In one way or another, Nellie McKay has spent a decent chunk of her fruitful career paying tribute to Doris Day. Openly embracing the jazz and vocal standards of the Tin Pan Alley era, McKay, like Day, projects unaltered exuberance, shameless optimism, and brisk and effortless confidence. McKay is certainly more of an eccentric, but both singers carved out careers with a sense of control and precociousness that belied their ages. Each is also a polyglot in a way, working with a range of styles and sounds-- their understated, commanding vocals easily adaptable to a variety of sounds.
All the more ironic then that most people know Day's career only from the playfully innocent films she made in the late 1950s and early 60s, particularly a trio of bedroom comedies co-starring Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. During that run of movies, Day usually portrayed a brash, independent, accomplished career woman (a union boss, a leading advertising executive, a journalism professor) who nevertheless projected both a lack of street smarts and a wholesome attitude toward sex-- she was essentially the original 40-year-old virgin.
On her full-length tribute to the film and music star, Normal as Blueberry Pie, McKay redresses some of these misgivings, covering a wide range of Day's work, from her earliest hit, "Sentimental Journey", to "Send Me No Flowers", a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song that served as the title track to one of those bedroom comedies. For the most part though, McKay skips the hits, choosing instead lesser-known album and film tracks closely associated with Day along with selections from the Great American Songbook that Day tackled. Irony-free, McKay channels Day's elegance and liveliness on not only swing, Dixieland, and showtunes, but also makes detours into bossa nova and western-inspired songs.
Not for nothing is the whole project named for a lyric from "(I'm in Love With) A Wonderful Guy", the South Pacific number that could double as a s [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ummation of Day's persona: It's a song about unaltered glee, feeling overjoyed rather than cynical about love, and aiming to convince others to think the same. One of the song's phrases, "No more a smart little girl with no heart," could practically have been the tagline to most of those Day films above. To McKay, the song's aggressive optimism seems to work as a defiant personal statement to those who'd call her fixations on pre-rock music old-fashioned or a mere affection. (And as a bonus, the South Pacific character it was written for is named Nellie.)
And so Day and McKay each shrug off claims of the corny or clichéd by embracing these qualities, proudly being themselves rather than playing dress-up. Similarly, their communicative, crystal-clear voices project subtlety, giving each a sense of normalcy and approachability. McKay does play with the material, often styling her voice in the sort of close-mic breathiness of the crooner era, or the wistful nouveau-cool of vocal jazz. She doesn't situate the songs in the arrangements of their time, however; instead, she typically leads with her piano and avoids the fuller, orchestral accoutrements that buffered Day's swing-era recordings.
Appropriately, McKay takes the lead here-- embodying Day's time without being completely in debt to it. Her version of "Sentimental Journey" jumps immediately into the lyrics, for example, whereas Day's star-making version-- with music written, arranged, and credited to Les Brown-- allowed its creator and his Band of Renown to take center stage for almost half of its run time (as many songs of the day did). Similarly, McKay's version of the jazz standard "Crazy Rhythm" is blissfully free of the tap dancing that that dominates Day's version. Decisions like these, plus McKay's obvious affection rather than reverence for the material, make this a tribute rather than a pantomime.
Normal is the rare tribute then that actually works to introduce and illuminate the songs it contains. McKay doesn't so much seize ownership of Day's songs as co-star with her hero. And with Day's having slipped from the public consciousness, McKay is presenting music that in many cases here is upwards of a half-century old. With the vogue in major American cities for speakeasy-style cocktails-- see NYC's Rye and Death & Co., Chicago's the Violet Hour and the Whistler, and San Fran's Bourbon & Branch-- it's not as old-fashioned and out of step as it may seem. Death & Co. even features a gin cocktail on its menu called the Sentimental Journey. Don't worry: If you're not ready to take the leap into Doris Day or Les Brown and the Band of Renown, they have another called the Joy Division.
