Event

ANDREA WOLPER QUARTET

featuring:
Michael Howell, guitar
Ken Filiano, bass
Michael 'TA' Thompson, drums

BISTRO AWARDS
By Kevin Scott Hall
Zinc Bar July 30

There was a bit of old-time magic in the air even before the music started at the plush and dark Zinc Bar, located in the heart of old Greenwich Village. The pleasure of a summer evening stroll down West 3rd Street, filled with the ghosts of past music legends, lent an air of expectation when I settled into the velvety back room, awaiting another musical dreamer to take the stage.

Backed by a trio of sensational musicians, jazz vocalist Andrea Wolper did not disappoint. Intriguingly, she opened by reading one of her own poems, "I Took the Lid Off the Jar." The metaphor of the title was an apt beginning, as Wolper et al proceeded to surprise and enthrall through two sets that went by entirely too quickly. (She later said, after another one of her poems, "I love words; why shouldn't jazz and poetry meet?" In that regard, she leaned a little more on the side of cabaret artist. Most jazz artists, in my view, tend to favor becoming one of the instrumentalists, conveying their emotions through sound.)

Wolper immediately established herself as a woman of great intelligence and refined taste. And yet, her warm, open rapport with the audience allowed us to willingly enter into her world of music, which was often experimental but never off-putting. In the world of the late '60s, her clarity of tone and absence of vibrato might have found her in the folk world. Yet Wolper is a jazz singer in every fiber of her being, with her conversational phrasing, rhythmic vocalizations, and fearless ability to twist and turn her vocal to whatever dissonance the band was serving up.