The irony about Steve
Lawrence and Eydie Gorme is that two of the youngest of the major interpreters
(they're both about the same generation as Elvis Presley)
of the Great American Songbook have the hardest time being accepted by contemporary
audiences. Lately, it's become somewhat modish for younger listeners to admit
they like Ella Fitzgerald or Peggy Lee - but will a rock star go to bat for
Steve and Eydie, the way Bono did for Frank Sinatra? Or will they make it onto
MTV, as Tony Bennett did? Not likely.
Yet they are more than
adequately supported by their own generation - when they played Westbury, Long
Island, two weeks ago, for four nights, there wasn't an empty seat anywhere.
What's more, Mr. Lawrence has just released his first new album in many years,
"Steve Lawrence Sings Sinatra" (GL Music) and
approximately two dozen CDs of the couple's music have been reissued in the
millennial era.
So let me say this plainly:
Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme are among the great treasures of American showbiz
and pop music. They are great entertainers and
great musicians. Their act contains more firstrate songs, sung better, than
any cabaret room in New York. In terms of musical content, they are endowed
with more harmonic and melodic invention - not to mention sheer swing - than
most of the city's jazz joints. And they are funnier than any act I've ever
heard in a comedy club.
An evening with Steve
and Eydie (the "ladies first" rule doesn't apply in entertainment,
i.e., Louis & Keely, Burns & Allen, Nichols & May) is less like
a concert in
the traditional sense of the term than a variety show out of the golden age
of television - they were in, fact, the only great singers to emerge out of
that medium - you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll kiss whatever reservations you
may have goodbye.
Steve Lawrence, 67, and
Eydie Gorme, 70, started working together about 50 years ago on the original
"Tonight Show" under Steve Allen, were married 45 years
ago ("How long you married," someone in the crowd asked. "Six
inches," was Mr. Lawrence's instantaneous reply), and became a full-time,
showbiz team in 1960. They have announced that their current tour, which they
have titled "One More for the Road," will be their last. This means
that while they probably will do an occasional concert in one of the bigger
cities, this is their final schlep across America.
When the twosome make their entrance, the first thing you notice is how little they've aged: at their peak, they had two of the finest vocal instruments in American pop. Ms. Gorme has grown a little stouter ("Baby, you're the only investment I ever had that doubled," Mr. Lawrence quipped), and her chops at first betray a degree of deterioration, which itself deteriorates as the evening progresses.
Ms. Gorme's specialty
is big, romantic ballads, particularly those from 1960s Broadway shows: "What
Did I Have That I Don't Have" ("On a Clear Day") or
"If He Walked Into My Life" ("Mame"). She instills them
with a sincerity and subtlety that make Barbra Streisand seem like an overbaked
wannabe by comparison. Mr. Lawrence's thing is swingers, and he possesses the
musical knowhow as well as the chops to sing musically dazzling contrapuntal
lines around his wife while she lays out the basic melody.
One major highlight of
the act is a performance piece that is essentially a medley of "Fly Me
to the Moon" and "Fly Me to the Moon." She begins by singing
it straight and beautiful, starting with the verse, the way songwriter Bart
Howard first conceived the song, as an intimate ballad (there's a fine recording
on "Eydie in Love").
Then he comes in, and swings the holy heck out of it courtesy of the famous
Sinatra-Basie arrangement.
Mr. Lawrence himself sounds
even stronger on his new album, "Steve Lawrence Sings Sinatra" (produced
by the couple's son, David Lawrence) than he does in person, going from low
to high notes effortlessly, and holding them like he has all the lung power
in the world. It's somewhat disappointing, however, that Mr.
Lawrence has elected to replicate the classic original Sinatra arrangements
rather than commissioning new ones. Even though he never stoops to parroting
Sinatra's exact vocal lines, Mr. Lawrence is a superlative vocal artist in his
own right, and he doesn't need to confine himself within the great man's shadow.
Though Mr. Lawrence and
Ms. Gorme are two of Sinatra's foremost disciples, they should never be mistaken
- especially by themselves - for mere imitators.
They're principally regarded as two Jewish kids from the Bronx (her family was
Turkish and Sephardic, his father was a cantor), but where other Jewish singers
have been either exclusively swinging (Mel Torme) or schmaltzy (Eddie Fisher),
only the Lawrences are both at the same time. Their backgrounds in different
fields - her with the big bands (principally Tex Beneke) and in a parallel incarnation
as a Spanish language recording star, him with an early career as a rock-era
teen idol (like Johnny Mathis or Fabian), both of them on Broadway ("What
Makes Sammy Run," "Golden Rainbow"). Their influences and their
experiences give their work
a sense of dimension and texture.
Happily, many of the team's
best recordings are back in print. Of the Lawrence-Gorme classic albums now
available - mostly through what they call the "yenta-net," their own
steveandeydie.com and collectorschoice.com - at least three are absolutely essential:
first, a twofer CD of a pair of Ms. Gorme's best ballad albums,
"Softly as I Leave You / Don't Go To Strangers." Here on these laments
to lost love, her theatrical-style belting is offset by a rare vulnerability.
Hers is the best combination of pure power and sublime sensitivity since Judy
Garland.
Mr. Lawrence's strongest
solo album is "Academy Award Losers," now expanded with six bonus
cuts. Abetted by the equally jazzy and witty Billy May, Mr. Lawrence is loose,
swinging, and inventive, proving that he could compete with Torme, Joe Williams
or any other major jazz singer. And I can't imagine anyone else who would climax
a super-uptempo rendition of "I'll Remember April" with an imitation
of Senor Wences. Of the couple's many fine duet albums, go for the show-tunes
twofer, "Two on the Aisles / Together on Broadway," which climaxes
in a treatment of "Sunrise, Sunset" so compelling that it could induce
Jesse Jackson
to order Manishevitz.