The current, first season of jazz at the Drawing Room After Dark in Brown’s Hotel is slipping away fast. The last night of Week 12 is on Thursday 19 December, featuring Art Themen. That means there are just six more nights – and I have only one word to summarize what I feel: GO.
It is a uniquely welcoming space with the sinkiest-into sofas anywhere. The staff are impeccable and clearly love the music too. The whole vibe is incredibly friendly. The hotel management invited a tandem of hosts/curators Matyas Gayer and Liam Dunachie to put a great programme together. And they have done a superb job.
I had picked up a musician buzz about quite how good Australian singer Louise Messenger is, but this was my first time hearing her live. She is as busy and in-demand as it is possible to be: I gathered this was her second of three gigs of the day on Thursday.
What she does so well is partly about professionalism, high standards, not cutting corners, making every moment special, but it’s also more than that. You don’t go to a five star hotel for a masterclass in jazz singing, but that was what I witnessed:
“But Not for Me” was all about making the voice light. Irving Berlin’s sad “Say It Isn’t so” was long phrases and improbably clear and sustained legato, and “Baltimore Oriole”’was the real revelation: can there be another singer (yes, maybe Karin Krog) who has that amazing richness of tone in the lower register? (I’ll leave out all the chocolate, treacle and wattle seed syrup metaphors for the next reviewer). What. A. Voice.
Vocal colour is just one of many things to marvel at. The instinct for countermelodies in Bye Bye Blackbird”, The Rhythmic drive and cross-beat energy of “But Not for Me”, and Louise’s way of bandleading all the beginnings and the endings is flawless. And I can imagine a lot of singers wondering if they are fearless enough of the seriously dark imaginings of Nacio Herb Brown’s “Temptation”. Louise Messenger makes it work. And it was just right in this space.
The trio were great. Matyas Gayer as pianist supporting singers is impeccably melodic. Asaph Tal has a wonderful strong bass sound and presence, and Joe Dessauer picked up the vibe that some of the punters there for the second set could do with a bit of out-of-the-ordinary loudness and energy. And he was right.
