JAZZ REVIEW : Sommers Shows She Is a Singer for All Seasons

Joanie Sommers turned back the clock when she performed Saturday at Maxwell’s last weekend of jazz.

The singer, who defined an entire generation with her vivacious delivery of “For Those Who Think Young” on behalf of Pepsi-Cola, was here to apply her trademark exuberance to the old standards. It was as if time had been suspended.

During her first set, Sommers worked familiar territory for those in love with the American songbook, doing numbers from the likes of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Henry Mancini. To her credit, she stamped the old chestnuts with her own upbeat personality, bringing a freshness to everything she sang. Obviously, Sommers is still thinking young.

Backed by pianist Daniel May, bassist Benjamin May and drummer John Whited, the vocalist employed a lively delivery while working up an intimacy appropriate to the room. Her trademark tone, without benefit of direct comparison, seems to have changed little since the days she had a hit with “Johnny Get Angry” in 1962. The major difference comes when she moves into the upper register, where her voice takes on a sandy, somewhat sexy maturity.

As Sommers noted from the bandstand, her three-day stand (scheduled to end Sunday) was the final weekend of jazz at Maxwell’s, and the loss in the music community will be felt. (There are plans to renovate the pier-side restaurant over the summer, but the place will remain open for dining.)

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Sommers, dressed in a simple white pantsuit, twisted and sashayed to the rhythms, bringing the same youthful enthusiasm to her stage presence that she brought to the music. Sometimes she would sing off-mike in scat phrases as pianist Mays took his solo. And always there was just a hint of mischief in her delivery as she lay slightly behind the beat, or hung on certain syllables as if she just couldn’t let them go.

Her range may not be expansive--there was a touch of unsteadiness in her highest pitched tones--but her sense of dynamics brought a sense of drama to quieter passages, and spine-tingling directness to those sung at higher volumes. With this control, and this material, she’s the kind of singer you can listen to all night.

Backed by only the piano, she opened a medley of Berlin tunes with a warm “What’ll I Do?” then, with the trio, moved directly into a sweetly sung “Remember.” A sense of devotion came across in “Always,” but the medley closed in ironic tones with a last verse of “Remember” (“I guess you forgot to remember”) giving the series a particularly melancholic touch.

She showed her up-tempo skills on a Marty Paich arrangement of Cole Porter’s “So in Love,” her voice skipping easily through the lyric before lingering here and there on a single tone. Her most playful delivery came on “Too Close for Comfort,” where she stretched and compressed phrases like modeling clay.

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Pianist May gets a lot of practice backing singers the likes of Barbara Morrison and Stephanie Haynes at Santa Monica’s Loew’s Hotel, and it shows. The word “accompanist” doesn’t really apply in his case. He works as an equal with the vocalist, listening and playing off the voice, adding ornamentation without being over decorative.

His brother, bassist Benjamin, worked comfortably in all rhythmic formats, but his strength is his walk, which is solid, sure-footed and constantly variable. Drummer Whited used his brushes and an array of cymbals to shade and color the proceedings, without ever becoming obtrusive.

Without Sommers, the instrumentalist displayed their wares during “On the Trail,” the loping rhythm providing pianist May with a springboard into a chordal-rich solo. Bassist May’s bowed improvisation on “Seascape” rolled through melodic changes in a way that suggested the swells of the sea.

Credit should be given booker Jim Vaughn for bringing such high-quality performers into the intimate room over the past few years. Without Maxwell’s, Orange County no longer has a venue that consistently presents acoustic, mainstream music.

Might we suggest they reconsider?