[JPL] A Gutbucket Full of Loss and Torchy Dreams

[Steve Schwartz]

Rebecca Parris' NY gig reviewed.
She's one of our most favorite singers from Boston:

November 23, 2007
Music Review | Rebecca Parris
A Gutbucket Full of Loss and Torchy Dreams
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

If Rebecca Parris, the Boston jazz singer who is playing a rare New York
engagement at Birdland, were a blues-rock artist, she would belong to the
school of gutbucket mamas whose delivery is the vocal equivalent of wielding
an ax. Her voice, a rich contralto with a baritone resonance, is so
commanding that when a song¹s attitude is combative, she can scare you. But
when the mood is playful, she can also enfold you in a musical bear hug.

That rawness, combined with sophisticated jazz technique that embraces some
rough scat improvisation, and the support of an excellent pianist (Brad
Hatfield), makes for a style that lends much of what she sings a cosmic
dimension.

In the first of her two sets on Wednesday evening sadness outweighed joy, as
Ms. Parris and her trio (Dean Johnson on bass and Matt Gordy on drums, in
addition with to Mr. Hatfield) eviscerated three classic torch songs.
Prefaced with Ms. Parris¹s dedication, ³For you, daddy,² Rodgers and Hart¹s
lovelorn lament ³He Was Too Good to Me² was offered in memory of her father.
The slowest version I¹ve ever heard, it became a moving jazz dirge that
turned on the phrase, ³He¹d never say go away now.² The devotion of a loving
parent, she implied, is the only true love you can count on.

Introducing ³You Don¹t Know What Love Is,² Ms. Parris warned that it was
angry and bitter and made good on those words. If her anger wasn¹t explosive
and her bitterness not corrosive, she found even more shades of emotion in
the song than Billie Holiday did in her classic rendition on the ³Lady in
Satin² album.

³Lush Life,² the third torch classic, was also taken to the limit in an
interpretation that emphasized the despairing self-recognition at the song¹s
end. In her version the narrator makes a conscious decision to self-destruct
and ³rot with the rest of those whose lives are lonely too.²

Disappointment and loss were not the only dishes on the menu. There was a
joyful ³Street of Dreams,² and a witty ³Darn That Dream.² Most revealing was
a rendition of the old Doris Day hit ³It¹s Magic,² in which Ms. Parris¹s
stressing of the words ³the magic is my love for you² transformed a girlish
swoon of enchantment into the narrator¹s grown-up awareness that she is
creating her own happiness.

Rebecca Parris is at Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton, through
tomorrow; (212) 581-3080, birdlandjazz.com.