JAZZ REVIEW : Betty Carter: Mannerisms Spoil Content

“Endurance test” was a thought that kept coming to mind during Betty Carter’s opening at the Cinegrill on Wednesday night. At least it did after the first hour of the show. By the time the second hour rolled around, “running the gantlet” became an even more persistent thought.

Carter simply didn’t seem to know when to stop. And, given her extremely idiosyncratic musical techniques and highly personalized stage mannerisms, stopping was exactly what this member of the audience was hoping for.

In fact, the problem was less a matter of too much than too little. Too much style and too little substance. Carter doesn’t interpret a song so much as she engulfs it. And she engulfed one song after another--in medleys and individually--in the same chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out manner.

As always, her interpretations were based on floating speech-song patterns and a lot of free-form scatting, delivered with enough physicality to make Joe Cocker look like a tree. She placed her lines freely, delaying them here, stretching them there. Unfortunately, she didn’t always do this in clear reference to either the rhythms or the chord changes of the songs, generally blowing away the essence of the originals in the process.

Creative as her method may have been, in a kind of damn-the- torpedoes, iconoclastic sense, it was an odd way to approach jazz improvising.

For example, is a performance of “If I Should Lose You” that abandons both the melody and the chords a jazz variation? Or is it an animated theatrical reading with musical accompaniment? For this listener, the answer was more often the latter. Despite the appearance of jazz singing, little of what Carter did had either the swing or the energy of the improvisational art. More often, her odd grimaces and musical meanderings came across as sheer theatrical posturing.

This was especially disturbing during those moments--”Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and her own generally excellent originals were good examples--when traces of her real skills slipped through the cracks in her style. At those times, it was apparent that Carter has everything it takes to be a superb jazz singer. But her rush to uniqueness has pushed aside content in favor of manner.

Carter, who was backed by an exceptionally gifted young trio consisting of pianist Darrell Grant, bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Troy Davis, continues at the Cinegrill through Saturday and returns Wednesday through Sept. 30.