POP MUSIC REVIEW : Toni Tennille: At Home With the Songs and the Turf

The trend among pop divas these days is to trade in the perceived ephemera of the Top 40 for the sturdy nostalgia of the 1940s (not to mention the ‘30s).

When Linda Ronstadt cemented the fashion in her three-album collaboration with the late Nelson Riddle, there was something self-conscious about her turn toward the Broadway and big band standards. Maybe she was paying homage to the past, and maybe she was engaging in musical social climbing aimed at vaulting her into a supposedly more-cultured class.

Toni Tennille’s concert Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center didn’t sound like a musical museum visit or smack of a self-improvement course. The 47-year-old singer, best known for ‘70s pop-rock hits as the vocal half of the Captain & Tennille, sounded comfortable with the standards in a way that called to mind a more recent and appealing chapter of Ronstadt’s career--the “Songs of My Father” exploration of her familial roots in Mexican folk music.

In fact, Tennille cast her show--a benefit for the “Imagination Celebration” children’s arts festival--in a similar light. After opening with the up-tempo swing of “Tangerine,” she noted that her father, Frank Tennille, had been a singer with a big band before settling into the furniture business in Montgomery, Ala. “Just about everything I’ll sing tonight I learned from him,” she said.

It was a homecoming night of sorts for Tennille. She moved to Orange County with her parents as a teen-ager, and they and several other relatives who still live here were in the audience. The circumstances reinforced the feeling that Tennille was fully at home with a song list that touched on Ellington, Fats Waller, Johnny Mercer and George and Ira Gershwin, among others.

In song introductions delivered in a breathless, vivacious voice, Tennille offered useful background about the music and its creators, but, more important, she offered personal reminiscences about how some of the songs became implanted in her memory.

The standards she sang--”All of Me,” “Georgia on My Mind” and “Someone to Watch Over Me”--keep their appeal because they evoke the most familiar, widely shared sentiments in a way that is elegant, clever or lovely enough to take root. By sharing personal links to the songs, Tennille showed that she was in tune with what makes them standards--not some rarefied quality that turns them into icons to be preserved but a lively capacity to keep getting under listeners’ skins.

Tennille’s throaty, cottony voice proved well-suited to a number of blues-inflected songs--notably “Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine.” With a fine dynamic buildup, Tennille turned the tune from “Showboat” into the high point of her 95-minute performance and won her biggest ovation.

At times her diction could have been more precise, and Tennille didn’t offer many surprises in her phrasing. Though her familiar relationship with the material was a plus, it didn’t allow for exploration of fresh possibilities. For example, Tennille gave the Gershwins’ “But Not for Me” a conventionally rueful, flat reading that didn’t hint at the potential for self-conscious irony in the song’s self-pity. Any 20th-Century lyric containing a Shakespearean word such as lackaday simply invites the singer to have some fun with it.

Tennille’s three regular accompanists, including conductor/saxophonist Rusty Higgins, coordinated well with a pickup orchestra of strings and horns. For the encore, Tennille made a stab at linking one of her Captain & Tennille songs, “Come In From the Rain,” to the standards that had come before it. Of all the pop duo’s songs, she said, it was the most likely to be remembered decades from now.

Completing the family affair, Tennille’s husband, Daryl (The Captain) Dragon, walked on to play electronic keyboards that had been rolled out just for the encore. With a 27-piece band at their disposal, Dragon and Tennille didn’t need to add the emotionally trite tinkling that these keyboards invariably sprinkle all over pop ballads like so much saccharine.