Ian Shaw sings Sondheim to spellbinding effect at King’s Place
The leading UK jazz vocalist bewitches with a stunning duo set with pianist Barry Green
Ian Shaw is pacing. The punters passing by the King’s Place concert hall don’t notice this guy hunched against the winter chill. Shaw, as Stephen Sondheim might observe, is for the moment, just one among Another Hundred People.
Soon Shaw will put on the motley and sashay on stage as the charismatic singer and showman, the jazz voice of his generation, and charm, chivvy and coax his willing audience through a magical evening of Sondheim songs. Because tonight is the launch of Shaw’s latest project, Stephensong, a pointed and poignant collection of the Broadway legend’s material.
But right now, the slightly soggy guy in the puffer and beanie is just the proverbial man on the street, prowling around as he preps head and heart, getting in the zone for the show to come.
And this is why Shaw’s star fits so well with Sondheim’s. Few performers (Holiday? Glynis Johns?) can present as vulnerable as Shaw. A foot in the gutter and a soul amid the stars. Apart from the world yet a part of us all. Shaw the storyteller embodies Sondheim’s paradoxical lyrics, moving from the conversational to the poetic in the spin of a dime, finding the heroic in the commonplace, the extraordinary in the ordinary. Take Me to The World from Evening Primrose, a movie Shaw returns to often (and featuring another star-crossed performer in Anthony Perkins) perhaps best captures this liminal space.
Yet Shaw is also as brazen and glam as you like, donning heels and glistening clip-ons for an hilarious take on Broadway Baby. But then he’s all homely and sentimental, recalling how as a little boy he’d listen as his Dad whistled while frying eggy-bread. And then the adult but now bereft Shaw goes into Anyone Can Whistle (which Shaw demonstrably can’t.)
And then he turns the emotional lights down low for the poignancy of Children Will Listen, his child-like prittle prattling scat pitched against Barry Green’s lyric richness.
Green’s piano has long entwined with Shaw’s voice. Indeed, Stephensong was the piano man’s idea, and one of the night’s most powerful moments came with Barry’s soul-touched take on Send in the Clowns.
Shaw wouldn’t sing it. Ever loyal to those he loves, he felt he couldn’t match Haydn Gwynne’s spine-chilling version. Green’s ‘unaccompanied’ solo, of course, rendered the house to a hushed silence.
Green played to a visual backdrop of a powerful portrait of Gwynne, who died before her time. The use of visuals worked perfectly throughout the show. The image of gay and trans rights demonstrations re-contextualised the tongue twisting precision of Everybody Says Don’t to a song of righteous rebellion. The image of summer bliss on a beach (Fflint, Colwyn Bay, Rhyll?), with mums in deck chairs and hitched up skirts to catch the brief sun dreamily complemented I Remember. No one captures memory mixed with desire like Shaw.
So the lights went up on a fabulous evening. And the audience spilled happy on to the damp and shiny street to get on their trains and planes, just like Another Hundred People. Shaw and Sondheim in all of them, all of them in the singer and the songs.
www.jazzwise.com/review/article/ian-shaw-sings-sondheim-to-spellbinding-effect-at-king-s-place
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