Karrin Allyson at the Dakota

When: Tuesday, June 23 • Where: Dakota • Who: Karrin Allyson, voice and piano; Rod Fleeman, guitar; Larry Kohut, bass

"A performance by vocalist and pianist Karrin Allyson is less a concert, more an exchange of confidences...." Click here to go to MinnPost for the rest of the review. No photos there.

Last night's late show set list:
1 "I've Got the Blues" (Wes Montgomery)
2 "Desafinado" (Jobim)
3 "Everybody's Crying Mercy" (Mose Allison)
4 (something in Portuguese)
5 "Estrada Do Sol" (Jobim; Karrin sung this one for her mom, who as always was in the house)
6 "Sweet Home Cookin' Man"
7 "Night and Day" (fellow Karrin fan Bevyn Marvy thinks this should be her theme song, she does it so well)
8 "Moanin'" (Bobby Timmons, lyrics by Jon Hendricks; this was pianist Laura Caviani's arrangement, and she was there to play it; see the photo below)
9 "Nancy with the Laughing Face" (by Jimmy van Heusen, lyrics by Phil Silvers; Laura at the piano)
10 "Surrender the Soul" (Vinicius de Moraes)
11 "Give It Up or Let Me Go" (Bonnie Raitt)
12 Encore: "Guilty" (Randy Newman)

How eclectic is that? She looked and sounded beautiful. And her minimalist band--just Fleeman on guitar, Kohut on bass, occasionally Karrin on piano (and, in the photo below, her friend Laura Caviani sitting in)--was a perfect setting for a deeply personal evening of music.


Photos by John Whiting.

Judi Donaghy's Tribute to the Vocal Legends of Swing

When: 6/10/08
Where: The Commodore
Who: Judi Donaghy (vocals), Doug Haining (saxophone), Rick Carlson (piano), Steve Pikal (bass), Dick Bortolussi (drums)

Donaghy's performance is part of the Schubert Club's Summer Song Festival, a week-long series of mostly classical evening performances. Billed as "Our Jazz Connection!" this night is the only one devoted to jazz. Appropriately, the event is held at the Commodore Hotel in St. Paul, former hangout and home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, voice of the Jazz Age.

It's an unusual venue—a small ballroom with a stage in one corner and multiple photographic challenges: striped wallpaper, a big window letting in natural light, a wall around the stage, foliage behind the wall, mirrors. But the sound is good and it's a sold-out crowd.



New Schubert Club director Kathleen van Bergen makes introductions, then Laura Caviani tells us about the band and what we'll hear.

This is the first time I've heard Donaghy sing. And she can really sing. Her bio on the McNally Smith College of Music Web site (she heads the voice department there) lists her areas of expertise: opera, musical theater, jazz, folk, country, gospel, pop, and R&B. She also writes songs, and she performs with Bobby McFerrin's Voicestra. I've been madly in love with McFerrin since I first heard him sing The Wizard of Oz—the whole movie—in just eight brilliant, manic minutes. If you have three minutes and forty-five seconds, listen to Kurt Andersen's interview of McFerrin (with Oz snippets).

Tonight Donaghy is singing songs recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Joe Williams. "I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me," "You Go to My Head." The band looks as if it has stepped out of the 1940s, and the venue contributes to the overall Wayback Machine feel of the event.

Maryann Sullivan, host of Minnesota Public Radio's "The Jazz Connection" (and Haining's wife) is here; so is singer Maud Hixson (who's married to Carlson), who came with singer Rhonda Laurie. One thing that makes this community such a strong place for jazz is the support musicians give to each other.



I like Donaghy's version of Joe Williams's "Every Day I Have the Blues" very much. She has a big voice, she knows what to do with it, and she really swings. All around me, feet are tapping and heads are bobbing, even in a crowd one could describe as staid without overstating. (It is, after all, the Schubert Club.)

Donaghy's band is smooth and playful. Carlson tosses off quotes, Pikal grabs and slaps his bass, Haining wails, Bortolussi smiles. Donaghy sings "Please Send Me Someone to Love," a song she clearly enjoys and gives 110 percent. Then "Sentimental Star," a song she cowrote with Carlson. She introduces it as "an audition song...the first jazz song I ever wrote...thankfully it was fixed by Rick Carlson and I got the job." You can hear it on Sing or Swing, a CD she recorded with the Wolverines.

Donaghy credits the Wolverines for the jazz part of her career. "I was never all that interested in jazz as a youngster," she tells us. "I didn't grow up in the jazz world. The first jazz group I sang with—in Lincoln, Nebraska—was not very exciting. Then after living in Minneapolis for a few years, I stumbled on a concert with the Wolverines Big Band and [vocalist] Shirley Witherspoon. My jaw dropped and I said to myself, 'I have to sing this kind of music.' I started going to hear the Wolverines and just listened, and then I started singing. Now I can't get enough of it and I want to sing swing all the time."

I'm surprised when Donaghy announces a break. It's 8:30, the show started at 7, and I'm hungry. Also plenty satisfied with what I've heard. So we go to W.A. Frost and sit on the best restaurant patio in the Twin Cities, drinking martinis and eating crab cakes and coconut risotto.

Monk's Birthday, with Cake

Artists' Quarter, 10/10/07: Each year, pianist and composer Laura Caviani celebrates Thelonious Monk's birthday (and the day before her own birthday) with an evening of Monk's music at the AQ. This year, she was joined by Adam Linz on bass and Phil Hey on drums. (Adam leaves soon for three weeks of sold-out performances in France and Germany with Fat Kid Wednesdays.) Laura teaches when she performs, which I appreciate, letting us know what she is playing and telling us a little about each selection. ("San Francisco Holiday" was originally called "Worry Later" because whenever Monk was asked its name, he'd say, "I'll worry about that later.") The trio gave us inventive arrangements of already inventive tunes. How can you make "Bemsha Swing" even more intricate? By playing the melody with the right hand, and also with the left hand...a half-beat or so behind, as Laura does, making me wonder if somewhere along the way she had the halves of her brain surgically separated.

If listening to Monk is "difficult," as some have said, you couldn't tell from the crowd of smiling people nodding their heads and tapping their feet. Some were musicians and teachers (in the house: Eric Kamau Gravatt, who will perform at the AQ with his band Source Code on Friday and Saturday; Matthew McCright, an instructor in piano at Carleton College, where Laura also teaches; vocalist Lucia Newell). The two generous sets included "I Mean You," "In Walked Bud," "Epistrophy," "Monk's Dream," "Ask Me Now," "Bright Mississippi," "Rhythm-a-ning," "Coming on the Hudson," "Bemsha Swing," "Let's Call This," "Sweet and Lovely" (during Adam's bass solo, you could hear him sing "Sweet...and...lovely...."), and the finale, "Blue Monk." Between sets, cake was served; talking got louder around the bar during the second set, probably due to the sugar rush.

I've always thought that Monk's music had a lot of math in it, but beautiful math--less about calculations and memorizing multiplication tables, more about planetary orbits and the geometry of snowflakes. I could never play it in a million years, but I can enjoy it when it's played as well as it was last night. As the couple sitting behind me said, "What a great way to spend a Wednesday evening!" "And for just six bucks!"

Photo by John Whiting.