Zara McFarlane Presents The Music of Sarah Vaughan, @ the Jazz Arena, Cheltenham Jazz Festival - May 5

I’ve got a couple of Zara McFarlane CDs on the shelves at Sayer Towers so it was good to see her on the bill at Cheltenham promoting her forthcoming Sweet Whispers: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan album. She mixed some of her own songs from her own previous albums in with the Sarah Vaughan covers and talked about ‘Sassy’ as she introduced some of the classics, taking us through some biographical details, highlighting the moments of defiance and determination that led to the Sassy nickname.

McFarlane’s fitness to provide a tribute to Sarah Vaughan is evident from the opening of Tenderly, a lush ballad that displays her range as she rises from a low purr, soaring up, clean and pure and scats up and down the scales, floating along the vocal line. Mean To Me follows with more scatting through a long section that lights a fire under the tune and into a section where she breaks up the line into single words that bounce along with zest and humour. A Great Day brings joyful gospel, as she wordlessly duets with the pianist. A sudden stop leads into a swinging groove and she whoops and sings up and down the register. Tadd Dameron’s ballad, If You Could See Me Now, slows down the pace. It’s a tragic, torch song tale of lost love during which McFarlane’s voice blossoms from bathetic weakness to a full force before the bassist takes over with a solo full of tragedy and yearning before McFarlane returns and her voice rises up to plaintiff and beseeching and then drops to a purr. She has inhabited this song and played the saddened lover beautifully.

She tells us tales of Sarah Vaughan’s poor romantic and managerial choices as her introduction to A Song In Your Heart. It’s a sixties lounge soul sound a la Dionne Warwick, a song of short bright lines, about, ironically, a woman who believes her man is cheating. It builds to a climax of long, held notes and tumultuous drums.

The Junior Murvin reggae classic Police And Thieves about police brutality opens with a bowed bass; sombre and full of resignation that the themes of this 1976 song are still true nearly 50 years later. McFarlane develops a hope for the next generation, her light and airy vocals develop a strength that reinforces her message. She comes back in after the piano solo, demanding “Hear what I say.”

Pounding drums take us into Interlude (A Night In Tunisia), a more romantic version than the hammering Art Blakey gave the tune. McFarlane rides the lead line beautifully. She comes out of the piano solo wailing out the long notes and following the complexity of the melody. Thunderous drumming (a nod to Blakey?) breaks for a bass solo that is both frantic and daring, playing with and around the title. McFarlane’s vocals are so delicate as to be barely perceptible.

Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues opens with electric piano as if to place it back in the early-seventies time of the original. Rather than shouting out, McFarlane whispers the “Makes me wanna holler” line. She closes with a vocal excursion across the scales adding a few blue notes into the mixture. Her voice swells to a full force rage and falls away.

And that’s yer lot. I could have done with more of this and it shows the downside of everybody doing festival, hour and a quarter sets. We saw some acts over the weekend where an hour and a quarter was about half an hour too long. This was not one of them. Dave Sayer