Steve Tyrell

December 2, 2013

“Wordsmiths: Lyricists of the Great American Song”

Café Carlyle  –  November 26 – December 31

Steve Tyrell Singer Steve Tyrell has arrived for his ninth holiday-season engagement at the Café Carlyle—the slot in which Bobby Short previously held forth. For the life of me, I can’t explain the longevity of Tyrell’s residency at this prestigious venue. Well, that’s not quite true: I presume he does land-office business, which explains his being asked back. More precisely, I can’t figure out why so many people want to see him. I might expect a performance of such tackiness from the band singer at a catering hall wedding in South Philly—though even there I would expect the level to be a bit higher—but not on New York’s Upper East Side.

His current show is called “Wordsmiths: Lyricists of the Great American Song.” Frankly, the set list did not excite me. Though the selections on it are all first-rate, I’d heard most of them literally hundreds of times before, and the few others, dozens of times. Nonetheless, knowing that even the most familiar song can be freshly compelling if given a perceptive and penetrating interpretation, I was looking forward to the evening. Regrettably, “interpretation” appears not to be in Tyrell’s artistic vocabulary.

He tells us, “It’s the words I’d like to focus on tonight,” and he refers to lyricists as poets. From that statement, I would expect two things: fidelity to the words as written by the lyricists, and perhaps even more important, a respect for the meaning of those words. We get neither.

Regarding lyric fidelity, I knew I was in trouble from the start, when in the first song, “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (Dorothy Fields, Jimmy McHugh), he sings, not “I’d be rich as Rockefeller,” but “I’d be richer than that Trump fella.” Don’t cringe yet—it gets worse. On Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” he regales us with “You give me a boot, baby,” and in Hammerstein and Kern’s “Why Was I Born?” he gives us “Oh, baby, why was I born to love you?” and he ends the song with “Yeah!” In “I Can’t Get Started” (Ira Gershwin, Vernon Duke), instead of “I’ve got a house, a show place,” he sings “I’ve got a house; it’s a show place,” which violates both Gershwin’s lyric and the meter. Perhaps worst of all, in that same song he replaces “I’ve been consulted by Franklin D, even Gable had me to tea” with “I’ve been consulted by President C, you know Hillary, she’s had me to tea,” and later with “I’ve been consulted by President Obama, I once had a drink with his mama.” Now you may cringe. (And these are only a few examples.)

After he’s finished “I Can’t Get Started,” he tells us why he wrote the Clinton and Obama lines. That may do as an explanation, but it certainly is not a justification. Yes, I know that Frank Sinatra also played with the words to that song, but Sinatra did some unconscionable things with lyrics in the last decades of his career. And don’t try to excuse it by telling me that this is jazz; there are many superb jazz vocalists who don’t mangle lyrics.

On to conveying the meaning of a song. He doesn’t—and as far as I can tell, he doesn’t even try. His gestures and expressions are more or less aligned with the music, and completely unrelated to what the words are saying. In “Why Was I Born?” he smiles cheerfully at us immediately after the line “Why do I cry? You never hear me.” Huh? Regardless of content, he approaches nearly every song the same way: in a lightly swinging lounge style. When I saw that the next song was to be Johnny Mercer and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “I Thought About You,” I thought, “maybe, just maybe, he’ll do this honestly, as a ballad.” Silly me. A song about absence and longing? Sure, let’s swing it! And he punctuates Rodgers and Hart’s supremely romantic “Isn’t It Romantic?” with hand clapping and finger snapping. In addition, the night I saw him he made a few lyric errors that suggest he doesn’t pay attention to what he’s singing: in “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” he sang “that happy tune is your street“; in “I Thought About You,” “two or three cars walked under the stars.”

The evening does have a couple of praiseworthy qualities: Tyrell sings in an appealingly gravelly voice, and the accompanists do fine work. The band consists of musical director Quinn Johnson on piano, David Finck on bass, Bob Mann on guitar, Kevin Winard on drums, and Bijon Watson on trumpet. I can’t comment on Jon Allen’s skill on keyboards because that instrument does not belong in this show: Throughout the evening it lends an inappropriate and unwelcome synthetic sound to the proceedings. What’s more, the arrangements, all by Bob Mann, are very much one like the other—a shortcoming they share with Tyrell’s vocal interpretations.

If Tyrell were a newcomer, not only would I not have written quite so harshly, I would probably have judged him not ready for review and, so, not have written anything, giving him a chance to grow and develop. However, he’s been in the business for decades and has a slew of recordings and awards to his credit. And this is the Café Carlyle, the crown jewel of New York’s nightlife. I would expect to find more thoughtful attempts at song interpretation any random Tuesday at Don’t Tell Mama, The Duplex, or other less-lofty clubs around town.

 

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About the Author

Roy Sander has been covering cabaret and theatre for over thirty years. He’s written cabaret and theatre reviews, features, and commentary for seven print publications, most notably Back Stage, and for CitySearch on the Internet. He covered cabaret monthly on “New York Theatre Review” on PBS TV, and cabaret and theatre weekly on WLIM-FM radio. He was twice a guest instructor at the London School of Musical Theatre. A critic for BistroAwards.com, he is also the site’s Reviews Editor; in addition, he is Chairman of the Advisory Board of MAC.