October 29, 2004

A Touch of Jazzy Mischief Updates Dylan With a Rap Inflection

ntil the singer Paula West unleashed her effusion of zany semi-sequiturs with the drummer Rodney Green tapping behind her, I hadn't realized that Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was a proto-rap song. Actually, folk-jazz rap song would be a more precise description of how Ms. West and Mr. Green treated it on Tuesday, when she and the Eric Reed Trio (in which Mr. Green plays drums and Ben Wolfe plays bass) opened a three-week engagement at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel.

Mr. Dylan's kaleidoscopic imagery became a slurred mouthful of pure jazz rhythm.

The singer, from San Francisco, has always relished transgressing stylistic conventions in much the same way as Cassandra Wilson. Both singers have dark, clotted voices and a refined taste in material. But where Ms. Wilson canonizes standards from all eras by reinventing them as art songs in her own free-floating musical universe, Ms. West remains a swinging jazz interpreter in constant communication with her pianist, Mr. Reed.

Although he doesn't belong to a particular school of piano, Mr. Reed has a strong, upbeat musical personality that complements Ms. West's. The bubbling ebullience of his playing, in which blues phrases detonate out of nowhere, is matched by a two-handed technical command so assured there is no sense of effort behind it.

Ms. West's mischievous streak asserted itself in slyly updated versions of Cole Porter's "At Long Last Love" and "Anything Goes" that mentioned phenomena like nonfat cream, the Hilton sisters and reality television. Her signature song, "The Snake," Oscar Brown Jr.'s streetwise retelling of the Adam and Eve story, remains one the most valuable jazz song rediscoveries in recent years.

The singer is belatedly emerging as a heavyweight balladeer. The evening's deepest moment was her slow, brooding rendition of "Black and Blue," the Fats Waller-Andy Razaf racial lament whose self-lacerating lyric was reputedly forced out of Mr. Razaf at gun point by the New York gangster Dutch Schultz. In Ms. West's hands, it became a devastating expression of suppressed rage.