Winter 2000
Bev Kelly: In Person
Fantasy/Riverside (OJCCD-1019-2), US, 1999
Reviewed by Bill Reed;
Los Angeles, California
Right down to the final glottal ululation, so closely does this acolyte suggest her sonic role model, Anita O'Day, that Bev Kelly In Person might as well have been reissued as "Anitamania: Not the Real Thing But an Incredible Simulation." And unlike Moody Marilyn Moore, who had her brief moment in 1957 with a not-very-good attempt to evoke Lady Day, one gets the feeling that Kelly just might sound this way roused out of a deep sleep. The resemblance in timbre to O'Day is even apparent during her between-song patter on this affair, recorded live at the Coffee Gallery in San Francisco on October 14, 1960.
The only noticeable differences between the two vocalists are that Kelly has a slightly higher voice; and that O'Day plays with the beat via techniques of vowel extension and scat, while Kelly tends to add, subtract and displace words. And another thing: After venturing off on some Handelian roulade of atonal overkill, O'Day usually lands back on her feet, while Kelly oftentimes stumbles badly. On Just Friends, for example, Kelly has the inane taste to fill up a missing beat by interpolating ain't lovers no more. Gak! And her It Never Entered My Mind can't help but evoke Dorothy Loudon's wounding send-up of the "take no prisoners" school of jazz-singing included on her unforgivably out-of-print At the Blue Note.
The 1950s were an era of unbridled warfare between the mannered chicks versus the straight-ahead swingers, with reviewers and fans solidly lined up on opposite sides of the Jesuitical question of singers who "took liberties" with composers' and lyricists' intentions. Richard Rodgers was so rigid regarding singers adhering to the song-as-written, it's rumored he even disliked some of Sinatra's interpretations of his works. He also originally balked at Peggy Lee's mildly radical 1952 reworking of his "little waltz," Lover.
The jazz-friendly composer Alec Wilder also had problems with singers who threw the melody up into the air. If, like Rodgers and Wilder, you crave a songbird who adheres to the printed staff, then the hipper-than-thou Kelly is definitely not your cup of musical tea.
In a giddy kind of way, I like Bev Kelly. You know how it is sometimes, you want to go out for Thai food but end up getting Chinese because that restaurant is close-by. Similarly, if you're in an O'Day mood but you're temporarily burned out on her, perhaps Bev Kelly In Person might be just the album for which you've been searching. Then again…
Chicago, the proving grounds for the likes of O'Day, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Audrey Morris, Lurlean Hunter, Lucy Reed, and many others, was, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Cradle of Modern Jazz Singing. Kelly is of this "school." After studying piano and voice at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, she became a mainstay - first with the Pat Moran Quartet and then solo - of such fabled Second City locales as Mr. Kelly's and the Cloister Inn. The last we heard of her, in the mid-1980s, she was tuned into the music of the spheres, working southern California in a style that made her 1960 self sound positively tame by comparison.
Inside most of the numbers here, there's a well thought-out, logical reinterpretation just dying to get out. But as my mother used to complain about comedian Sid Caesar (unfairly, I think), Kelly "just doesn't know when to quit." Not for the faint of heart is this album as she careens her way through a Great American Songbook (GAS) repertoire that also includes Night and Day, Falling in Love with Love, This Is Always, and My Funny Valentine. Of Betty Carter, the New Yorker's Whitney Balliett wrote perhaps the ultimate defense of GAS deconstruction: "At first hearing, her choice of notes seems quirky. But the original melodic shape she draws out of her songs demands 'wrong' notes, and she chooses them with daring and intelligence." Kelly finds hers with a toss of the dice. Sometimes seven comes up, most times not.
And that's the way it goes throughout the 39:27 running time of this reissue of the second of Kelly's two Riverside albums. Kelly's Love Locked Out (1960) has also been put back in print to thrill and amaze you with her vowels, long enough to inspire new diacritical marks, intonation from somewhere south of downtown India, and attitudinizing that brings new meaning to the word "presh." Lovers of the caution-to-the-wind school of singing will be amused, while GAS purists will be left slack-jawed and aghast.
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Tracks
1. Long Ago and Far Away (Kern, Gershwin)
2. Then I'll Be Tired of You (Harburg, Schwartz)
3. My Foolish Heart (Young, Washington)
4. Night and Day (Porter)
5. It Never Entered My Mind (Rodgers, Hart)
6. Just Friends (Lewis, Kleener)
7. Body and Soul (Heyman, Sour, Green)
8. Love Letters (Young, Heyman)
9. This Is Always (Warren, Gordon)
10. Falling in Love with Love (Rodgers, Hart)
11. My Funny Valentine (Rodgers, Hart)
Bev Kelly (vocals), Pony Poindexter (alto sax), Flip Nunez (piano), Johnny
Allen (bass), Tony Johnson (drums)
Recorded live at the Coffee Gallery, San Francisco, October 14, 1960
Produced by Orrin Keepnews
