by Liesbeth Tryzelaar
Last week, The Metropole, the luxurious pink jazz club in the Fairmont Hotel, hosted Ian Shaw and Stephen Kowalczyk, jazz singers from New York and the U.K. respectively. Their Wednesday, March 12, performance combined blues, scat and pop ballads, making a diverse and ambitious concert, consistently demonstrating their talent.
Shaw and Kowalczyk began and closed their concert with an upbeat duet ironically titled "Born to be Blue," giving their audience a first taste of their remarkable scat a la Ella Fitzgerald. The first set of the evening, by far better than then second, was opened with Shaw solos, first singing a free-feeling rendition of "I Thought about You," demonstrating his incredible range, as well as the rich kind of voice that provoked my companion to comment that "he must like chocolate." Not so strong was his solemn performance of "Wouldn't It Be Lovely" from My Fair Lady, featuring a rather absurdly serious rendition of the word "abso-bloomin'-lutely." In both these pieces, as throughout the concert, Schneider's piano solos were worth waiting for. His playing was always complementary to the singers (he was humble enough to step back from the forefront when accompanying them), but at the same time had interesting and often beautiful intercepts of melody.
Kowalczk, a younger singer from New York, had a fluid mellow voice with an occasionally inappropriate feeling Elvis-like vibrato. He sang beautifully one of his own songs titled "Nothing Matters," a bluesy song about "that kiss...when we didn't have a penny;" a song that rises in energy and dynamics in the depths of nostalgia and then takes the audience back down with him into the sad present. Once again, Schneider plays a sweet piano solo that enriches and enlivens this pretty melody.
The weaker second set of the duo was rescued from obscurity by the finest singing of the evening by Shaw in a song entitled "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most." Sung after yelling at his small chatty audience to "SHUT UP!" it's hard to believe this melancholy song was performed with such a simple, light, pretty style that leant the piece a natural sympathetic seriousness. Still even here one could see that the ensemble had not yet clicked together, and throughout the concert the tiredness of the soloists was evident. One can only hope that the pair gets to rest up and thus perform up to the level I have no doubt they typically attain.
Centerstage Will Feed You
