Schuur’s Warm Style Gets Lost Amid Vocal Peaks, Valleys

At its best, Diane Schuur’s voice can be one of the most seductively soothing sounds in all of jazz. At its worst, when she pushes herself into the strident upper limits of her range, its penetrating qualities can make far too much progress into the headache centers of the brain.

Her performance at the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach on Sunday afternoon included instances of both those aspects of her singing.

Felony drug charges were formally filed Monday against actor Robert Downey Jr. stemming from his arrest last month at a Palm Springs hotel. Schuur came on stage wearing a bright red outfit and her trademark dark glasses (she was blinded at birth in a hospital accident). Seated at the piano, accompanied by the Dave Pier Big Band, she started her set with one of her best efforts of the day: a svelte rendering of “Travelin’ Light,” showcasing her potential for warm, touching singing.

The following number, “You’d Be So Easy to Love,” took her into more up-tempo mode. Swinging with ease, she affirmed her capacity to drive her vocals with the loose, improvisational qualities of a natural jazz artist. Further underscoring those qualities in a spirited midsection of the arrangement, she scatted in highflying unison with the entire band.

The balance of the program never quite reached the level of the first two numbers. Schuur sang standards--”Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “We’ll Be Together Again,” “Over the Rainbow”--as well as some material from her album with the Count Basie Orchestra and a spontaneous reading of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

The problem, despite Schuur’s wonderfully amiable quality, her pleasant interaction with her audience, was her tendency to sacrifice the storytelling qualities of her material to the vagaries of her musical line. The result, too often, was the interruption of her phrasing with sequences of trumpet-like squeals and, occasionally, the holding of notes purely for the purpose of demonstrating her virtuosic breath control.

It was the sort of approach that might work for an instrumentalist but causes problems for singers who, after all, have responsibilities to the words as well as the music. And the wide range between the highs and lows of her performance made it clear that Schuur needs to pay attention to the lyrics as well as the melodies and harmonies of her songs if she is to reach her full creative potential.