Cabaret attracts a varied audience, with tastes that run from early Irving Berlin to late Bob Dylan. Extending its usual musical boundaries, the Metropolitan Room hosted guitarist Billy Derby, drummer Sam Zucchini and the blues-rock vocalist Kate Taylor. 

Acknowledging the audience’s warm and prolonged greeting, Taylor picked up an acoustic guitar and was joined in song by her two instrumentalists in an infectious, heavily rhythmic opener.  By the time she hit the final notes, it was hard to know who was having the better time, Taylor and her musicians or the supportive, swaying crowd in the seats.

Taylor, the sibling of songster James Taylor, made her mark in the music world back in the 1970s, with albums for Atlantic Records and, later, Columbia Records, but then largely gave up that existence for the mommy role in her young daughters’ lives. It was almost twenty-five years later that she returned to touring and in 2002 cut a folk-rock album, Beautiful Road.  Her newest CD is Kate Taylor at the Cutting Room.

Known essentially as a rocker, at the Metropolitan Room Taylor was equally charismatic with blues and ballads, including “Redtail Hawk,” a personal tribute to her late husband, Charles Wintham.  She included an amusing country number, “Stop the Wedding,” and three oldie-but-goodies going back to her 1978 Columbia album, Kate Taylor.  They included the pop “A Fool in Love,” “Stubborn Kind of Woman,” and a moody “Tiah’s Cove.”

Cabaret numbers primarily are story songs – love sought, love lost, love won – but Taylor’s songs and energetic arrangements put lyrics in second place to the overriding beat.  Her guest pianist, Jimmy Vivino from the Max Weinberg 7, dovetailed into that perfectly, illustrating why a piano is referred to as a percussion instrument.  Also guesting was vocalist Eddie Brigati of The Young Rascals (later, just The Rascals) with two numbers from that group’s catalog.

Taylor’s audience was with the performers all the way — hand clapping, singing along, and standing as they applauded various tunes.  And if there were some in the room without a digital camera to take multiple photos, their cell phones seemed to be a satisfactory substitute. 

The delight evident throughout the show reached its peak at the encore. As the stage full of performers offered the popular blues number “Mustang Sally,” their audience seemed to break loose of any residual restraint, and with a verve usually seen on the stage, not in front of it, joined in vocalizing “…ride, Sally, ride” as if it were in fact, a private party.  From Kate Taylor’s perspective, I think it was.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
June 24, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org