Sirens of Swing: Ann Hampton Callaway – The Pheasantry

Sirens of Swing: Ann Hampton Callaway at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Unbridled joy at the annual visit of the magnificent American singer/songwriter/pianist Ann Hampton Callaway mixes with melancholy as an era is coming to an end at Chelsea’s beloved cabaret room, The Pheasantry.

Widespread changes at owners Pizza Express have already seen the exit of group booker Joseph Paice and music department head Ross Dines, and Ruth Leon will also be departing after the cabaret stars she has brought over have fulfilled their dates.

What the new regime has in mind for entertainment is unclear but Paice and Leon are looking for suitable central London premises to open a cabaret venue of their own – and believe the elite artists in their contact books on both sides of the Atlantic will support them.

If this was the Callaway Pheasantry swansong, then she went down with all guns blazing in a fascinating Sirens of Swing set that honoured the singers who were her greatest influences, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Etta James, Annie Ross, Carmen McRae and Doris Day among them.

But it was AHC’s dalliance with a name less familiar to UK audiences, Shirley Horn, that made the most appeal on a number she said she had never sung in public before.

The song: ‘Here’s to Life’, written by Artie Butler and Phyllis Molinary and recorded by Horn in 1992, reflectively serves as a meditation for those entering their later years (which is why it resonated so much with me) and was quite wonderfully performed with all the wounded vulnerability conveyed by Horn’s smoky contralto original.

The Callaway voice in ballad mode is like liquid gold, unique and never to be confused with anyone else’s. It pours out a warmth that gives the audience a great big hug. In both ‘Here’s to Life’ and Peggy Lee’s ‘The Folks Who Live On the Hill’, with Lee’s granddaughter Holly Foster Wells in the audience, you could hear a pin drop. The Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein number has rarely been sung more movingly and there was more to come with the finale ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’, the Cole Porter number Callaway rates “one of the most exquisite ever written”.

Earlier, in a jazzier first session, she exhibited all the scat she had learned from her journalist father with her flawless take of Ella’s ‘How High the Moon’ but not before one of her party tricks, impersonating trumpet and saxophone with a voice that can do virtually can do everything and go anywhere. Not only instruments, we were treated to a ferociously accurate Billie Holiday (‘God Bless the Child’) and Sarah Vaughan (‘Tenderly’) too.

Her most famous party trick, unique to AHC as far as I know, was saved until later on, a ‘Swing-Improv’ where she invited the audience to throw a variety of wildly unconnected thoughts at her with the name of a ‘siren of swing’ to sing it – in this instance, Sarah Vaughan – and she would ‘compose’ a song using all the components and somehow make it (almost) sound sense. The routine has been part of her act ever since I was first knocked out by her 33 years ago and it never ceases to amuse.

If we ever needed proof of her versatility up she came with ‘La Vie en Rose’ in perfect French in a section devoted to Josephine Baker, “an American lady in Paris who liked taking her clothes off, was a spy in the Second World War and a civil rights activist, one of the strong women doing incredible things in times of trouble”, so admired by AHC.

This Sirens of Swing was an updated version of the show Callaway took to Le Son de la Terre, a jazz club on a barge, for her Paris debut at the end of last year. They loved her, we love her, she loves London but when will we have her back again? Ann would love to bring over Broadway the Calla-way!, the show she does with sister Liz in New York, but needs a longer run and bigger space to make it financially viable. Any takers?

Jeremy Chapman