Natalie Douglas performed at the Crazy Coqs, London
Natalie Douglas performed at the Crazy Coqs, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It’s no wonder New York chanteuse Natalie Douglas returned for her fourth appearance at that most attractive cabaret spot Crazy Coqs. Her engaging personality would fill a stage many times bigger, as would her velvet tones, for make no mistake about it, here is a singer with an enviable technique that would do justice to any song set before her.
Her latest programme, put together with much care and thought, juxtaposes the four loves of her life, though only one husband, as she disarmingly puts it. They are American popular music legends, Nat King Cole, Stevie Wonder, Joe Williams and Sammy Davis Jnr.
In this show she honours her predecessors from whom she has, as an Afro-American artist, drawn much inspiration in building her career. Intermingled between the songs, her lively patter embraces the autobiographical as well as political comment. She cannot help but get a laugh from the present line-up of hopefuls for The White House, as she quips, “some people are running for President others for Chief Idiot!”
In her teens Douglas befriended the granddaughter of Academy Award-winning songwriter Jay Livingston, an assiduous viewer of the television networks who made a note of every commercial which featured one of his songs. The next day he’d ring the television company to check the royalties were going through!
‘Mona Lisa’ was one of his hits (for Nat King Cole) and Douglas sings it as if we are listening to it for the first time, its closing line ‘or are you just a cold and lonely lovely work of art’, sends a frisson down the spine.
She’s clever too at coupling lyrics that add a further dimension to some familiar refrains. ‘Gonna Build a Mountain’ by Bricusse and Newley, sung as a spiritual with a great accompaniment from pianist Mark Hartman, is paired with Stevie Wonder’s ‘All in Love is Fair’. Joe Williams, lead singer with the Basie band for many years, is remembered by one of the evening’s less well-known titles, Billy Strayhorn’s lovely ballad, ‘Something to Live For’.
Douglas has sung with her pianist, the distinguished Broadway conductor and arranger Mark Hartman, for seven years, a sure foundation to a partnership where the joy of music making is evident from the word go.
‘For Once in My Life’, their opener, begins in a relaxed intimate vein before swinging along. She breathes new life into ‘L-O-V-E’, singing it in several languages, then follows it by acknowledging how artists like Sammy Davis Jnr and Lena Horne had drawn from their own experience, by singing ‘Once in a Lifetime’.
‘Sinner Man’ is rendered powerfully, while ‘Unforgettable’, with a grand cascade of pianistic fireworks, is another instance of her uncanny knack of making an audience really listen to a lyric.
Their most telling performance is reserved for ‘Mr Bojangles’ where the intimate storytelling and the restraint with which it is sung, brings a tear to the eye.
Adrian Edwards
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