A lean, pop-jazz hipster whose buzz-saw voice, much like that of Tom Waits, slices away glib sentimentality, Curtis Stigers is not the usual sort of act one finds at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, although he has played there before. (The last time was five years ago.) Depending on your definition he is either a rock ’n’ roll jazz man who plays a honking saxophone that echoes his raw, craggy singing or a jazz-influenced rocker.
Either way his renditions of standards by Mr. Waits, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman, to name three songwriters whose work he sang at Tuesday’s opening-night show of a two-week engagement, were tough, rhythmically sneaky reinventions to which his voice imparted an intensely personal stamp.
He got to the slippery bottom of Mr. Newman’s “Real Emotional Girl,” whose narrator, in a tone of wonderment tinged with contempt and guilt, describes the behavior of a girlfriend who cries in her sleep and who
Either way his renditions of standards by Mr. Waits, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman, to name three songwriters whose work he sang at Tuesday’s opening-night show of a two-week engagement, were tough, rhythmically sneaky reinventions to which his voice imparted an intensely personal stamp.
He got to the slippery bottom of Mr. Newman’s “Real Emotional Girl,” whose narrator, in a tone of wonderment tinged with contempt and guilt, describes the behavior of a girlfriend who cries in her sleep and who
turns on easy
it’s like a hurricane
you would not believe it
you have to hold on tight.
The storyteller knows full well that such intimate details should be kept private, but he can’t help himself.
