It’s easy to get spoiled in Chicago: we enjoy a surfeit of excellent music, with nationally popular artists appearing on a regular basis – which in turn makes it easy to take them for granted. You forget that the rest of the country doesn’t get to hear these folks in person every week (and in some cases, even more often).
Well, that’s why we have airplanes.
This weekend, several of Chicago’s best will head out of town to share some of our musical wealth. Saturday night, vocalist Elaine Dame makes her New York debut at the city’s Metropolitan Room, while the Deep Blue Organ Trio undertakes their first West Coast tour, in support of last year’s radio hit Wonderful! (The album finished at #15 on the JazzWeek chart gauging airplay for 2011; it also got the Wall Street Journal’s critic Marc Myers’ vote for album of the year.)
The Metropolitan Room is primarily a cabaret venue (an intimate one at that) and this plays to one of Dame’s strengths. She has a theater background and the storytelling skills that the cabaret crowd appreciates – sometimes to the point of overlooking musical flaws. But Dame also possesses all the musicality you could want in a true jazz singer – centered intonation; an enviable command of rhythm; and a translucent but powerful instrument.
With all that, her improvisational prowess – the ability to take a really convincing scat solo, spare and focused, like a savvy horn player – seems almost unfair. In any case, she’ll have plenty of opportunity to show it off on Saturday, backed by a trio featuring two of Chicago’s recent and much-missed ex-pats: pianist Dan Cray and bassist John Tate.
(Dame is actually the second veteran Chicago singer to debut in New York in the last course of a month. Joanie Pallatto did the same in January, when she and pianist Bradley Parker-Sparrow appeared at Iridium in midtown Manhattan to present a tribute to saxophonist Von Freeman on the occasion of his being named an NEA Jazz Master. The evening also featured vocal legends Bob Dorough and Sheila Jordan – another newly minted Jazz Master – and reportedly drew a sizable and enthusiastic audience.)
On the other side of the country, the Deep Blue Organ Trio arrives in San Francisco on Saturday to begin a week-long sojourn. Comprising guitarist Bobby Broom, organist Chris Foreman, and drummer Greg Rockingham, the trio will undertake the first West Coast tour in their 12-year history.
The tour will give audiences in five states their first chance to hear the band, which has garnered a national audience through rave reviews for their four albums, up close and personal. And that’s a treat in itself, as regular attendees of their long-running Tuesday residency at the Green Mill can attest: the DBOT draws on listeners’ reaction to fuel each performance and hone their infectious groove and swaggering solos.
The trio performs at Yoshi’s in San Francisco this Saturday, then moves on to Santa Cruz (CA) Monday; Seattle, next Tuesday and Wednesday (2/07-08); and Portland (Thursday), Denver (Friday), and finally Phoenix (Saturday, 2/11). You’ll find the complete listing of the clubs they’ll play here; they return to the Green Mill on Valentine’s Day.
As it turns out, most Chicagoans don’t have to be on either coast to get what is very likely their first glimpse of one local artist. Part-time trumpeter Steve Schneck is also a full-time attorney, which helps explain why you don’t see his name in the listings very often – a shame, really, given his clear clean technique and his strong ear for melody.
Schneck will mark the release of his second album (in as many decades) with two upcoming gigs: Saturday at the Heartland Café in Rogers Park, and next Wednesday, Feb. 8, at the Jazz Showcase (806 S. Plymouth). At each performance he’ll lead the primary quartet that appears on his self-produced Dedicated To You (starring guitarist Neal Alger, bassist Scott Mason, and drummer Charlie Braugham, with the possibility that Rusty Jones may sit in on drums at some point.
It’s a gentle, swinging album, for which I wrote the liner notes: a lovely collection ideal for listeners “who treasure the deceptively simple art of carving lapidary gems from the raw materials supplied by the endlessly generous Great American Songbook” (from the notes). Schneck doesn’t plow any new ground here; instead, he takes pains to beautify the existing musical environment with understated grace and clear logic.
And if you know anything about the law (or have just had your fill of recent political debates), those are qualities in short supply but great demand.
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