Madeleine Peyroux, Berklee Performance Center, November 1, 2006
By JON GARELICK | November 2, 2006
UNDECIDED: Is it technique or temperament that bedevils Peyroux? |
What’s the deal with Madeleine Peyroux? Touring behind her second hit album for Rounder, Half the Perfect World, she drew a good crowd to Berklee Performance Center last night and plied her unique brand of retro-contemporary: a Billie Holiday vocal delivery backed by a jazzy acoustic quintet of keyboards, guitar, bass, drums, and trumpet. She’s always been a reticent, uneasy performer who saves herself with a winning streak of self-depreciating humor and a compelling delivery, and at Berklee she introduced songs with wry, if practiced, patter, smiled at trumpeter Ron Miles after he played a particularly tasty solo, and told the crowd that a portion of their ticket price was going to the Boston charity Spare Change.But sometimes reticence turned to awkwardness. Peyroux is a real improvisor, and you can sense her feeling her way afresh into each song -- no two performances are alike. But the danger in making it up as you go along is that you can fall on your face. When Peyroux sang a slow ballad like Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” or Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” her phrasing fell apart -- there was a mile between syllables, and nothing connecting them. Sometimes her pitch was off, or her voice thinned out to unsupported strings of notes. Was it a failure of technique, or a failure of commitment, like she hadn’t made up her mind which note to hit or when?
She sang a Tom Waits tune and a couple by Leonard Cohen, and she sang her own, winning kiss-off “I’m All Right” (“It won’t be fun when you’re drinking for one”). Peyroux makes you lean in to listen to her, and sometimes the attention paid is worth it, especially the way she can hit a line in, say, Randy Newman's “I Think It's Going To Rain Today” -- “That tin can at my feet, I think I’ll kick it down the street/that’s the way to treat a friend.” And when she sang a less-played Billie Holiday number, “I Hear Music,” she completely reconfigured the melody and really sang out on the title phrase. For a change, like she meant it.
Related:
Madeleine Peyroux, Madeleine Peyroux | Bare Bones, Erin McKeown, More
- Madeleine Peyroux
It's a retro soundscape of acoustic guitars and bass, brushes playing jazz-shuffle rhythms, vintage keyboards, and Peyroux’s lazy Billie Holiday croon.
- Madeleine Peyroux | Bare Bones
You could say that Peyroux's third album for Rounder in five years is just more of the same.
- Erin McKeown
With Madeleine Peyroux and Norah Jones as ingrained in the cultural fabric as cockroaches in an Allston student flat, there isn’t much refreshing about yet another pop singer’s taking a whack at a few pages in the Great American Songbook.
- Sense in the sound
In Stephen Sondheim’s old formulation, opera is about music and musical theater is about words.
- Foreclosure frontline
The 72 Hours project, which I and others have been developing in the effort to help those fighting eviction in Boston, uses video projection to bring public awareness to the struggles of those undergoing foreclosure.
- St. Vincent
Clark’s soaring soprano is capable of hitting a Billie Holiday swoon just as easily as a sinister incantation.
- Rae of light
Touted as the second coming of Erykah Badu and Billie Holiday by the London press, Corinne Bailey Rae is a twentysomething singer whose luxurious, lazy phrasing and sweet tone are closer to Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues .
- Insides out
The everyday interaction with animals other than domestic pets has become a whimsical thing of the past. Which leaves those musicians who still write numbers with furry protagonists in a bit of a throwback situation, their songs almost instant period pieces.
- Turning up
Seven times during our 20-minute telephone conversation, Keren Ann Zeidel tells me some variation of “There are no rules.”
- Small-town gold
Like most 17-year-olds, Sonya Kitchell is struggling to figure out who she is.
- Basia Bulat | Heart Of My Own
Like a Laurel Canyon Billie Holiday or a pixilated Tracy Chapman, Bulat sports a voice rich with vibrato, hearty oomph, and dignified lonesomeness.
- Less
Topics:
Live Reviews
, Entertainment, Music, Leonard Cohen, More
, Entertainment, Music, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Jazz and Blues, Charlie Chaplin, Randy Newman, Billie Holiday, Madeleine Peyroux, Ron Miles, Less