Autumn is not officially here until you visit Barbara Carroll's Sunday Jazz Brunch at the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room, where Carroll brings more flavors to a tune than Ben and Jerry brings to ice cream. With Carroll are the stellar bass talents of either sly, witty Jay Leonhart or the more reticent Sean Smith. In this show, Carroll sings "You Fascinate Me So," by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, and has a few delightful moments teasing Sean Smith:

"Will the end deflate me,
Or will you annihilate me?
You fascinate me so!
You aggravate me,
You irritate me,
You fascinate me so!"

Smith, trying hard to appear nonplussed, concentrates on his conversational counterplay.

Carroll's parlando vocals communicate the lyrics with the feeling that she has been there and back. Two of her closing songs, "Something Good," words and music by Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim's "You're the Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me" highlight the lessons of life she has learned. In her opener, a swinging "All I Want is the Girl" (Styne and Sondheim), she improvises into engaging flights of fancy with dexterous finger work and authoritative chords. Between every few songs she gives the name of the piece and its composer. All performers should salute the songwriters like this.

Carroll talks about the start of her music career, playing in the jazz clubs on 52nd Street. "My nanny used to bring me there," she joked. The area of "Swing Street" (between 5th and 6th Avenues) and "W.C. Handy's Place" (between 6th and 7th Avenues) was the legendary street of dreams for jazz, and Carroll played with names like Parker, Tatum and Hawkins. In this show, she salutes Dizzy Gillespie with an intriguing delivery of his exotic rhythmic bebop chord-play in "Night in Tunisia." Although Carroll discovered jazz early in her training, she has a classical foundation. She renders a classical/jazz feel to an all-American pairing of Gershwin and Bernstein. Carroll begins the potent chords of Gershwin's "Prelude in C Sharp Minor," redolent with the energy of New York City. She then sweeps into Bernstein's moody “Lonely Town.”

Barbara Carroll at the piano replenishes your soul, and by the time she traditionally ends with Sondheim's "Old Friends," which should be an American standard by now, she has placed herself on the podium of elegant, talented old friends you are glad to have in your life. Her show is a not-to-be-missed Sunday afternoon at the Oak Room.

The Algonquin Hotel Oak Room features Barbara Carroll's Sunday Jazz Brunch on Sundays from 11:30AM and show at 1PM..

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Cabaret Scenes
October 19, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org