A voice that did
everything she asked
Melissa Manchester starts her comeback at the Cinegrill in
October, 2004.
From
the first words out of her mouth, you knew that Melissa
Manchester does singing like singing should be done. “I’ll know you by
your heart,” she sang, and a man’s old dry heart seemed to jump right up
and say yes.
True, there
were a couple of numbers – “Bend” was one -- in which the heart said oh,
come on, now. But when she got through with a tune like “So’s My Old Man,”
with its tale of head-to-head, eye-to-eye romance, you realized you’d been
taken right back to the 1960s when the ladies of the land came out from
behind the apron and said let’s dance, buddy.
Manchester stood on a great big pile of well-played music to get her
message across, stacked up by, among others, Peter Hume, who can twang the
hollow body guitar in a sort of white-guy, down-home fashion that struck
just the right tone.
Manchester
seemed to specialize in that sort of action. “I Got
Eyes” was an even saucier let’s-get-it-on-pal ditty in which swagger was
the watchword, bolstered by the work of John Lewis, drums; Cliff Hugo,
bass, and Stephan Oberhoff, keyboards.
The lyrics were not so salty, of course, in her vintage slow balladry.
Here that world-class voice covered up any taint of the cornball or the
hammy in the words, burying it in that peaches and cream sound that she
produced all night. Every note was made to carry a tasty, well aimed shot
of emotion. It was a voice that did everything she asked of it.
A good example was “When Paris Was a Woman,” when the voice took on a
stentorian, masculine tone, presumably in tribute to Gertrude Stein’s
girlfriend Alice B. Toklas, who narrates the ballad of Picasso, Hemingway
and Matisse in the 1920s. Or maybe the idea was “to the barricades,” since
Melissa kept balling her little fist concerning the days when Paris loved
so well.
The
Manchester face is a beautiful one, true, but her hands,
too, are strikingly delicate and graceful. She made them count in her
Barbra Streisand tribute, “The Kind of a Man a Woman Needs,” where she
left the mike on its stand and opened her arms at the last line in a
memorable gesture of generosity.
That really was the underlying theme of this October night at the
Cinegrill in Hollywood at the outset of her first personal appearance tour
in more than 20 years. Manchester, now 51, put herself across as a lady
with a great, generous, open heart --- in a song like “Easy” (“if you want
me, you can have me”), or “When I Look Down That Road” (to her hometown
where she remembers her mother’s “oatmeal kisses”), or “After All This
Time” (“baby, we got this right”) or “Come in From the Rain” (“I want to
be the one who keeps you from the rain”).
You wanted to believe her, because pop could sure use something like that
these days.
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