By Carolyn Graye
Emiko Mizoguchi
September 16
Jazz Alley
Vocal bookings have been a little sparse lately, but late summer and fall brought two very different singers to Dimitriou's Jazz Alley.
September 16 marked the third annual Kobe Sister City Jazz Day and featured Emiko Mizoguchi who was this year's winner of the Shinkaichi Music Street Festival Jazz Vocal Queen contest. Ms. Mizoguchi studied opera and classical voice in college and has sung regularly with both big bands and smaller groups throughout Japan. She performed for a nearly full house at Jazz Alley and was ably accompanied by Randy Halberstadt on piano, Jeff Johnson on bass and John Bishop on drums. Guitarist Michael Powers joined the band for the last half of the set. With all due respect to cultural exchange, I couldn't resist going to hear anyone billed as the Kobe Jazz Vocal Queen and, was as usual, a bit skeptical.
Emiko Mizoguchi is attractive and charming on stage. She also has a big voice with a lot of range and most importantly to me, an obvious love of the music she's singing. In the first set, Ms. Mizoguchi displayed her unabashed admiration for Ella Fitzgerald via her treatment of "Just One of Those Things" and her scatting on "In A Mellow Tone." She also set a lovely mood with a ballad version of "Summertime." There were a few distracting vocal effects in "Trust in Me," some forced, flat pitches in "Caravan" and several moments throughout the set when her pronunciation was problematic. However, she was so heartfelt in her delivery and approach that it was easy to overlook the occasional mangling of lyrics. When she apologized for her language skills and asked the audience to trust that she sang each note from the heart, she charmed everyone in the room.
It's always interesting to see any art form filtered through the perspective of another culture and while Emiko Mizoguchi isn't a major force as a jazz singer, she is a very sincere and enthusiastic ambassador for this music.
Kenny Rankin
September 24
Jazz Alley
Singer/songwriter and guitarist Kenny Rankin packed the house on Monday, September 24 and brought the baby boomers out for a night on the town en masse. I remember hearing him in a solo concert 20 years ago and I've always admired his songwriting. I have heard and performed his tunes in piano bars, hotel lobbies and restaurants for years even after I got serious about tackling the standard jazz repertoire, and I always thought his music held up well by comparison. In short, I went expecting to be transported back to a simpler, happier time.
Wrong.
In all fairness, Mr. Rankin admitted to being a bit nervous and setting the tempo of his opening original tune, "Haven't We Met," too fast. I like this song and found myself wanting to hear him sing it with the band from his latest recording. His smooth tenor voice wasn't quite as soulful as I remember it, and his scatting has gone from interesting to irritating - a kind of frenetic, automated bub-a-da-dub-a-da that had nothing whatsoever to do with the melody or harmony of the tune he was singing. Actually, very little of his performance had much to do with the melody or harmony of the tunes he covered because he altered them to the point of total unfamiliarity. Mr. Rankin relied heavily on material by the Beatles ("Blackbird," "Penny Lane," "I've Just Seen a Face"), Goffin/King ("Spanish Harlem") and threw in a few jazz standards ("Just the Way You Look Tonight," "'Round Midnight") for good measure. I grew up absolutely loving these songs - how can anyone from this generation screw up Lennon and McCartney's
"Blackbird"? I'm not talking about the musical dismantling and reassembling of songs that good jazz players do routinely. I'm talking about taking liberties without respecting or improving upon the original composition. This was the most jarring and obvious on Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight" and when he made a condescending joke about "weird names like Thelonious and Cootie (Williams)" while idly fingering blues licks on his guitar, I'd had enough. I hit cocktail lounges in the burbs when I want to see that kind of show. Not even a fond reference to Laura Nyro, one of my all-time favorite singer/songwriters from the '60's could salvage the set at that point.
Mr. Rankin was at his best on the Latin-tinged pieces, and his encore of "Berimbau" had a nice groove, but by that time I didn't care. The audience went wild - clearly I was in the minority - but I feel more emotional connection to this music when I listen to old LP's. I still admire Kenny Rankin's songwriting, but I'll enjoy it from a distance in the future.
Carolyn Graye is a jazz singer, pianist, composer and instructor living in Seattle.
