Peyroux Glows at City Winery

Madeleine Peyroux’s visit Tuesday night to the City Winery stage couldn’t have been more curious.  A straight-ahead performance full of edgy humor and wonderful music, she casually interlaced the familiar and the new, the melancholy and the playfully salacious; all the while filling the evening with unexpected jolts of surprise.

It’s not by intention, but Peyroux’s such a mysteriously illusive artist because she’s so impossible to pinpoint. She’s been called a jazz singer, but is she?  She’s proficient in the blues.  But that shoe isn’t a completely comfortable fit either.  For Tuesday night’s show, she decided to take us down two musical paths; drinking songs and the blues.  A tantalizing combination that promised both fun and depth.

Opening with her cautionary Don’t Wait Too Long, the first thing that strikes you is the loveliness of her voice. Light and sweet and smooth, it’s the kind of nectar any ear would relish.  You can imagine how she must have sounded busking on the streets of Paris at 16 enchanting passersby strolling along the Left Bank.  Which leads back to what kind of singer is Madeline Peyroux.  Treated with much more than drinking songs and blues, it’s when she slipped gently into French that she seemed most a home and in an element she found luxuriously comfortable. Singing, La Javanaise, her contribution to The Shape of Water’s soundtrack, the melody and the timbre of her voice were ideally suited to the poetry of a song about the ethereal nature of love. Rose colored lighting and City Winery’s suggestively cabaret aesthetic added to the song’s dreamy allure.

Now a resident of Brooklyn with a nice stash of highly regarded albums to her credit, she’s a seasoned performer who has expectations of audiences just as they have expectations of her.  At times that interaction got a little frustrating for someone who enjoys stimulating interchange.  Totally devoid of affectation, Peyroux comes across as “regular people”; someone who disdains the kind of pretense that stymies connections.  And she let the audience know, with generous servings of humor, that she was having concerns.  From the floor, it simply appeared as if the audience was being overly conscientious about respecting an artist they held in esteem. That struggle to reach the audience beyond the music lasted most of the night.  In the meantime, it was more than enjoyable traveling the labyrinth of styles that define Peyroux. 

Leaning on the robust exuberance so common to keyboard driven jump blues, energy erupted when she and her gang of four hit the rhythm road.  That’s when Jon Cowherd would go a little crazy on organ and make it surge with harmonious funk. Springing into Everything I Do is Going to Be Funky, initially, it really wasn’t.  Mostly it was just sweet and wonderful.  It took Cowherd’s take-no-prisoners skills on the organ to restore the groove.

The evening with Peyroux also helped solve a mystery.  Prior to the show, comparisons to Billie Holiday somehow seemed exaggerated and unlikely.  After all, who can sound like Aretha or Callas? But Peyroux and Holiday can, depending on the song, share an eerily similar tonal quality.  It’s startling to hear that singular sound in another context other than in the milieu of Billie Holiday where a residue of pain is ever present. With Peyroux, it’s as if that sound had been lifted and taken to a different world.    Her interpretation of Dance with Me to the End of Love crystalized that sensation.  Written by Leonard Cohen, Peyroux arranged the song to project the languid ease so characteristic of French cabaret. It’s no wonder she tours France so much.

Paying tribute to another musical shape shifter at the end of the show, the incomparable Odetta, it was clear Peyroux draws her musical inspirations from many sources.  By then, she and the audience had come to a mutually satisfying understanding.  One that ended in some of the warmest applause experienced in City Winery’s cloistered musical enclave.

Madeleine Peyroux

October 22, 23   2019

City Winery

1200 W. Randolph St.

Chicago, IL  60607

313-773-9463