JAZZ REVIEW : Sarah Vaughan in a Divine Form

If Sarah Vaughan has any faults at all, they are a tendency toward silliness and overdramatization, but Sunday at El Camino College’s Marsee Auditorium, the great jazz singer left her excesses at home and treated listeners to a deliciously understated evening of music making marked by relaxation and subtlety. In the on-going battle of less versus more, chalk another one up for less.

Delivering items from her only-slightly-changing standard repertoire that longtime fans have come to expect, Vaughan displayed all her exemplary vocal talents, from those bell-clear, ringing high notes and middle-range tones given a girl-ish affectation to her gruff bottom notes that make you think of Billy Eckstine. Throughout her renditions, she applied her considerable jazz sensibility, stretching out some words--such as “fundamental” in the, at first, exquisitely slow “Wave”--like pulled taffy, booting others as rhythmically as would a drummer.

Vaughan varied her tempos, going for breakneck romps on such songs as “There Will Never Be Another You” and “On a Clear Day,” dancing at a medium pace on numbers like “Just Friends,” and slowing things down with warm ballads, which included “Misty,” “Here’s That Rainy Day” and Tadd Dameron’s largely forgotten masterwork, “If You Could See Me Now.” Her one inclusion from her latest “‘Brazilian Romance” (CBS) LP was the endearing “Photograph,” the words of which she has yet to memorize, though no one seemed to care except the artist. She closed, goaded by two standing ovations, with “Once in a While,” accompanying herself with grace at the keyboard.

George Gaffney, piano, Andy Simpkins, bass and Harold Jones, drums backed Vaughan in the manner to which she’s become accustomed, never getting underfoot and providing her with a firm musical chair to lean back on when she wanted one.