Gig review: Roberta Gambarini quartet

Published on Thursday 6 August 2009 18:58

ROBERTA GAMBARINI QUARTET **** NAIRN COMMUNITY CENTRE

ROBERTA Gambarini is an Italian-born, America-based singer with an impressive CV: she credits the late Benny Carter with being her mentor, has worked with everyone from piano great Hank Jones to current trumpet star Roy Hargrove, and was a runner-up in the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal Competition when she first moved to the United States.

In Nairn on Wednesday night, as part of the Nairn International Jazz Festival, she dazzled a packed (actually, it felt rather like a vacuum-sealed) Community Centre with an energetic performance which showcased her vocal acrobatics as well as her skills as a balladeer.

Although it's her scatting and the way in which she uses her voice like an instrument (most obviously when she mimicked a trumpet solo by bringing the microphone right up to her lips) that have the obvious wow factor, anyone who prefers listening to lyrics rather than to a barrage of vowels, and favours emotion over technical prowess would have been much more readily seduced by the ballads she performed, notably in duets with her pianist, Cyrus Chestnut.

Gambarini's interpretations of I's Your Woman Now (from Porgy and Bess) and the sublime My One and Only Love were spellbinding – every word crystal clear, every emotion tangible. The same goes for her take on Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life, which she invested with a real sense of world-weariness and which highlighted her gift as a storyteller – something that doesn't come across in her scat-athons.