by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Before the much-hyped main attraction on NBC last night — a
celebration of the 90th birthday of singer Tony Bennett — they
offered a show with Canadian crooner Michael Bublé, who as I’ve written in
these pages before isn’t a great singer
but is a sufficiently appealing one that it’s nice to know there will still be
singers around who can handle the Great American Songbook after Bennett finally
croaks. I had expecting Bublé’s show to be another Christmas-themed special,
but it wasn’t; it was a BBC-TV production called Michael Bublé Sings
and Swings and it was apparently promotion
for his latest album of that title. The show was a mixed bag that proved that
Bublé is a good performer but also one with a narrow range — and I don’t mean
the actual compass of his voice, but the sorts of styles he should be doing and
the kinds of songs he should sing. He opened with a surprisingly dissident
orchestral intro (incidentally I was impressed by the sheer size of his
orchestra — he was using the same number of musicians as Frank Sinatra did at
his peak, and I wondered what the budget for musicians was like on this
program) that led into his first song, a quite good cover of Julie London’s
1956 hit “Cry Me a River” that ably suited his voice (even though I like
London’s sparse version — she was backed just by Barney Kessel playing
beautiful jazz guitar, and a rhythm section — and Ella Fitzgerald’s cover from
1961 better). Alas, Bublé strayed from the traditional pop songs that show him
off best into more contemporary material; his next song was a modern-day power
ballad called “I Just Haven’t Met You Yet” (an odd choice for a performer who
paraded the happiness of his family arrangements with his wife and kids during
his between-songs patter) that required a more openly soulful sort of singing
than Bublé could provide.
The yin and yang between stuff Bublé can do effectively
and the sort of songs that put him at sea went on throughout the entire
program, and sometimes even within the same song; after “I Just Haven’t Met You
Yet” he sang two songs that perfectly suited him, Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought
of You” and Walter Donaldson’s “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” Donaldson wrote the
latter for Eddie Cantor’s 1930 film Whoopee (the movie was based on a stage show that Donaldson
had written for Cantor, but producer Sam Goldwyn commissioned new songs and
wisely chose Donaldson to write them), but Bublé said he’d learned the song
from Nina Simone’s recording on her first album, Little Girl Blue. One could tell from the melodic variations and the
tricky countermelodies his pianist had taken from Simone’s version (of course
Simone, an accomplished pianist, had played the countermelodies herself!), but
it really worked. Alas, the show then went off the rails again for a modern
pop-ballad called “Nobody but Me” that’s supposedly the first single from
Bublé’s new album, and then into a cover of Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on
My Mind” that showcased Bublé the wanna-be soul singer. Bad move: it’s not that
great a song in the first place (Nelson was great writing songs about
dysfunctional relationships but nowhere near as good doing a straightforward
love song) and Bublé’s “take” on it didn’t help.
The next piece was another
undistinguished modern song called “I Want to Go Home,” but what followed that was the best song of the night even though it didn’t come from the 1930’s, 1940’s or 1950’s. It came from
the 1960’s: Brian Wilson’s wrenching ballad “God Only Knows,” taken much slower
than Wilson’s original recording with the Beach Boys on the Pet
Sounds album, but while I wouldn’t say
Bublé’s version is better than the original, it brought out the sheer aching
beauty of the melody at least as effectively and was a quite valid cover,
offering a different “take” on the material instead of just slavishly copying
the original. (I still have bitter memories of the awful version Olivia Newton-John
did in the 1970’s — ouch!) The final song on Bublé’s program was the Anthony
Newley-Leslie Bricusse ballad “Feeling Good,” which has been very lucky in its
artists — Carmen McRae, Nina Simone and John Coltrane. Alas, this was another
song Bublé learned from Simone’s version, which was fine as far as she was concerned but, like a lot of other recordings
from singers on Mercury or its affiliated labels in the late 1950’s and early
1960’s, afflicted with an awful arrangement by Hal Mooney — and Bublé and his
musical director copied Mooney’s arrangement all too well, so a song that Bublé
started in the same soft, slow, moving fashion in which he’d sung “God Only
Knows” ended up as more of a battle between him and his band, much the way
Pentatonix’ version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” from an NBC-TV special
aired last week suffered when
they sped up the tempo and started doing those damned drum-machine effects that
drive me crazy. Overall, Michael Bublé is a talented performer but one who
needs to be a lot more careful in
how he chooses his material and how the people around him arrange it for him!
