Etta Jones at the Kennedy Center 2/11/01

by Alan Greenblatt

Here's something I had never seen before: At the opening of Etta Jones' show at the Kennedy Center the Friday before last, her backup musicians took the stage one by one, taking a brief solo on the bass, the drums, guitar and piano before Jones herself took the stage. It was a good thing they got that early moment in the sun, because otherwise the show was all Jones.

Jones (not to be confused with Etta James) is 72 now, and her age shows. Her voice is several shades deeper and ten times huskier than it was when her career began in the late 1950s. She sat through most of the show, and clipped off phrases, never engaging in legato and just getting out as much of a line as her breath would carry.

For all that, though, she put on a terrific show, turning the Terrace Theater into as much of a party place as it could ever be. She sang only old standards, and whether the song was a weepy number about failed love or something originally uptempo hardly mattered. She just put across the melody and let you enjoy the drama that lies in song, not naked emotion. The show reached its culmination, perhaps, when her sister-in-law took the stage and wiggled her booty around to "I'll Be Seeing You."

Jones' songs were lent some emotional lift by the excellent local pianist Dick Morgan. He knows what note to put next, whether he's building to a big Rachmaninoff-style crescendo or plucking out a few quiet notes, interpolating a simple tune such as "This Old Man." He plays frequently for free at the Borders at 18th and L; check him out.

p.s. I spent last week in Buffalo, N.Y. I didn't get much of a chance to check out the cultural scene. There were a few clubs and art galleries and all the rest, and a particularly lavish old movie theater-cum-performance hall called Shea's, with an interior partially designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

I ate lunch at the Polish Villa in Cheektowaga with town supervisor Dennis Gabryszak. After I ordered kielbasa, the waitress asked, "What do you want for soup -- beef vegetable, or czernina?" I asked what czernina was, and she said, "like chocolate soup, with raisins and plums."

I passed, but Gabryszak said, "They call it chocolate soup, but it's really duck's blood soup." He added that Hillary had refused to try it while stumping the area, so naturally I had to try it. In case you're curious, it's awfully rich but doesn't have enough distinct taste to make it spit-inducingly bad. Gabryszak recommended adding sugar.

p.p.s. Bizarre -- yet true! Al's Jazz Times is now posted on the Congressional Quarterly web site, www.cq.com