Jane Scheckter will perform “From This Moment On" at 7 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday, at Broadway Baby, 318 West 53rd Street, Clinton; (212) 757-5808, broadwaybabybistro.com.
Ferocious. That is the word the pop-jazz singer Jane Scheckter applies to Lena Horne in “From This Moment On," her tribute to Ms. Horne, who is now 90. Ms. Scheckter recalled at Broadway Baby bistro on Wednesday evening that Ms. Horne, along with Bobby Short and Tony Perkins, was one of her youthful idols. Holding up an old LP of Ms. Horne's 1957 live album at the Waldorf-Astoria, she credited it with rerouting her girlhood fantasy of movie stardom to nightclub singing.
She discovered the force of Ms. Horne's ferocity in the video of her celebrated one-woman Broadway show, “The Lady and Her Music," whose close-up photography revealed her hurt and anger. For Ms. Horne's dazzling smile has always had the ominous quality of a wary tiger baring its teeth. Her alluring seductiveness coincides with a forbidding hauteur, the whole driven by an innate theatricality.
That Ms. Scheckter is not ferocious, visibly angry, haughty or especially theatrical helps her to separate herself from her complicated subject in the most positive way. What she has appropriated from Ms. Horne is invaluable musical skill.
