Carla White Takes Fresh Swing Through the Old Standards

For a jazz singer, a New York reputation doesn’t always translate into high visibility on the West Coast. When Carla White--well-known and much-praised in Manhattan--played a one-nighter Friday at Lunaria, it was with minimal visibility. That was a shame, because White--a singer who blends interpretive intelligence with a solid musical grounding and a sure sense of swing--deserves to be heard.

Dressed in a simple but elegant blouse and slacks, her blond hair coiffed in a short, no-nonsense cut, White worked the sometimes noisy room with easy confidence. During the up-tempo numbers, she became one of the players, her voice taking on the role of instrumental soloist. On the ballads, she focused her creative spotlight onto the songs, the lyrics and the stories they told. Indeed, her capacity to range so freely and easily from impressive scat singing to rich interpretation was one of her most striking achievements.

Her material was familiar and straightforward, but she did not hesitate to rework old standards and almost always managed to cast them in a new light. “Detour Ahead,” for example, was done with meticulous concern for the lyrics’ symbolic imagery. “Speak Low” retained its lyrical flow throughout White’s surging, rhythmic rendering.

But the biggest surprise was her scat singing. Many vocalists can produce effective-sounding spontaneous melodic lines, using syllables to articulate notes in the style of an instrumentalist. But few do it with White’s harmonic awareness and creative imagination. In her soloing on “Night and Day,” she improvised an entire chorus in double time--that is, articulating her melodies at twice the speed of the basic tempo. Remarkable as a technical achievement, it was even more effective for the fact that her lines were filled with unusual twists and turns, energized by her nonstop rhythmic drive.

White was given particularly sympathetic support by Biff Hannon on piano, Tom Warrington on bass and Dick Weller on drums. Warrington, especially, sounded at the top of his form. In a brisk romp through Charlie Parker’s “Bloomdido,” his walking bass line accompaniments were irresistibly driving, exceeded in impact only by the superb solo he tossed into the middle of the tune.

The only downside of the evening was the awareness that the performance was a one-night shot. If nothing else, it demonstrated that White has the skill and the talent to warrant much wider West Coast exposure.