by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 10 p.m. NBC
aired a one-hour special featuring Canadian singer, songwriter and pop star
Michael Bublé called simply bublé (all lower-case), sponsored by a sparkling-water soft drink called
bubly (Bublé appears in their commercials doing a pun between his name and that
of the product). I’ve seen some of Bublé’s holiday specials but it was a bit of
a surprise for him to turn up just doing a pretty ordinary performance show. I
don’t think he’s a great singer —
and the songs he’s written himself seem like pretty anodyne pop that don’t rise
anywhere near to the heights of the Great American Songbook selections he also
performs — but as I’ve said before about his previous shows, it’s nice to know
that the standards repertory of the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s will have someone who can still sing it once Tony Bennett finally
croaks. I liked this Bublé show more than I have some of his others mainly
because it seemed much lower-keyed — at least until the final segment. He was
backed by a big band with a string section, but most of the arrangements were
relatively understated and allowed him to project the songs effectively without
having to strain against shrieking strings and shrill brass. There were also
the predictable montages about his early career, including one compiled from
home videos Bublé’s parents took of him when he was a kid singing into a “mike
stand” he’d improvised from a broom, and another in which he paid tribute to
Warner Bros. Records for signing him 18 years ago even though one Warners
executive said, “Why do we need him? We’ve got Sinatra on Reprise.” Bublé
reminded him that Sinatra was already dead and they’d need a living talent if
they wanted new records of that sort of music and singing style.
Bublé opened bublé with “When You’re Smiling,” a standard if there
ever was one, composed by Larry Shay, Mark Fisher and Joe Goodwin; the
Wikipedia page on the song shows a photo of Billie Holiday in 1947 (10 years
after she made a particularly beautiful recording of it with Lester Young — two
takes exist and Young’s solo is almost completely different in each — and her
version and Louis Armstrong’s from when the song was still relatively new in
1929 remain my favorites). Bublé’s version was relaxed and made the most of the
song’s optimistic lyrics. Then he did a medley of songs associated with Frank
Sinatra, Dean Martin and Louis Prima — he rates Prima considerably higher as a
talent than I do and as he croaked his way through a reasonable simulacrum of
Prima’s assault on “Just a Gigolo” I couldn’t help but wish he’d learned that
song from the 1931 recordings by Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong instead. The
Sinatra part of his medley was “Fly Me to the Moon” — in a quite good
reproduction of the arrangement Sinatra and Count Basie recorded for their album
It Might as Well Be Swing, compete
with a pianist who perfectly reproduced Basie’s famous plunks on the keys at
the end. Dean Martin was represented by “You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves
You,” which Bublé sang with a bit of Martin’s famous swagger, and after “Just a
Gigolo” Bublé followed it up with “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” also a Prima vehicle
others had done better before him, with a tenor saxophonist who did a pretty
good job copying Prima’s player, Sam Butera (who, along with Bill Haley’s Rudy
Pompilli, was one of the first white tenor players to honk).
After the medley
Bublé evoked memories of yet another great singer of the past, Nat “King” Cole,
on “When I Fall in Love” — he made a few irritating changes in the melody and
lyric but caught at least some of the eloquence of Cole’s phrasing — and did an
odd arrangement of “My Funny Valentine” which he admitted had a “sinister”
quality, with some odd boom effects from his drummer and minor-keyed riffs from
the strings. The number was photographed in a “sinister,” almost neo-noir way, but at least it was a “different” approach to
this once so overperformed a song one 1950’s
LP liner-note writer said people were actually walking into record stores
asking for albums that did not contain it. After that came the one guest star featured on the program,
a Black Canadian (I think) singer whose name, as nearly as I could decipher it
from Bublé’s quickly spoken announcement, is Carla McLoren South. She had
close-cropped hair that was shorter than Bublé’s, and the song they chose to
perform together was Edith Piaf’s standard “La Vie en Rose,” which they sang in
a mishmash of the original French and the English translation that got covered
by several American artists in the early 1950’s (though the words “la vie en
rose” were not translated). Once again,
as far as I’m concerned the winner and still champ for the English version is
Louis Armstrong — for some reason his gravelly voice rang truer to this song’s
naked emotion than the smoother pipes of the crooners who trudged through it —
though Bublé’s version with his mystery guest was quite artful and the two
voices counterpointed very well. After that there was another historical
montage of Bublé’s career and performance footage from a different venue of
Bublé’s three biggest original hits: “It’s a Beautiful Day,” “Haven’t Met You
Yet,” and “I Want to Go Home.”
After the quality of the standards Bublé’s own
songs seemed to be a letdown, and the final segment of the show returned to
other people’s material but didn’t improve things. The next song was “Such a
Night,” which was recorded in the early 1950’s by Clyde McPhatter and the
Drifters and covered by the white singer Johnnie Ray, though the definitive
version remains Dinah Washington’s: on her record she sang it with a boogie
shuffle rhythm throughout, but there’s an even better version she filmed for
the TV show Harlem Variety Revue in which after she sings the first chorus, she reprises the last 16
bars with an electrifying shift in the rhythm from boogie-shuffle to straight
four-four. Bublé appears to have learned the song from Ray’s cover rather than
either of the two Black versions, though at least he made a nice noise and once
again his tenor sax soloist got a chance to shine. After that Bublé did one of his most ghastly selections,
Anthony Newley’s and Leslie Bricusse’s “Feelin’ Good,” a song done to
perfection by Carmen McRae on her 1964 live album Woman Talk. Alas, the version Bublé learned it from was Nina
Simone’s, which was fine as far as she was concerned but was beset by a terrible arrangement by Hal Mooney,
who as house arranger for Mercury Records did his level best to ruin otherwise
great records by Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Patti Page and Dinah Washington.
Bublé’s version all too faithfully copied Mooney’s ghastly, overwrought chart,
and even more than on “When I Fall in Love” he reached for “different”
phrasings that didn’t work all that well. Bublé closed the show with Leon
Russell’s early-1970’s ballad “A Song for You,” a lovely song (though Russell’s
own version suffered from him having virtually no voice at all and, once again,
the definitive version was done by Carmen McRae on a live album, this time
1972’s The Great American Songbook) to which he did full justice. My comments on Bublé probably sound
appallingly nit-picky: the fact was I enjoyed the show a lot and even the
faults I noticed in it were more of the “with all thy flaws, I love thee still”
variety. Whatever I think of his interpretations of this song or that, overall
Bublé puts on a very pleasant show and it’s nice to hear someone in 2019 sing
1920’s and 1930’s songs with such a deep, rich understanding of what they’re
about and how they should go.
