MUSIC REVIEW : Khan Hits Heights and Never Lets Up

Singer Chaka Khan and her management were so jittery about Wednesday’s concert at the Bacchanal--the opening night of her current tour--that they made an unusual request: Please don’t review the show.

The fact that they said they wouldn’t mind having the tour’s second gig (Thursday in Redondo Beach) critiqued could have been taken as a slight to San Diego, as though this were little more than a warm-up for the real thing.

But, in actuality, Khan was planning to “try some new things” and reportedly was genuinely concerned about whether they would come off.

She needn’t have worried. After a wake-up set by local blues-funksters Len Rainey and the Midnight Players, Khan got the racially diverse, capacity house into her corner before she even stepped onto the stage. With her eight-piece band playing (including two vocalists), Khan began singing from offstage, and the mere sound of that familiar set of pipes evoked polite pandemonium.

Khan is prone to do the unexpected, which may help to explain why she’s not a bigger star, and her first selection turned out to be an effectively funked-up version of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.” Her emergence from the shadows presented surprise No. 2: Although she still has the Big Hair, the singer has lost a considerable amount of the weight she’s carried in recent years, and she appeared even more svelte than in her days fronting the mid-’70s band Rufus. The audience would learn that a lithe Khan produces more than her usual quota of vocal acrobatics.

Ever since Rufus hit paydirt in 1974 with the Stevie Wonder- penned “Tell Me Something Good,” Khan has seemed the most natural heiress to Aretha Franklin’s throne. Each is blessed with a soul-siren of a voice, a high-octane instrument that works best at altitudes other singers can’t even reach.

But, although the 49-year-old Franklin remains a formidable talent, she lost her fastball years ago and, like a veteran pitcher, must now rely on wily delivery to sell a song. At 38, Khan’s voice, if anything, is getting stronger, yet early in Wednesday’s concert one wondered if perhaps she weren’t playing that trump too often.

Throughout the first several songs, including 1984’s funky “This is My Night” and 1986’s mid-tempo ballad, “Love of a Lifetime,” Khan stayed mostly in her upper register, repeatedly hitting and sustaining impossible notes full-throttle in a bit of virtuosic exhibitionism that drew frequent ovations. She started so “hot,” in fact, that one feared the atomic soprano would be a hoarse alto by the middle of her set.

I should be so hoarse.

Khan kept the expressive flame high during both 1984’s well-received ballad, “Through the Fire,” and an as-yet-unrecorded dance tune, forcing the listener to recognize a key to her appeal. Khan’s voice has the potential to overwhelm by sheer volume and timbre, yet it never wears because she uses it in a very musical way.

Where Franklin’s gospel background was evident in everything she sang, Khan’s sinewy phrasing echoes the jazz jones that has led her to record a bebop medley (on 1982’s “Chaka Khan”), to collaborate with such jazzbos as Miles Davis, George Benson and Bobby McFerrin (on 1988’s “CK” album), and to write a song called “Coltrane Dreams” (for her 1986 opus, “Destiny”).

On a new song, “Everything Changes,” Khan put those jazz chops to work, alternating between a staccato trumpet attack on certain lines and slinky, sax-like phrasing elsewhere. She even tossed in a little scat-singing. Whatever she did sounded glorious and, for the most part, elicited idolatrous response.

As to the “new things” she was going to try out, they certainly had nothing to do with staging, which was basic and unpretentious. Khan and her two female vocalists had fun--at one point, they did an “Egyptian” dance while the band cooked--but there was little planned choreography or risky theatricality.

Perhaps she was thinking of the newer material she’d be debuting at the Bacchanal. Khan did at least half a dozen songs from a yet to be released album, and a couple of these were positioned too close together late in the show, killing an impressive head of steam that had taken more than an hour to build.

Such oldies as the Rufus-era ballad “Sweet Thing,” “Tell Me Something Good,” “I’m a Woman (I’m a Backbone),” “Stop on By,” and the hit single “I Feel for You” salvaged much of the lost momentum. The quixotic Khan, however, answered a fervent call for an encore--not with a dance-jam--but with a sultry reading of the ‘50s jazz ballad, “Don’t Go to Strangers.”

Khan did some of her best singing of the night on this tune--including some death-defying chromatic passages--and got great response. Her performance suggested what fun the closet jazzer might have if she tied her hair back, wore shades and played a good jazz club under a nom de ruse.

But this was an occasion to let her fans have fun, and Khan did so by finishing the show with a version of the murderously funky “Ain’t Nobody” that brought the whole room to its collective feet in a sing-and-dance-along. If this show was a test, Khan passed.