurant and a three-story ceiling crowned with a sculptured dome that is itself a work of art. There, two hometown favorites who are also international successes appeared in one of their collaborations. For their duo gigs, it is Dave Frishberg’s policy to serve only as pianist with Rebecca Kilgore, not as a singer of his own famous songs. During the course of their two long, satisfying sets, someone on the margins of the room called for “Peel Me a Grape.” “Don’t know it,” Kilgore said. Frishberg gazed at the ceiling.

She knew plenty of other songs, many of them from albums the pair have made together. Someone—I think it was I—commented that people who attended the upstairs and the downstairs events had the pleasure of hearing in one evening two jazz vocalists who sing all but unfailingly in tune. At one point there was a missed harmonic signal. Kilgore veered slightly, but her sonar immediately locked her back onto the path. The repertoire included a few songs from Why Fight The Feeling, their album of Frank Loesser songs, among them “The Lady’s in Love With You” and “Can”t Get Out of This Mood,” the latter sung with languor that Kilgore seems to employ more frequently these days in her ballads. However, she has lost none of the sunny feeling she brings to up-tempo pieces. A spontaneous medley of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” was saturated with it.

Frishberg is often thought of as a pianist primarily influenced by stride and traditional players, but the internal rhythms he creates in his solos can hint at bebop and sometimes enter it outright. That was true in his solo last night on “Lover Come Back to Me” and in the following piece, with a complex chorus he built on Artie Shaw’s “Moon Ray.” In “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” he briefly led Kilgore into tango territory. They took “There’s No Business Like Show Business” slow, giving it a plaintive quality that probably never occurred to Ethel Merman. Finally, Kilgore and Frishberg performed “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” giving a nice Billiie Holiday symmetry to the evening that had begun hours before in the Newmark.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. Red Sullivan says

    February 25, 2012 at 10:57 pm

    Suzannah McCorkle recorded an amazingly SLOW, slow, slow reading of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” that made such an huge impression on me that it seems it’s now the only way, the real essence and feeling intended for the song… Maybe a song by irving Berlin can be treated in such a manner that new depths can be found, can emerge… (but I have no idea if all that would have a surprise to the composer, for example.? Maybe so?).

    For instance, it surprises me that “Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” should be accorded a “sunny” outcome or performance (even if allowing I’ve heard such before) – seems strange given the adult nature of the lyric, right? Yet these songs are the ones, these are the songs that genuinely withstand such examination and yield deep results when looked at seriously.

    I think it’s wonderful when a singer of the authority of a Rebecca Kilgore (and there aren’t many) can convincingly honour the endless depth of such songs. Because she’s right – these meanings ARE there, in the literature and text of the material.

    Rock critics and people who dig the Beatles sometimes think that these songs come from “A more innocent age.” Imagine! (I mean, imagine such a conceit, such hubris). Anyway, no date attaches to this repertoire: It’s the music of the future.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in