Once again, Jessie Buckley proves she is THE female jazz voice of the year in my book.  Tonight, rather than perform with just piano and bass, she branched out to a six-piece jazz band, an idea that sounds great in theory, but in reality turned out to be questionable.

While Jessie always shines on ballads, tonight she showed that she has SOUL. Her scat even verged on gospel on a few occasions. The highlights of the night were an amazing jazz cha-cha version of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” her original song, “Lily May,” and a song that sadly has to remain nameless (perhaps “That’s Cool Baby”) because it’s an original and I wasn’t given a song list.

Last Spring at Pizza on the Park, Jessie literally stopped people in their tracks.  Tonight, however, she had great difficulty holding the audience’s attention. On three separate occasions, someone peeped out from the sound booth behind me to shush the audience.

The primary reason for this was that the band was far too loud, and the sound mix did nothing to highlight Jessie. This didn’t allow her to command attention.  There were moments of total magic in the evening but, for my money, Jessie works far better with piano and bass.  If she’s to continue singing with a jazz band, someone really needs to reign the musicians in, and whomever is on sound needs to make sure Jessie can be heard above the instrument;, otherwise, the vocalist becomes unnecessary.

Harold Sanditen
Cabaret Scenes
December 8, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org