Paula West celebrates 10 Plush years with dynamic new show

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jan 26, 2006 | by Chad Jones, STAFF WRITER

THINGS you can depend on in this world are disappearing every day. But Bay Area cabaret fans know that you can depend on Paula West.

She's the San Francisco singer who used to sling hash and now serves tunes both cold and hot every year around this time at San Francisco's Empire Plush Room.

In fact, this year marks West's 10th anniversary singing under the gorgeous stained-glass ceiling in the intimate York Hotel music room.

For a decade, we've come to depend on West for several things. First, she will always put on a great show. Second, she will reinvent a few tunes you thought you knew. And third, she will penetrate your defenses and turn you into mush at least once.

West's six-week anniversary run opened Tuesday night, and although the singer was suffering the usual opening-night nerves and missed a few notes here and there, she demonstrated exactly why audiences love her.

She swings, she sasses, she croons. And she does it in a style that becomes more markedly her own with each passing year.

For the opening two and final weeks of the run, West is accompanied by the Eric Reed trio, with energetic Reed on piano, David Wong on bass and Willie Jones III on drums. Along the way she'll also perform with the Bruce Barth Trio and the Xavier Davis Trio.

But no matter who's supporting her, West is fully capable of casting her own unique spell.

She opens the new show with two fast-paced jazz licks: "Day In, Day Out," in which Johnny Mercer tries to write like Cole Porter, and "It's All Right with Me," in which Porter successfully writes like Porter.

Then she does one of those distinctive Paula West things. Accompanied only by bass and drums, she steps forcefully into Nina Simone's streetwalker dirge "See-Line Woman" and gives it her own stamp: part jazz, part blues, part don't mess with me.

From this moment on (as they say), West takes full command of her 13-song, 70-minute set. She taps into some deep emotion on a full- throated "Why Was I Born?" before exposing her playful side on Leonard Feather's "Man Wanted," a funny, lovelorn tune made famous by Ethel Waters.

West swings hard on "Perdido" and the Gershwins' "It Ain't Necessarily So" and gives the simmering tango treatment to "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise."

West says that a good song is "flexible" and proves it with her driving version of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues." Never mind that you could never believe West killed a man in Reno just to watch him die. It's just fun to hear her give the song a whole new feel.

She doesn't fare as well with Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," a less flexible song that carries a tangy whiff of star-gazing hippie patchouli.

Her take on the overly dramatic Irish ballad "Danny Boy" doesn't quite connect with the song's rampant emotion, but the arrangement, with delicately bowed bass and hollow drums, transforms the tune into an eerie ghost story.

Because this is West's anniversary (tradition holds we should offer her gifts of tin or aluminum), it seems only fitting that one of her show's greatest moments comes with Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin's "Thanks for the Memory," an Academy Award winner introduced by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross in "The Big Broadcast of 1938."

Beautifully sung with warmth, charm and style to spare, the song is a fitting way to celebrate Paula West's talent and accomplishments thus far and to toast a future in which, as the old song says, the best is yet to come.