Music Review: Jane Scheckter - Easy to Remember

Veteran cabaret jazz singer Jane Scheckter's fourth album, Easy to Remember, offers a nice mix of classics and less well known songs from that proverbial Great American Songbook sung with the artistry of a real pro. The essence of a great jazz singer is the ability to take a song and make it your own—bend a note here, work out some innovative phrasing, and play with the tonality and the rhythm. Scheckter knows her business. Well known or obscure, she takes these songs and puts her stamp on them.

Take her version of the Rogers and Hart classic "Where or When." First, she begins with the verse—a verse I doubt many have heard before, and when she gets to the heart of the tune she turns in a truly exciting reading of the familiar lyric. The addition of some nice work on the harmonica from Gil Chimes helps make this old favorite new again.

Her performances of other gems like Ray Noble's "I Hadn't Anyone 'Til You" and Rogers and Hart's "Easy to Remember" are equally original. In the first, she opens singing with guitar all-star Bucky Pizzarelli, and then they are joined by a swinging ensemble including the coronet of Warren Vaché, the saxophone of Harry Allen, and the members of her trio: pianist Tedd Firth, bassist Jay Leonhart, and drummer Peter Grant. She works with the ensemble on "Easy to Remember" too, and there is some sweet sax accompaniment from Allen. Again, these are really nice readings of old favorites.

The set opens with a stylish jazz take on Irving Berlin's "The Best Thing for You." She brings it home with spirit. Her vocal on the beautiful "I'm Glad There is You" echoes with quiet sincerity. Other and perhaps less well known standards like "How Little We Know," "I Have the Feeling I've Been Here Before," and "I Was a Little Too Lonely" give Scheckter the opportunity to showcase them for a wider audience. The same is true for even lesser known tunes like Harold Rome's "Along With Me" and Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen's "Accidents Will Happen." What she does with them makes you wonder why they haven't found a wider audience.

http://blogcritics.org/music/article/music-review-jane-scheckter-easy-to/

Her Eyes Wide Open, Her Feet on the Ground

Jane Scheckter, a singer with both feet on the ground, goes back to the source in her new cabaret act, “Play a Simple Melody: A Tribute to Irving Berlin,” at the Metropolitan Room. For a performer who over four decades has traveled many show-business byways (associations with Bette Midler and Barry Manilow, a stint in an Andrews Sisters-like female trio named Tuxedo Junction), that means both drawing from the well of the quintessential American songwriter of the pre-rock era and asserting herself as a no-frills pop-jazz swinger with her eyes wide open.

With blunt emphatic phrasing, a matter-of-fact attitude and a bright but coarsened voice that doesn’t try to be pretty, Ms. Scheckter is no simpering romantic, although she confessed during Tuesday’s opening-night show to a lingering “delusional” crush on Tony Perkins. Accompanied by a solid pop-jazz trio — Tedd Firth on piano, Tom Hubbard on bass and Peter Grant on drums — she delivered brisk renditions of 20 Berlin standards strung together with mechanical patter that offered few fresh insights. Several interpretations of standards went against the conventional grain. Singing a rhythmically fortified “I Got Lost in His Arms,” a song that Barbara Cook, Stacey Kent and Victoria Clark all treat as a fairy-tale ending of sweet surrender, Ms. Scheckter made it clear that she was not about to let her guard down. Two songs associated with Fred Astaire — “Cheek to Cheek” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” — instead of gliding on a polished dance floor, remained conspicuously earthbound.

Ms. Scheckter’s resistance to pop sentimentality paid off in her plainspoken renditions of two classic Berlin waltzes, “Remember” and “What’ll I Do?,” in which her absence of vocal sweetness called attention to simple heartfelt lyrics, which speak for themselves. But the show was mostly about swinging along with one of the stronger cabaret trios. Especially when Ms. Scheckter leaned into a witty, happy-go-luck “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket,” the beat was on.
Jane Scheckter performs through Sept. 13 at the Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street, Manhattan
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/arts/music/03scheckter.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss