by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I chose as last night’s TV “feature” a PBS pledge-break
program called Michael Bublé: Tour Stop 148. Michael Bublé, like Andrew Lloyd Webber, seems to be one of those
people you either love or hate — either you think he’s the ultimate destruction
of pop music forever or you think he’s a little god — and I recently shocked a
friend by telling him I liked Bublé. “Well,” I said somewhat defensively, “I
don’t think he’s a great singer,
but it’s nice to know there’s someone out there who’ll still be able to sing the Great American Songbook
after Tony Bennett croaks.” Alas, Michael Bublé has become one of those
modern-day artists who doesn’t trust just himself, his voice and his music to
win an audience. Like Beyoncé — a great soul singer in the tradition of Dinah
Washington and Diana Ross who is currently burying her true talent in
overproduced recordings so full of “samples” you can barely hear her and even
more overproduced videos that look like they were directed by the love-child of
Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl — Buble has filled his current touring show
full of “production,” including projected images of sky, sunsets, clouds, fires
and whatnot behind him, the use of his projection screens to show multiple
images of him so he looks like he’s about to do a solo re-enactment of the last
scene of The Lady from Shanghai,
and an oversized band that contains rock players, jazz players, string players
and everything else he can think of he might need for whatever he wants to
sing.
What’s more, the sheer elaborateness of his production means he has to do
the same show every time and can’t vary his repertoire according to the mood of
an audience the way the great cabaret singers of the past could do. Though
PBS’s announcers were proudly proclaiming Bublé as one of their own because his
first U.S. TV appearance was on the public network, the shows I’ve seen him on
before were on NBC and overlapped some of the same repertoire as he did last
night as well as some of the same lack of focus. Bublé is, quite frankly, at
his best when he’s singing songs of the 1930’s and 1940’s; when he tries to do
more contemporary material — or, even worse, when he tries to write more
contemporary material himself — he seems to wander off cue and spoil the
simplicity of his act. Last night he opened with “Cry Me a River,” the 1953
song by Arthur Hamilton that was a huge hit for Julie London in 1955 with a simple
backing by jazz guitarist Barney Kessel and bassist Bob Leatherwood (no other
instruments!). (Wikipedia lists at least two more recent songs called “Cry Me a
River,” by a band called Pride and Glory in 1994 and Justin Timberlake in
2002.) Wikipedia’s page on “Cry Me a River” says that the song was originally
written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in the 1955 film Pete Kelly’s
Blues but was dropped from the final cut —
though Ella recorded a superb version in 1961 on her album Clap
Hands, Here Comes Charlie! Bublé drowned
his version in an overwrought orchestral arrangement — in fact that was my
complaint about much of this show, that he was doing big-orchestra versions of
songs that had worked far better for other singers with smaller bands.
Then he
did a version of Little Willie John’s “Fever” that successfully combined John’s
R&B original and the superb jazz cover by Peggy Lee (again, with just two
musicians behind her — bassist Joe Mondragon and drummer Shelly Manne); Lee
dropped one of John’s lyrics and added some of her own that turned the mood of
the song from fervent and pleading to detached and cool, and Bublé sang both
the verse Lee had dropped and at least some of the ones she’d added, to good
effect. Then, alas, Bublé departed the older material he does best and did one
of his own songs, “I Just Haven’t Met You Yet,” which was an O.K. modern-day
romantic ballad but hardly at the level of the older songs on the program, and
he followed it up with another recent song, “It’s a Beautiful Day.” Then there
came the first of the pledge breaks with which KPBS studded these programs —
and whereas previous PBS pledge-break musical specials have already aggravated
us with the repeated (ad nauseam)
statement that what you’re seeing is only a fraction of the full program, which
you can get for a three-figure contribution to your public TV station, this one
threw fragments of Bublé’s performances into the pledge breaks themselves,
hinting that you’d get complete versions of these songs later — which you
didn’t. On the first pledge break there was a hint that we’d get a version of
the song “I’ve Got the World on a String” and a mention of Frank Sinatra, who
recorded it in 1953 on his first session with the great arranger Nelson Riddle,
though there’s a just as beautiful version 20 years earlier by Louis Armstrong
— and Bublé’s version, at least from the fragments we got to hear, wasn’t as
good as Armstrong’s or Sinatra’s but still communicated the song effectively
and showcased him in the material he does best. Then we got two fragments of
Bublé’s version of “Try a Little Tenderness,” one in rehearsal (there were a lot of shots of people setting up or tearing down his
sets and interviews with members of his behind-the-scenes crew, in an attempt
to distinguish this from every other PBS concert special with a major star) and
one in performance, which indicated that once again, as with “Fever,” Bublé had
tried to combine the two best-known versions of this song — by Frank Sinatra in
the 1940’s (quiet and prayerful) and Otis Redding in the 1960’s (loud and
soulful) — whether or not they were compatible.
After that Bublé did the
Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse ballad “Feelin’ Good,” which has received a lot of great performances over the years, including a
superb, unbeatable one by Carmen McRae on her 1964 live album Woman
Talk and a great instrumental version by
John Coltrane in 1965. There are also editions by Nina Simone (a great
performance as far as she is
concerned, but saddled with an overblown, tasteless arrangement by Hal Mooney)
and Jennifer Hudson (who tried to copy Simone’s but, alas, copied Mooney’s
arrangement as well), and Bublé too worked from the Simone-Mooney version
rather than Carmen’s superbly understated one (and I missed Carmen’s marvelous
vocal ornamentation, particularly her change of the leap in the melody on the
line “it’s a new day, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new life for me” into a scale).
Then Bublé did “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” in the style of the great
Sinatra-Riddle version from the 1950’s — and did it quite well. After that, however, it was back to contemporary material — “I
Wonder Who’s Loving You” and a pledge-break excerpt of “Kiss and Hold Her
Tight” (interrupted with another pledge-break excerpt, “Save the Last Dance for
Me,” the Drifters’ 1959 hit and one that, judging from what little we got to
hear of it, would have been right up Bublé’s alley) before his next full song,
“Home,” a Bublé original which he decided to use as an excuse to fire confetti
at the audience and do bits of other songs with the word “love” in their
titles, the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and Elvis Presley’s “Burning Love”
(Elvis’s last #1 hit — in 1972, five years before he died — and though I’m
hardly a big Elvis fan he did
sing this song with far more throbbing emotion and soul than Bublé could
muster) and a fragment of Leon Russell’s “A Song for You” that’s been
manhandled by all too many singers — Russell’s own version is quite good but to
me this is another song “owned” by Carmen McRae, who staked her claim to it on
her 1972 live album The Great American Songbook and who sang the hell out of it with a level of
passion and emotion that totally eluded Bublé.
After that we heard Bublé’s
orchestra playing the outro to his concert and Bublé himself taking his bows,
saying goodbye to the audience and the final credits flashing preceding …
another pledge break. You might have turned off the TV set (or changed the
channel) at this moment, but if you had, you’d have missed the simplest, the
most beautiful and the best Bublé performance of the night: his encore, in
which he sat alone at a piano and sang and played “Smile,” the beautiful song
Charlie Chaplin wrote as the theme for what I think is his greatest movie, Modern
Times (1936). Though, according to the Wikipedia
page on the song, Chaplin had nothing to do with the lyrics — they were added
by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons in 1954 — their theme of surviving through
adversity and holding to hope and happiness in the middle of despair is very Chaplinesque, and Bublé responded to the song’s
simple, affirmative mood with low-keyed singing that made far more of an
emotional effect than the heaving and straining he’d been doing, especially on
modern material, though much of the evening. Michael Bublé is unquestionably a
singer of talent, and the fact that he doesn’t always use his talent in the
ways that showcase it at its best makes his work and his career even more
frustrating than it might be if he had less vocal talent and less potential for
real greatness.
