JAZZ REVIEW : Weslia Whitfield: A Songwriter’s Singer

What’s a songwriter’s idea of heaven? Weslia Whitfield singing a full evening of their songs.

The San Francisco-based artist, who opened a six-night run at the Cinegrill Tuesday, is an unrivaled interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Praised, with complete justification, by such well-known artists as Tony Bennett, Michael Feinstein and Bobby Short, she is singing better than ever.

In the last few years, Whitfield has enhanced her already superb readings with a growing jazz sensibility (encouraged by her husband and musical director, pianist Mike Greensill). As with the warmly focused sounds of Carmen McRae and Irene Kral, it is an awareness of jazz that has more to do with rhythmic flow, lush timbres and precise note placement than it does with scat singing or manipulation of lyrics. There were times, in fact, especially in the slower numbers, when Whitfield’s astonishingly pure, airy high notes became almost instrumental--strikingly reminiscent of the soaring tenor of the young Stan Getz . . . jazz saxophone with words.

Typically, Whitfield’s program overflowed with Porter, Gershwin, Berlin, Arlen and Rodgers & Hart. But even the most familiar material emerged with thoughtful, new perspectives. “Just One of Those Things,” for example, commonly performed as an up-tempo flag-waver, was transformed into a kind of wry recollection of something that just hadn’t worked out. “When You Wish Upon a Star” was effectively extracted from the Disney orbit, and “How Deep Is the Ocean?” unfolded as the passionately intense love song that its lyrics so clearly define.

Whitfield leavened her tunes with humorous between-numbers patter (“Cabaret is just a jazz club with great lighting”). But she was content, for the most part, to let her music speak for itself. And with good reason. One of the finest masters of popular singing, Whitfield should be scrutinized by anyone attempting to learn the subtleties of the vocal arts, and treasured by listeners who value beautiful music, beautifully done.

* Weslia Whitfield, with pianist Mike Greensill and bassist Dean Reilly, at the Radisson Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel Cinegrill, 7000 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 466-7000. Through Sunday night. 8 p . m. $15 cover with $10 minimum purchase.