Tammy Weis is a lovely woman — both personality-Weis (get it?).... and in looks.  In fact, my date aptly described her as a pre-Raphaelite beauty. She’s upbeat, warm and down to earth, yet something’s amiss. I wanted so much to enjoy tonight, but was left dry. Here’s why:

Her voice is pleasant, but not exciting, and often lacks color. Her personality is sweet, but neither magnetic nor engaging. Her interpretation of lyrics is, I’m sad to say, really lacking. In fact, at some point in the evening she let us know that we are learning a lot about her through her lyrics. What I learned over the course of the 2 ½-hour evening (which really is too long) is that she sings songs of pain with a smile on her face, and songs of joy (for example, her own “I’ll Be Loving You” and Ned Washington/Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You”) with pained looks on her face. I ask myself – is this a test? Am I in the twilight zone of emotions, some weird place where all emotions are seen oppositely?

Tammy sang songs mostly from her new CD, Where I Need to Be. She opened with “Everyone But Me,” for which she wrote the lyrics. The lyrics are those of pain and sadness – “the air is filled with music…..everyone is dancing….everyone but me….” – yet from her vocals, I didn’t get that pain at all.  It’s as if she were singing from a safe place and not relating to us just how harrowing that night was for her. Similarly, in “I Pretended,” another original song, which she told us it still gives her chills, there was no pathos at all in her delivery.

Her best song of the evening was a jazz version of Johnny Burke and Erroll Garner’s “Misty,” which showed off her voice best. I also liked her version of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Help!,” which was the one song of the night in which she truly displayed emotion. This is probably because of the way she came to sing this song – by asking her mother and grandmother, both now dead, for help – and dreaming of the song for two days before working on it.

She was joined by Randy Bachman for a few numbers, and he stole the show with “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.” Now here’s someone who can sell a song, tell a story and engage with his audience, and we were all his. He told us he wrote the song as a “goofing-around track” that was never meant to be released, basically to scare his brother who stuttered. After the song was released, his brother never stuttered again. Tammy asked us how she could follow something like that, and the answer is: only if you, too, can sell a song.

Tammy did tell us a few engaging stories, though: the “Help!” story above, and the fact that she’s a fifth generation musician, and the first song her grandmother ever taught her was Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek.” Tammy does a lovely version of it, too. I think she should have opened her show with this story and song, then followed it with “Everyone But Me,” but making sure she really gets the sadness across.  To juxtapose those two songs and emotions would be beautiful.

After all this, my take is that Tammy is truly a nice person with an “up” personality, so despite writing lyrics of pain, actually portraying that pain is not something she does naturally. She also loves her music and her musicians, but often at the expense of her audience.

Despite my misgivings above, Tammy has a really wonderful musicality and moves well on stage. Her band is terrific, too – Tim Lapthorn on piano, Arnie Somogyi on bass, Simon Lee on drums, Al Cherry on guitar and guest artist B J Coles on pedal steel guitar.

Harold Sanditen
Cabaret Scenes
March 18, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org