CONCERT REVIEW
Waiting for Betty Carter
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Nov. 15, 1997) -- Not the terrible road conditions left by the season's first snowstorm nor the 45-minute delay before she appeared on stage could dampen the sellout crowd's enthusiasm at Chapin Hall on Friday night. Once Betty Carter opened her mouth and unleashed her singular style of jazz vocals, the audience was hers for the next 90 minutes of her grand, inspiring performance.
In Carter's third appearance at Williams College -- her first in nearly a decade -- the singer exhibited her fully ripe and mature art form, highly stylized and controlled while at the same time relying on spontaneity, emotion and an in-the-pocket groove.
Backed by her trio of Bruce Flowers on piano, Neil Cayne on bass and Eric Harland on drums, Carter was a looser but no less dynamic presence than she was when last seen in the Berkshires, at the 1996 Tanglewood Jazz Festival.
She kicked off her program with Jule Styne's "This Time," but of course made it entirely her own with her impossibly elastic phrasing and trombone-like vocal stretches and slides. On this as on subsequent tunes, Carter defied the laws of time or physics, delaying her lines seemingly past the point of no return, where they were bound to come crashing up against her trio's steady tempo. Somehow, always, everyone wound up exactly where Carter wanted them to be, which is only part of Carter's art as an illusionist.
"Jazz singing" is often erroneously thought to be synonymous with something called "scat singing," whereby a vocalist stops singing lyrics and imitates the sounds of a musical instrument. Carter's vocals bely the simplicity of mere "scat." There is virtually no differentiation between her singing lyrics and her singing "sound." She is as much a trombone or trumpet when she sings words as she is when she sings wordless vocals, which she invests with as much meaning as she does her lyric-singing.
At the same time, few singers pay as much care to the lyrics -- both their sound and their meaning -- as Carter, who uses the lyrics as much or even more than she uses the written notes to convey emotion. It is often said of great jazz musicians that they tell stories through their playing. If that is at times a hard concept to grasp with an instrumentalist, Carter makes it explicit. The words are as much her text as the melody notes are to a player. What she does with those words, as much or more than the composer's melody, is what makes Carter the singular artist she is.
Carter knows that performance is theater, and as much as her musicianship relies on artistic integrity, that doesn't come at the expense of the visual aspect of her show. Costumed in a loose, belted black dress with a dangerously plunging neckline, over which she wore a blue velvet robe, Carter carried herself with the precision of a Shakespearean actor. Even the simple act of grabbing the microphone cord with one hand was turned into a dramatic gesture, timed just right to fit in with the song's meaning and rhythm.
Carter's trio of young players did a great job of laying down the canvas on top of which Carter painted her impressionistic pictures. The concert was enlivened at one point by what has now become a de rigueur struggle between bandleader and musician, as Carter took Flowers to task for rushing a figure. "On the job training," she clued in the audience, before snapping at Flowers, "You gonna wait for me this time?"
He did.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Nov. 17, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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