Jane MonheitCatalina Bar & Grill - Los AngelesJune 9, 2007 Inner Child Meets Uptown Diva . . . and They SwingJane Monheit in concert is a treat. She whisked onto the small stage at L.A.’s Catalina Bar & Grill and, with no further ado, began to sing. Part little girl, part grown young woman, part jazz diva, she’s not the sort of singer to strut into a room and take command of the space through her sheer presence. Though the diva part tends to take over whenever wind blows through her pipes, the little girl (or as she likes to say, her “inner nine-year-old boy”), only slightly tempered by the young woman, eternally threatens to bubble through. Fans of her CDs know the subtle lightning-strike voice, pliant like a divining rod, husky like a cello, clear and bright like polished silver when it steps uptown. Not a whit of that is lost in concert; Monheit delivers the goods. Even better: if one might gently criticize her last album for being too polished, too perfect a sound, her live performance breathes with an easy, improvisation which never comes across as forced or rote. Monheit was with her regular band: pianist Michael Kanan, guitarist Miles Okazaki, Ari Ambrose on tenor sax, Neil Miner on bass, and her husband Rick Montalbano on drums. These guys are excellent musicians, and their comfort level in playing together was evident. When simply accompanying, they added unobtrusive rhythm, spice and punctuation to Monheit’s vocals; on solos they took off and flew, and seemed to get off on each other’s virtuosity, which was allowed a much more generous display than on the albums. Closing in on her 30th birthday, Monheit clearly got a kick out of being young. Dressed in a diaphanous knee-length Greek gown, hair in a ponytail with large gold-hoop earrings, she displayed a refreshing vivacity which never took itself too seriously. Towards the end of her third number, “Só Tinha de Ser Com Você,” which featured an outstanding sax solo from Ambrose, they began a gradual fade, each measure cutting the volume of the last by half, and just as this threatened to drag on into infinity—though nobody seemed to mind—she cut in and woke us up: “We will literally fade this puppy all night!” Later, when Montalbano had to leave the stage for a moment between numbers, Monheit razzed him with a wicked smile, “Ricky has business in the dressing room . . . ,” then turned around and laughed at herself, “My inner nine-year-old boy is showing.” Out of the baker’s dozen she played before her encore, she included several from her latest album, Surrender. She was eminently comfortable working in the Brazilian rhythms she’s been exploring, such as “Só Tinha,” or the bossa-flavored version of Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed,” which she claims Michael Okazaki’s arrangement “Brazilified” (she says Webster’s is entering the word into their next edition, and she’ll get full credit). Most fun were the upbeat renditions of “I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me,” which the band turned into a full blown groovin’ little jazz number that blew the duet she did with Michael Bublé on her last album out of the water, and their completely swinging rendition of “Twisted,” from her first album, Never Never Land. But the showstopper, perhaps, was the barebones version of Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie,” a simple duet with Kanan on the keys during which you could hear a pin drop as the audience held a collective breath. Later, after being cheered back on stage for an encore with warm, enthusiastic applause, she said to the audience, “You guys want to come and live at my house and just do that every morning when I wake up?” Part show-woman, part genuine chanteuse, Monheit seems to thoroughly enjoy what she’s doing on stage. I, for one, would like to see some more of this simplicity and freshness, this spontaneous sense of jamming with her band for the pure pleasure of it, infect her next album (see accompanying review). If I had a vote, I’d say lock her and her band in a recording studio for a week and let them mess around to their hearts’ content. Then let a minimalist producer sift through the dross and give us the gold. Or maybe Monheit should just lug a sixteen-track recorder around to all of her live sessions and see what shakes loose, because if what I saw at the Catalina is any indication, these are the true gems.
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