My friend Sam, who lives around the corner, wrote earlier in the week, “Saturday night Babs Streisand is giving a one time only night at the Village Vangard where she got her start. Can you imagine?”
It was her first time back to the club in 48 years:
Max Gordon, late owner of the Village Vanguard, liked to tell the possibly exaggerated story of the “little pisher” who hung around the club in 1961, pestering him for a chance to perform. He flicked her away for weeks, but when his headliner, Miles Davis, was later than usual for a gig one night, he finally gave the Brooklyn teen permission to audition a few songs.
The NYTimes says that last night she upended the social order. Briefly:
Concerts by Ms. Streisand are rare, but the scale of Saturday’s show was exceptional enough to briefly upend the natural social order of celebrity events. To promote her new album, “Love Is the Answer” [link], which will be released on Tuesday, she was booked for one night at the Vanguard, legal capacity 123 — absurdly small for an artist who has sold 71 million albums. The scarcity was made more acute by the fact that 74 seats had been given away through online fan contests [link], and video cameras would be eating up some of the little space remaining.
The ticket was so impossibly hot that a satellite party for spillover V.I.P.’s was arranged uptown at the Waldorf-Astoria, where a live video feed was shown to a few dozen people, including former Mayor David Dinkins, various Streisand family members and employees of Ms. Streisand’s record company, Sony. In the elegant Louis XVI room, where baroque chandeliers reflected the flickering table candles, a voice from one table erupted during Ms. Streisand’s first song, “Here’s to Life”: “Oooh, is that Sarah Jessica Parker?” (Indeed it was, front and center.)
For a concert at, say, the far roomier Madison Square Garden, much of the Waldorf crowd could count on a plum seat. But access for the Vanguard went mostly to average fans from around the world, some of whom said they had never been able to afford a Streisand ticket before.
Streisand friends who made Donna Karan and Nicole Kidman were there. As were Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
For Love Is the Answer, the album the concert is meant to promote, she has chosen thirteen songs whose average year of composition is 1963. Actually, she sings each song twice: on one CD backed by Diana Krall and her jazz quartet, on the other immersed in a full orchestral soup concocted by arranger Johnny Mandel. The soup is, shall we say, rich. The boîte-style versions give a better taste of the deprivation that made Barbara “Barbra.”
The great pop singers of the Golden Era delivered an emotional wallop powered either by the compression of anger or the sublimation of despair. Usually men were in the first category and women in the second—Sinatra and Garland, archetypally. Streisand defied the pattern. Her subtext has always been the fury of the kooky, odd-looking girl getting revenge by asserting her own kind of femininity—and trying to move the culture toward her instead of the other way around.
Anthony Tommasini asks her about her diaphragm:
Did Ms. Streisand, like an opera singer, think incessantly about breathing deeply from the diaphragm, about using the diaphragm as a natural support for her voice?
“Never,” she said, sitting up straight on a couch in the living room of a friend’s Upper West Side apartment, looking elegant in a dark dress and lacy shoulder wrap. Everything about singing came to her naturally, she explained, adding, a little sheepishly, that she hardly ever does vocal exercises. She was giving a rare interview, in person, apparently curious to speak with a classical music critic about vocal technique.
“I’m terrible about warming up,” she said. “That’s just too boring to me.” Years ago Tony Bennett sent her a tape with vocal exercises on it. “I listened to it once,” she said. She does keep handy one tape with solfège vocal routines that a voice coach made for her. “It’s very simple,” she said. “But I find myself doing the exercises only in the car on the way to the recording session.” That is too last-minute to do much good, she added.
Not really related: Video of George Bush kissing the legendary liberal after she was honored at the Kennedy Center last December.