Daryl Sherman and Dave McKenna at Blues Alley 7/27/00

by Alan Greenblatt

Daryl Sherman is a trombone player's daughter from Winsocket, Rhode Island, a singer I had never heard of before her Blues Alley date this past Wednesday was announced. She has what we might describe as a singer's figure and wore the largest pink muumuu/pantsuit I've ever seen.

All of this is irrelevant to her talent, I suppose. Sherman performs along that indecipherable boundary line between jazz and cabaret, a good musician (she plays piano as well) who pays attention to lyrics and sings them in a slightly high-pitched voice. (She has a touch of the speech impediment that befall the cat in the comic strip "Mutts"). She sang songs that weren't exactly obscure but aren't done to death, either: Ellington's "Tulip or Turnip"; the perhaps inevitable "Rhode Island Is Famous For You."

Performing with Sherman was Dave McKenna, one of the all-time great swing pianists (and another child of Winsocket). McKenna has a great left hand, playing a repetitive line that made the lack of bass player unnoticeable. He has great taste and a clean, unadorned sound. The highlight of the evening, for me, was his solo medley on a series of songs with girl's names such as "Rosetta." (How quickly the mind forgets all the little details. What were the other ones? A professional journalist like myself, you might think, might take notes. Oh, well.)

Houston Person, who was in town to play behind his singing wife Etta Jones, added some much needed funk to the proceedings, improvising terrific bebop cadenzas on Ellington's "Solitude." Person comes out of that biting, deep-throated school of tenor sax playing.

Backing all these performers of disparate styles was our fine local drummer Chuck Redd. I hear him all the time, most recently behind Eric Felten at Felix. (Felten leads a terrific swing band there the first Wednesday of each month and will headline at Blues Alley on Thursday.) Redd is deft and unobtrusive, keeping his time on the cymbals and laying out the cleanest press rolls ever.

Sherman and McKenna have a new CD out ("Jubilee," named for a Hoagy Carmichael tune) and will perform at the Algonquin in New York the first two weeks of August. Their first set last week was just lovely, intimate and fun and full of little musical pleasures. The place was about 2/3 empty for the second set, and perhaps for that reason the energy level dropped way down.

McKenna hobbles about with a cane these days, and at one point left the stage, muttering "Ol' rockin' chair" -- a little, little joke, but poignant if you remember the old Louis Armstrong record.