Reviews
Serendipitous shopping:
Our unfettered correspondent
seeks out the salubrious
and the cerebral.
Pearls Before Pearl Harbor
By Mopsy Strange Kennedy
January 8-21, 2003
Between The Wars-an appealing CD featuring Cambridge-based cabaret performer Bobbi Carrey on vocals, Tomi Hayashi on piano and John Clark on soprano and tenor saxes and clarinet-covers the luscious songs composed between 1918 and 1941. Available online at www.bobbicarrey.com or at Amazon.
Put on this CD and roam around your house, and you’ll find a certain daydreamy feeling blossoming. One of the cozy virtues of cabaret is the way it blurs the lines between romance, sadness and humor. When Carrey comes in, hauntingly, on the somber “I’ll Be Seeing You,” the melancholy is evident-even figuratively with the swirling dress on the CD cover moving in slow motion. The songs recall that precious time bracketed by the two world wars, sweeping across the fizzy twenties, then on through the down-swoop of the Depression and up again through recovery. Tunes include samples of the great American Songbook, from Oscar Hammerstein and Irving Berlin through the Gershwins and Johnny Mercer. Al Jolson’s galloping ragtime piano in “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye” sits alongside the throaty disillusion of “Falling in Love Again,” which, in conjunction with “Just a Gigolo,” spoofily suggests that we’re all love’s fools. There are moods of stouthearted bravado in the face of disaster (“I’ve Got Plenty of Nothing”), of longing (in the affectionately quotidian letter-song “P.S. I Love You”), rueful loneliness (“What’ll I Do?”) and sexual jealousy, jauntily explored (“How Many Times?”). These songs follow you around like a pink kitten.