As if it weren’t enough doing eight Fionas a week in Shrek on Broadway, Sutton Foster has squeezed in two Monday evenings this month at Feinstein’s at the Regency. I missed her February performance in Lincoln Center’s “American Songbook” series, so I made it over to Feinstein’s for the first of these, which took place on April 6 and spotlights songs from Foster’s CD released in February on Ghostlight Records. A second date follows on April 20.
If one of the goals of an evening of cabaret-style songs is to get a more personal view of a singing artist, the picture that emerged from the between-songs banter was of a sweet ingénue with a steely interior: an intensely ambitious and intelligent performing animal who can never get enough of being onstage. On a chilly evening, the 34-year-old Foster flounced onstage in a sleeveless yellow sundress, as if willing the stubbornly slow spring into the room. Yellow seemed like the right color choice for her sunny brand of charm, as she chatted about her childhood in Georgia and played a recorded excerpt of her assertive audio Valentine’s Day message to a childhood sweetheart, saved from a cassette tape she made when she was ten. read more
Earlier this December, I took the number 1 subway up to 125th Street to catch a daytime performance by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at the Apollo Theater http://www.apollotheater.org/ for schoolchildren. The program, “What is American Music? NYC: The Great Migration and Ellis Island,” focused on twentieth-century migration to the United states, through the music of Aaron Copland (Fanfare for the Common Man), Dvorak (the “New World” Symphony), Bohuslav Martinu (“Charleston” from La Revue de Cuisine, Suite for Orchestra), William Grant Still (Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American”), Scott Joplin (“The Entertainer”), and George Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue). Conductor Damon Gupton (who has also worked as an actor) led the orchestra, and the young Brooklyn pianist Simone Dinnerstein was the soloist in the Gershwin.
Also attracting notice in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was Romie de Guise-Langlois, a young clarinetist playing up a storm in the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, who came to New York a year and a half ago from her home city of Montreal to become a Fellow in The Academy, a joint program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. read more
This week, SundayArts looked at Lincoln Center’s Out-of-Doors, which on Sunday 24 celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Roots of American Music series with a bill that’s nothing short of killer. “Roots music,” just like “world music,” has become a catch-all term that often means more in the marketing realm than in musical or aesthetic ones, so the bill in question is particularly exciting because it makes us reconsider what exactly we mean by “roots”: The bill is shared by Charlie Haden Family and Friends, starring the famous jazz bassist, Patti Smith, the Knitters, featuring John Doe, Exene Cervenka and DJ Bonebrake, and the Music Makers Blues Revue. All of them draw inspiration from the past, but then they put it through their personal musical food processors, and come up with music that’s everything but frozen in amber. read more
It’s hard to find a more fitting act to open Lincoln Center’s annual Midnight Summer Swing series than Nellie McKay. Now, Lincoln Center isn’t new territory for McKay, who appeared in that institution’s Great American Songbook in March 2005, but the interesting development this time around is that she’ll be fronting a band called the Aristocrats, featuring musicians pulled from the Swingin’ Hot Shots. It may look like an idiosyncratic move for a singer-songwriter who usually backs herself on the piano live, but then McKay specializes in odd moves. And even when they don’t quite pan out, the results are never boring. Let’s not shy away from hyperbole here: McKay is possibly the most interesting artist to emerge out of New York in the past decade. read more
What’s the opposite of a golden age? Whatever it’s called, it’s the age we’re living in when it comes to soundtracks—particularly from Hollywood movies. Trying to find a score that makes for decent home listening shorn of its accompanying images is a daunting task these days. Roughly speaking, your choices are either collections of pop songs (more or less inspired, cf. Juno) or formulaic scores that (1) tend to repeat a couple of themes ad nauseam and (2) are utterly predictable in their arrangements and melodic approaches. An ongoing film series at the Museum of Modern Art, “Jazz Score,” not only puts this dire situation in perspective, but shows us the birth of a specifically American approach to scoring. read more
The word “ethereal” is perhaps the adjective that comes to mind quickest when describing the voice of Maude Maggart, the 32-year-old who is a fast-rising singer of the Great American Songbook. But however you choose to characterize it, it’s the kind of voice that has critics from the New York Times to Time Out New York struggling to convey its particular beauty in words. From April 1 through May, she performs her latest cabaret show, “Speaking of Dreams,” in the Oak Room at the Algonquin.
Maggart’s renditions of 1920s-era songs like “Love for Sale” or “Love Me or Leave Me” uncannily evoke an earlier time, with their melancholy, yearning high notes, laced with a wispy, fast vibrato that makes her voice recognizable in an instant. She takes many standards at slower tempos—even “Happy Days Are Here Again,” recorded on her 2005 CD Look for the Silver Lining, often taken at march-like clip, is taken leisurely, as if from the wistful perspective of someone already looking back on happy days. Posted after the jump, you can hear her singing “Love Me or Leave Me” with John Boswell on piano from Look For The Silver Lining.
Maggart is the granddaughter of Millicent Greene, who performed in George White’s “Scandals” in the 1920s, and she is the daughter of musical theater performers Brandon Maggart and Diane McAfee. Her little sister is the singer/songwriter Fiona Apple. Just before one of her shows at the Oak Room, I spoke with Maggart about why she loves cabaret, her career, and her family.
On how she got started as a cabaret singer: I first heard Andrea Marcovicci when I was 16. My dad took me to the Gardenia [in California]. My life changed. read more
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