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Baby Jane Dexter
December 4, 2009
“All About Love”
Metropolitan Room – November 20-21, 27-28, December 4-5, 11-12, 18-19
For some time now, Baby Jane Dexter has made the Michael Stipe-Peter Buck-Bill Berry-Mike Mills anthem “Everybody Hurts” her signature song. Not only did she include it as the beg-off number when I saw her in the second week of a five-week Metropolitan Room stint (Fridays and Saturdays only), but she continued singing it—with its repeated “hold on” and “hang on”—to sustained applause as she left the room.
The leave-taking is a five-alarm example of her following the song’s persistently reiterated advice. She’s holding on to the number until she passes through the black curtain dividing the performance space from the bar area. She holds on to the determined ditty so regularly that she delivered it with undiminished tenacity when, two nights later, she showed up at Birdland as one of Jim Caruso’s Cast Party guests.
For all I know, Dexter is somewhere this minute insisting that “everybody hurts” and “everybody cries,” and the only thing to do when you feel you’ve had “enough” of “this life” is to hooooooolllld ooooooon.
Well, my take where the 80-pounds-lighter Dexter is concerned is that there are some things worth holding on to and some things not so worth holding on to. Having heard her sing for close to 40 years (full-disclosure: we both worked out at Budd Friedman’s Improvisation in the 1970s), I’m glad she’s held on to her appreciation of all music genres. In this show about love, she discusses the popular subject as parsed by tunesmiths from Bob Dylan (“Make You Feel My Love,” “If Not for You”) to Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers (“The Gentleman Is a Dope”), from Stephen Sondheim (as good a “Not a Day Goes By” as anyone has so far essayed) to Eddie Green’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.
I’m glad she’s held on to a sense of humor that comes from so far out in left field that Johnny Damon is still hustling to catch it. (If Dexter ever decided to get someone in as a patter-supplier, I’d organize a protest.) I’m certainly pleased she’s held on these last 18 years to patient, potent pianist-arranger Ross Patterson.
On the other hand, there are a few things Dexter needn’t hold on to. She’s proved she didn’t need to hold on to those 80 dropped pounds. More importantly, though, there are a few vocal glitches she doesn’t need to hold on to. Is it my imagination or has Dexter experienced a voice change unusual in most singers? Most singers, it seems to me, develop darker, lower voices as they age. The opposite seems to be taking place where the diva’s vocal cords are involved. The way I hear it, her voice hasn’t quite the full-bodied boom she used to have in her lower register. Concurrently, her upper register seems lighter, sweeter.
The result of the change I’ve perceived is that she’s having trouble sustaining lower notes. She’s especially having trouble with notes held at the end of songs. In other words, she’s holding on when she’d be better advised not to. The held-on notes too often transmute into something that closely approximates bellowing.
Let’s just say Dexter doesn’t put the “mute” into transmute. Let’s just say Dexter is to be congratulated for always holding out but not necessarily for always holding on.
