Patti Austin at The Carver

Patti Austin
The Carver Community Cultural Center
Jo Long Theatre
San Antonio, TX
October 12, 2024

Between appearances on the West Coast—accepting a lifetime achievement award from SF Jazz in San Francisco, exemplifying jazz excellence at the Jazz Excellence (JEXA) gala in LA—Patti Austin came through San Antonio to open the 2024/25 season at the Jo Long Theatre in the historic Carver Community Cultural Center. At age 74, she was celebrating 70 years in show business in great voice: powerful, limber, pitch-perfect, full of nuance. She conducted with her body and danced as she sang, her expressive hands amplifying the drama and the fun. The show was a retrospective, with musical numbers and funny anecdotes interspersed. But seriously, her first aside with the audience was a call to vote in upcoming elections.

Austin attributes her easy stage manner and flair for comedy to her extraordinary background. She grew up in and around Harlem's Apollo Theater, appearing on that stage for the first time at age four, schmoozing with the likes of Sammy Davis, Jr. and Ray Bolger, comedians Pigmeat Markham ("Here Comes the Judge"), Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx, to name a few. She met a host of top African American performers (musicians, actors, dancers) of the time, who took her under their wings, sharing secrets and showing her the ropes. And she had some of it in her DNA. Her jazz-trombonist father Gordon Austin worked with Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. Quincy Jones and the late Dinah Washington are her godparents.

That evening, she treated her comic interludes like jazz solos, peppering them with musical quotations, frequently bursting into bits of melody, lines from hit songs (hers and others), jingles she sang (during her reign as "jingle queen"), impersonations (musical partners Michael Jackson, James Ingram and others). Austin's craft is right up there with her mentors, creative pros able to come into a situation and handle whatever is called for, nailing it on the first go, artistically and technically.

She opened her two-hour set at the Carver with a couple of tunes by Rod Temperton, "Give Me the Night" and "Razzamatazz." "Give Me the Night" was George Benson's first #1 Billboard hit (Warner Brothers, 1980). Why start with Benson? Austin is as proud of her lucrative work as a backup singer as she is of releases under her own name; it is her voice on those intricate background scat figures. She sang lead on "Razzamatazz," a single pulled from Jones' album, The Dude (A&M Records, 1981), also a big hit for all concerned.

Next up was "Baby, Come to Me," a Temperton duet vehicle that became a #1 hit for Austin and Ingram (Qwest, 1981), but only after it had "died" as a single and been resurrected as Luke and Laura's love theme on General Hospital, the soap opera. She went on to sing one more runaway hit she had had with Ingram, Michel Legrand's Grammy-nominated "How Do You Keep the Music Playing" (Qwest Records, 1982; lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman). She and ingram introduced it, but it has since become a major standard for jazz and pop vocalists.

Austin improvised—in one way or another—on every number in the program and in the repartee between. In addition to the Legrand-Bergman tune, though, her set included just a couple of Great American Songbook standards, both from her hit jazz album, The Real Me (Qwest Records, 1988): the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" (lyric by Otto Harbach). Stretching for several choruses, her most extensive scat solo of the evening was on Bill Cantos' "Love Wins," from his New Standards for the New Millennium (GIC Productions, 2006), which, in her words, "exemplifies my feeling about living in the world."

"Love Wins" ushered in the final act of Austin's show, the "love portion," as she called it. She prefaced Hal David and Burt Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now"—a two-part audience sing-along—with the observation that she had rarely seen a problem that love could not address in some meaningful way. Sung with power and grace, her take on Des'ree's hypnotic "You Gotta Be" (Sony Soho Square, 1994) ensued, a definite highlight of the evening. (Check YouTube, below, for a similar live reading.) "You Gotta Be" has been in her repertoire for over two decades, and she has released it twice (Church: Songs of Soul & Inspiration, UTV/DMI/Carmen Productions, 2003; Sound Advice, Shanachie, 2011). At the Carver, the lyric ("stand up and be counted") seemed to echo her earlier call to the audience.

The set concluded with Bill Withers' perennial "Lean on Me," followed by a rousing encore, the The O'Jays' "Love Train," tailored to the crowd with a mention of San Antonio in the tune. The room was up, singing and moving along on the refrain ("people all over the world, join hands...").