by Alan Young, NY Music Daily/Lucid Culture
A Starry, Starry Night with Svetlana at Joe’s Pub
Saturday night at the sold-out album release show for her latest cd Night at the Movies at Joe’s Pub, singer Svetlana further crystallized the lush sound she’s been gravitating further and further toward with each successive record. The erstwhile leader of longtime New York swing jazz favorites the Delancey 5 has never sounded more lustrous, or more dynamic than with this particular project. Working with producer Matt Pierson, she took a deep bucket list of well over a hundred songs associated with movies and whittled them down to a somewhat less epic fourteen. She played most of them at this show. What was most striking, at this show, was how serpentine and latin-inflected they’d become.
Drummer Henry Conerway was having a great time with the clave, whether implied or straight ahead, further enhanced by the variety of percussion textures and polyrhythms from Rogerio Boccato. It’s a new groove for Svetlana, and it serves her well. Likewise, there was more interplay among band members than ever before. Svetlana is a connoisseur of charts, and she likes to hand out assignments. Bassist Endea Owens, who’s sometimes the princess of darkness in this band, was appointed Secretary of Entertainment for this gig, spinning out boisterously chugging lows.
Likewise, alto saxophonist Christopher McBride got plenty of coy exchanges early on with trumpeter Noah Galpern and trombonist Corey Wilcox: echo effects and triplets were playfully recurrent tropes. Pianist Willerm Delisfort took charge of trick endings and what were almost false starts, while guitarist Jocelyn Gould played her cards close to the vest with expansive postbop chords and terse bluesiness.
In front of the band, Svetlana celebrated the great contributions that immigrants bring to this country. As a kid, she’d escape the repressive atmosphere around her by going to the movies, and eventually made it out for real at age 18. Dreams, literal and otherwise are another of the album’s major themes, She celebrated them with a starry arrangement of In the Moonlight – from the 1995 movie Sabrina – along with a crescedoing, shapeshifting version of Pure Imagination, a druggy ballad from the Willy Wonka movie. And Moon River, which began as a bittersweet, bucolic duet for guitar and voice, was arguably the most unexpectedly poignant of all of them: huckleberriness be damned!
The most epic number was the elegaic Remember Me – from the 2017 animated film Coco. The group marched defiantly, second-line style through Almost There – from the 2009 Princess and the Frog soundtrack – and an unannounced considerably more enigmatic ballad. Svetlana returns from US tour to a show at the Django on Oct 18; it’s reasonable to expect her to keep this new direction going.