If July
2nd -- for the 39th edition of the Montreal
International Jazz Festival-- was your first
encounter with Sonia
Johnson, you would have been impressed that a real opera singer
was invited to perform at a jazz festival. She was the special
guest of local bad-boy keyboardist Vincent
Rehel who was looking to add a layer of pain in
the highest register to offset his primordial, synthesized-warped
organ exudations. The combination – shattered glass and
champagne on the brain -- was riveting. I’m sure listeners
immediately went to the Who’sWho in opera, looking to learn
more about Sonia, who is in fact a terrific, albeit much under-appreciated,
jazz singer (in English) and talented songwriter (in French),
blessed with a real singer’s voice and extensive vocal range
that allows her to explore not only jazz, but sophisticated pop
and opera.
She performed
on three occasions (twice as invited guest) during the jazzfest,
but it was her July 7th show, at one of the city’s celebrated
jazz clubs, Diez/Onze(10/11 in English), that audiences got to hear the real Sonia
Johnson at her very best, making the open-and-shut case that she
deserves to be considered among the very best jazz singers in
Canada.
With
guitarist par excellence Stephen Johnston, they performed
selections from their exquisite Dialogue Ella & Joe, (homage
to the voice and guitar of Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass). They
usually perform as a duo but for the jazz festival they were joined
by three other musicians, including the much-in-demand, irrepressibly
lyrical bassist Adrian
Vedady, who, in the spirit of Ron Carter, never
wastes a note while making every note sing.
It took
no longer that a couple of note-perfect bars of music to realize
that the title of their now long-running show (Dialogue Ella &
Joe), is simply a stylistic (guitar and voice) reference point,
or point of entry to the many standards the duo recorded between
1976 and 1986. But live, what the ear hears -- and wants to hear
more of -- is an evening of some of the greatest American music
ever written as performed by Sonia Johnson & Stephen Johnston.
You don’t hear, or think or wish for Ella and Joe because
the bewitched ear is already under the spell woven by Johnson
& Johnston. As a duo, or in the larger context of a quintet,
they have fashioned a musical dialogue of the highest order which
does the genre proud.
There
was a time when guitarist Stephen Johnston played like Frank Zappa
wound up on steroids and low-grade rat poison. But that was then
and now is now (demons fully exorcised) and his elegant accompaniment
is much more than about routine shading and adding texture; his
guitar is like another voice in a duet, where each voice is collaborating
with the other in unearthing, in bringing into wonderfully explicit
filigree the original feelings that gave birth to the song.
How high
is the moon? The challenge of every jazz singer is how deep can
you get into the lyric. Sonia Johnson is at her very best singing
the slow stuff, the ballads, the litmus test for any singer. That
we didn’t hear enough of them would be my only complaint
in an evening of memorable music where grace notes abounded.
That
Johnson is comfortable singing opera gives her a decided edge
over other voices in jazz in that she is able to shape (to round,
to contour) a note or a line of music. It’s a technique
that allows the singer to more effectively probe the feelings
that underwrite the lyrics. So when she brings this extra dimension
to jazz, the overall effect is deliciously enhanced. But she can
also change gears on a dime, and scat her voice on the A-train
at full tilt, and then just as suddenly slow it down to an easy
stroll or down tempo such as in the pensive classic “Lush
Life “composed by “Sweet Pea” (Billy Strayhorn).
It doesn’t take more than a couple of songs to realize that
Sonia Johnson has all the necessary interpretive tools at her
disposal to persuade an audience that “raindrops on roses”
is a subject better suited to voice than painting. She can be
ebullient one moment, wistful the next, but always a faithful
servant of the song under consideration.
Is there
a case to be made that she is one of Montreal’s best kept
secrets, at least on this side of the Atlantic? She’ll be
performing in France during the summer.
It is
no small accomplishment that Sonia Johnson is able to transmute
her vast life experience into the American Songbook and make you
forget that the music has been performed by hundreds of other
singers. If there is justice in the world – and we learn,
especially in the arts, that there often isn’t – “the
rest of Canada” and south of the border (including the dental
floss fields in Montana) will be Sonia’s backyard for the
indefinite future.
Be sure,
“come rain or come shine,” to catch Dialogue Sonia
& Stephen when they come to your neck of the woods.
