James Carter
Though Billie Holiday's 90th birthday is more than a month away, saxophonist James Carter arrived at the Kennedy Center KC Jazz Club bearing gifts Saturday night. Inspired by his 2003 tribute CD, "Gardenias for Lady Day," the debonair reedman saluted the late singer with a program that tapped into her songbook and soulfulness.
Carter isn't one to sublimate his own personality, though. He opened with a rhythmically spry take on "Nice Work if You Can Get It," the equivalent of a soft-shoe dance for soprano sax and percussion. Featuring drummer Leonard King, it offered a lean, nimble and harmonically daring prelude to a performance featuring vintage tunes and a Carter original. His "Lil' Hat's Odyssey" was bracketed by soft, flute-limned passages and brashly punctuated by trumpeter Dwight Adams's fiery tone and Carter's dramatic shift to tenor sax.
The Holiday remembrances included "More Than You Know" and "You're a Lucky Guy," though there was nothing overtly sentimental about Carter's approach to the material. At times his tenor sounded like a gunned Harley roaring through the room. It was impossible to listen to his robust lyricism without recalling why Robert Altman cast him to play Ben Webster in the 1995 film "Kansas City."
It's a pity Carter didn't perform more Holiday-related tunes from "Gardenias" during the opening set. Yet this installment in the ongoing Kennedy Center series, "A New America: The 1940s and the Arts," was consistently enhanced by his collaborations with King, Adams, pianist Gerard Gibbs and bassist Ibrahim Jones.
-- Mike Joyce
Sara Evans
Friday night at the Patriot Center, Sara Evans's microphone kept cutting out during her opening number, "Rockin' Horse," but if it bothered her she never let on. The performance seemed to capture the mantra of her song "Perfect": "Real love and real life doesn't have to be perfect." Evans admitted to the enthusiastic crowd that she was singing with a cold -- -and the strain on her vocals showed in songs like "Saints and Angels."
But poor health didn't slow Evans down. Her hour-long set was an energetic performance of mostly uptempo country tunes executed with genuine enthusiasm. Adorned in a pale pink blazer, jeans and a sparkly belt that spelled "love" across her waist, she literally twinkled with excitement every time she walked across the stage. She introduced the mellow "Tonight" as "a sexy song about not wanting to leave the one you're with" -- but it displayed good old-fashioned affection rather than modern raunch ("Hold on tight and tell me I'm the only one you see tonight").
It was no surprise when Evans thanked the crowd for letting her live out her dream, and to close her set she belted out the Belinda Carlisle hit "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" as if it were the first time it had ever been performed. The evening may not have been flawless, but to the fans singing along with every tune, it was perfect.
-- Catherine P. Lewis
