Carol Fredette

October 11, 2014

Carol FredetteCarol Fredette has decided that she is not going to sing any more downbeat songs, at least when it comes to their lyric content. That sweeping decision has eliminated all of the blues and a large swath of country music, at a minimum, from her possible repertoire. But this show at Jazz at Kitano, taken in part from her aptly named latest CD, “No Sad Songs for Me,” proved that she really doesn’t need those negative numbers. With her solid voice, admirably collaborative musicianship, and superb lyric sense, Fredette was able to offer a refreshingly upbeat tone to her set, even with her ballads.

Her opening number neatly set the tone: “Havin’ Myself a Time” (Leo Robin, Ralph Rainger), a song recorded by Billie Holiday in an uncharacteristic positive mood. Its lyrics include “I’m living like a lord, acting like a loon,” and Fredette made you believe she was doing just that. But the real scene setter came in the middle of her set, from a nifty title song she had persuaded David Finck to compose: “No Sad Songs for Me.” Finck also produced and arranged her current CD, as well as playing bass on it (but not in this show).

Fredette offered fresh takes on familiar standards, from Duke Ellington and Bob Russell’s “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me” to Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’s “A Fine Romance.” You could sense that “All or Nothing at All” (Jack Lawrence, Arthur Altman) reminded her of both Frank Sinatra and John Coltrane, as she said, even though she sang it with Latin inflections. “Love Thy Neighbor” (Harry Revel, Mack Gordon) brought back a largely forgotten Bing Crosby hit from the 1930s, and “O Pato” (Jayme Silva, Neuza Teixeira, Jon Hendricks), an even more obscure Brazilian song about a duck, a goose and a swan doing the samba in the water brought comic relief, with Fredette singing partly in Portuguese and quacking sounds provided by drummer Aaron Nussbaum working his hands. She broke her own premise by inserting one sad song, the exception to prove the rule: “(You Forgot to) Remember,” by her favorite composer of them all, Irving Berlin. (Fredette’s usual Berlin song is “The Best Thing for You,” which she had sung during her first set that evening.)

I like very much that she billed her show as performed by “The Carol Fredette Quartet,” even though she had only three instrumentalists on stage with her. Her own voice was the fourth instrument, albeit the central one. Dave Lalama on piano, Dean Johnson on bass, and Nussbaum provided everything else she needed musically for a tightly played and very satisfying hour of jazz. She does need to work on her chat, however. There was too much of it, and it got repetitive. Yes, the three men on stage behind her were “cute” as well as accomplished, but she didn’t have to keep saying so. Or keep encouraging Nussbaum to make his hand noises—limiting them to the duck song would have been sufficient. She pushed the sale of her CDs too often and too needily (“my rent’s coming due”), even if she meant that as a joke. Fredette’s musical performance can speak for itself—positively, of course.

Jazz at Kitano  –  October 2

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About the Author

Robert Windeler is the author of 18 books, including biographies of Mary Pickford, Julie Andrews, Shirley Temple, and Burt Lancaster. As a West Coast correspondent for The New York Times and Time magazine, he covered movies, television and music, and he was an arts and entertainment critic for National Public Radio. He has contributed to a variety of other publications, including TV Guide, Architectural Digest, The Sondheim Review, and People, for which he wrote 35 cover stories. He is a graduate of Duke University in English literature and holds a masters in journalism from Columbia, where he studied critical writing with Judith Crist. He has been a theatre critic for Back Stage since 1999, writes reviews for BistroAwards.com, and is a member of The Players and the American Theatre Critics Association.

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