Andy Bey at the Kennedy Center 11/13/00

by Alan Greenblatt

Jazz fans in the Washington area will want to head to the Kennedy Center this Friday night to hear Andy Bey. Writing for washingtonpost.com a few weeks ago, I called Bey "perhaps the greatest living jazz singer," and since then I haven't been able to think of who else it might be. Bey has a startling range, up from a deep mineshaft of a husky voice to a silky, convincing falsetto. He's become a great singer of ballads and you'll enjoy his familiar, patient, sometimes moving renditions of the Ellington and Gershwin stuff. Tickets are $27, so don't be cheap.

On the book shelf: To like Tom Wolfe's latest, "Hooking Up," you really have to love Tom Wolfe. He wants you to love him. His need for approval in this book is as strong as Sally Field's. He wants you to believe that his novels are not only huge sellers and entertaining but play more to the strengths of the genre than do the writers who attacked "A Man in Full." Wolfe has extremely unkind and uncharitable things to say about John Updike's "aging bladder," Norman Mailer's "rusted-out hips" and John Irving's "sexagenarian jowls."

It's Wolfe's first collection of nonfiction in a couple of decades and, although it trots along well enough -- his prose moves faster than any major writer's, excepting Philip Roth -- he's not terribly well engaged. He writes a longish piece about Bob Noyce, the founder of Intel, who's been dead for a decade. Wouldn't the younger Wolfe gone sailing with Netscape's Jim Clark instead, like Michael Lewis did?

Wolfe's great gift has been chronicling the varieties of American lives. Like a classics professor or successful screenwriter, Wolfe understands that there are only about 10 different stories, that "Charlie's Angels" and "The Marriage of Figaro" and your mom's life story are all just variations on the same pool of plots that the Greeks worked from. In "Hooking Up," he's less engaged than he used to be, more Olympian, more judging things and people and slang from a height, less descriptive, more cranky, more desirous of our love.

Still, I would dearly love to read Tom Wolfe's take on a touring show, currently at the Hirshhorn, of works by Wolfgang Leib. This has to be the all-time bad art show parody. All of his stuff is made from natural materials, so you have a room that would fetch $3,000 a month in Manhattan that now is home only to a low pile of pollen. Or a meditative chamber that is a smaller room lined with blocks of bee's wax. Or some pollen in a jar. Or some plates of rice on the floor. (Don't step too close -- an alarm will sound!) My favorite is the "milkstone," a block of marble covered with a smooth surface of milk. The poor museum staff has to sponge up the stuff daily and put on a fresh coating in the morning.

LATER THOUGHTS....

Andy Bey's version of "Pick Yourself Up" is nearly cubist. He sing the words so fast that they broke up neatly into little syllables -- a far more effective abstraction than his always uncertain attempts at scat singing.

His performance Friday night at the Kennedy Center didn't go over as well as his appearance a few months ago at Blues Alley, where the booze and the proximity of the crowd to the performer helped enliven things. A number of people got up and left Friday, which was too bad, because the program contained a number of rich pleasures.

These mainly consisted of Bey's beautiful renditions of slow ballads such as "Someone to Watch Over Me" and Nick Drake's "River Man." Another highlight was his jazzy "Brother Can You Spare a Dime." Bey's voice is deep but has a huge range and he's able to lend texture to songs through patient, ever-so-slightly renditions. Gosh, he does love his vibrato.

I got a response from one person who loves Bey but differed with my earlier characterization of him as possibly the best living jazz singer. His other nominees were all respectable but helped make it clear this is not a golden era for jazz singing. At any rate, it became clear to me the other night that Bey isn't even really a jazz singer, in the sense that he never varies his renditions much. Almost the entire concert was drawn from his "Shades of Bey" CD and his live versions were so close to what he'd recorded that a couple of times he noted the absence of the guitarist who had accompanied him on the record, as though he couldn't adjust.

He was joined on stage by bassist Joe Martin and drummer Victor Lewis, who were fine but largely superfluous. In fact, Bey sounded his best when he accompanied himself alone on piano. He's not much of a piano player, but his spare tinkling served well as a backdrop to the riches of that fabulous voice.