Ann Hampton Callaway: The Sarah Vaughan Project

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Ann Hampton Callaway

The Sarah Vaughan Project

SFJAZZ, San Francisco, CA, July 16, 2015

Reviewed by Steve Murray for Cabaret Scenes

Ann-Hampton-Callaway-Cabaret-Scenes-Magazine_212Ann Hampton Callaway is quite the performance chameleon. Her current tour includes her show Sibling Revelry with sister Liz, Jazz & Sondheim, and To Ella and Nat with Love. But if there ever was a perfect symbiotic pairing, my choice is this show featuring Callaway’s interpretations of the music of the great Sarah Vaughan.

Callaway has the tone and timbre of the later Vaughan style, the sensitive attention to lyric and the emotional showmanship to carry it off spectacularly. With great arrangements by Bill Mays and brilliant piano accompaniment from Christian Jacob, Callaway’s strong yet nuanced contralto rides the material without imitation, but with genuine respect.

“Misty” (Erroll Garner/Johnny Burke) and “Someone to Watch Over Me” (George & Ira Gershwin) feature stunning vocals and lovely arrangements. Not many people would attempt “Chelsea Bridge,” a Billy Strayhorn instrumental given an overlaid vocalese by Vaughan in 1979, but AHC is more than up to the task. A 1947 recording of “Tenderly,” with music by Walter Gross and lyrics by Jack Lawrence, is given a velvety Vaughan-esque sublime vocal. Callaway performs Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave,” which Vaughan recorded in 1972, riding the wave of bossa nova popularity. She closed the set with a remarkable imagining of a proposed collaboration between Vaughan and opera singer Leontyne Price, singing Puccini’s “Un Bel di Vedremo” paired with “Poor Butterfly” (Raymond Hubbell/John Golden). It’s a showstopper, literally.

The Sarah Vaughan Project is a huge success and, thankfully, has been captured on CD (From Sassy to Divine: The Sarah Vaughan Project). It’s a great achievement by one of cabaret’s finest entertainers.

Steve Murray

Always interested in the arts, Steve was encouraged to begin producing and, in 1998, staged four, one-man vehicles starring San Francisco's most gifted performers. In 1999, he began the Viva Variety series, a live stage show with a threefold mission to highlight, support, and encourage gay and gay-friendly art in all the performance forms, to entertain and document the shows, and to contribute to the community by donating proceeds to local non-profits. The shows utilized the old variety show style popularized by his childhood idol Ed Sullivan. He’s produced over 150 successful shows, including parodies of Bette Davis’s gothic melodramedy Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte and Joan Crawford’s very awful Trog. He joined Cabaret Scenes 2007 and enjoys the writing and relationships he’s built with very talented performers.