Susan Werner, Madeleine Peyroux
The Great American Songbook has proved a renewed source of inspiration in the past few years (Rod Stewart, call your accountant), and the spirits of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer were alive in sets by Susan Werner and Madeleine Peyroux at the Birchmere on Sunday night.
Werner has reinvented herself with "I Can't Be New," a disc that evokes romantic 1950s Manhattan. Playing a grand piano and accompanied by acoustic bassist Greg Holt, Werner bore little resemblance to the Carole King/Joni Mitchell-style folkie she once was. She joked that she started writing originals in the Songbook style because "most of the competition is no longer competing," but "Philanthropy," "Let's Regret This in Advance" and "Late for the Dance" were expansive, melodically glowing updates.
The bewitching Peyroux, born in Georgia and raised in Brooklyn and Paris, consults a different Songbook: Her giants of American song include Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Hank Williams. Possessing a voice startlingly reminiscent of Billie Holiday's, Peyroux is touring behind "Careless Love," the follow-up to her 1996 debut "Dreamland," which made a splash in the jazz-vocal world. Her guitar combined with piano and bass to make tender, jazz-trio love to Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" and Williams's "Weary Blues."
The night's real gem was her version of Elliott Smith's "Between the Bars," which dripped with alcoholic melancholy. Peyroux's too-brief set didn't add much to the recorded versions, but it was thrilling to hear her evocative voice in person. Peyroux's stage persona was curiously distant and awkward -- fitting, perhaps, for an enigmatic artist who seems happiest when disappearing inside a song.
-- Patrick Foster
Thalia Zedek
Although guitarist Thalia Zedek spent years fronting underground bands such as Come and Uzi, the turnout for her show Sunday night at Iota was sparse. The small audience would have disappointed any band (Zedek played with drummer Daniel Coughlin and violist David Michael Curry), but it did turn the performance into a cozy, intimate concert.
Zedek's trademark melancholy moan was perfectly suited to her downhearted lyrics; she dropped to a whisper on such lines as, "Don't ever look back / . . . you will lose everything if you do." Without Coughlin's percussion to propel her songs forward, it's likely that her detached, growling voice would have drawn out her music to a lugubrious pace.
Curry's viola added hints of brightness to Zedek's dark tunes and deep vocals; on "Temporary Guest," his swooping melodies smoothed out the roughness in her voice and pulled together the song with a few glimmering flourishes.
Zedek introduced her final number, "Hell Is in Hello," as her mother's favorite song from her new album, the confusingly titled "Trust Not Those in Whom Without Some Touch of Madness." In the middle of the song, Coughlin's rapid pounding of his cymbals sparked a period of instrumental mayhem, with Curry alternating between viola and trumpet and Zedek hunched over her guitar with her back to the audience. The song returned to a calmer verse to round out her 50-minute set.
-- Catherine P. Lewis
