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Diane Schuur and the DIVA Jazz Orchestra
February 19, 2015
“With Love from Deeds and DIVA,” the Valentine’s weekend show at the Iridium, paired West Coast contemporary jazz singer Diane Schuur with the New York City-based DIVA Jazz Orchestra (15 strong for this booking) on songs about love, appropriately to the occasion. This upbeat collaboration (the first for diva and Diva in several years) provided a highly satisfying and solid hour of mainstream jazz. (For the uninitiated, “Deeds” is short for “Deedles,” Diane’s nickname since early childhood.) The brass-heavy band—with eleven shiny gold instruments, including alto, tenor and baritone saxophones, trumpets and trombones—was in top form, as was the singer. Ostensibly an all-female ensemble (they used to joke that they were “No Man’s Band”), DIVA Jazz Orchestra occasionally allows a dude ringer to join them, and they did on this occasion. More on him in a minute. Drummer Sherrie Maricle is the group’s leader.
Her band began the proceedings, as many acts do, with “I Love Being Here with You” (Peggy Lee, Bill Schluger). They followed with their own boisterous arrangements of “Makin’ Whoopee” (Walter Donaldson, Gus Kahn) and “Them There Eyes” (Maceo Pinkard, William Tracey, Doris Tauber). Alto sax players Leigh Pilzer and Janelle Reichman, and baritone trombone player Jen Krupa soloed in this medley.
When Schuur took the stage (as a recently minted all-out blonde), she sat at the piano and launched into Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson’s “I Just Found Out About Love (And I Like It),” her pitch and phrasing as perfect as ever. For the rest of the show she sat on a stool, keeping time with one hand, and clutching a bottle of water in the other, as befits a denizen of the California Desert—where it was 80 degrees that day, she noted to a crowd that had just been shivering in the teens. Her chat thereafter was minimal, apart from a couple of borderline-ribald cracks about ex-husbands. She did allow that, “in my middle years [she’s 61] I’ve gained a few lower notes.” Then, with a splendid Cubanesque “Besame Mucho” (Consuelo Velazquez, Sunny Skylar), she proceeded to prove she’d lost none of her top notes in the process, as she seemed to match the very highest notes of the terrific solo work of trumpeter Dave Trigg, the aforementioned divo.
It’s almost impossible to pick standout numbers from the rest of Schuur’s loving set, which included “I Caught a Touch of Your Love” (Jack Keller, Grover Washington Jr.); “We’ll Be Together Again” (Frankie Laine, Carl Fischer); Billy May arrangements of Cole Porter’s “Easy to Love” and “Love for Sale”; and “Deed I Do” (Walter Hirsch, Fred Rose). One highlight was a Schuur signature song (and her most downloaded, she said), “Louisiana Sunday Afternoon” (Franne Golde, Peter Ivers, Schuur). The closest she came to an anti-love song was her closer, Duke Ellington and Bob Russell’s “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me (And You Never Will).”
Schuur went back to the piano for her sprightly encore, “Deedles Blues” (Frank Foster, Schuur), which is not very blue at all. After all, one of her lyric lines goes: “Deedles is my name/I don’t know how I got here, but I’m awfully glad I came.”
So were we all.
“With Love from Deeds and DIVA”
Iridium – February 13-15
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.
“With Love from Deeds and DIVA,” the Valentine’s weekend show at the Iridium, paired West Coast contemporary jazz singer Diane Schuur with the New York City-based DIVA Jazz Orchestra (15 strong for this booking) on songs about love, appropriately to the occasion. This upbeat collaboration (the first for diva and Diva in several years) provided a highly satisfying and solid hour of mainstream jazz. (For the uninitiated, “Deeds” is short for “Deedles,” Diane’s nickname since early childhood.) The brass-heavy band—with eleven shiny gold instruments, including alto, tenor and baritone saxophones, trumpets and trombones—was in top form, as was the singer. Ostensibly an all-female ensemble (they used to joke that they were “No Man’s Band”), DIVA Jazz Orchestra occasionally allows a dude ringer to join them, and they did on this occasion. More on him in a minute. Drummer Sherrie Maricle is the group’s leader.