You hear "Rita Hayworth" muttered as often as "Ella Fitzgerald" at Jane Monheit's gigs, which are like walking on to a 1940s movie set, right down to the black-tie outfits for the band and the chanteuse's sultry toss of her cascading hair. The time warp happened at the Soho Pizza Express, at the end of the 23-year-old American's current tour, which consolidates a big year in her life.
Monheit has been the classic jazz discovery of the year for singing - and behaving on stage - in a manner that was in its prime 30 years before she was born. And despite the Rita Hayworth look, the Ella Fitzgerald sound is more to the point, because Monheit is a performer of light, effortless swing, a projector of a guileless optimism, and a possessor of a remarkable vocal technique that invests the smallest sound with momentum as well as texture.
In one way, her new show was livelier and less mannered than her showcase performance in London earlier in the year. She was more confident, and therefore breezier, and less inclined to self-conscious vampy posing. In addition, Scott Hamilton was guesting on tenor sax.
Like Monheit, but 30 years previously, Hamilton once got it in the neck for being a young curator of an old style, the Stan Getz school of swing-sax. The demise of most of his heroes has left Hamilton at the top of his particular tree, and his masterly control of acceleration and delay, laconically expressive bell notes and warbles, and luxurious sensuality on ballads (at times he's very reminiscent of the late Ronnie Scott at his best) were both imposing stand-alone features of this gig, and sensitive embellishments of, and contrasts to, Monheit's world.
It would have been a fine mainstream jazz gig except for Monheit's initially touching but ultimately misguided choice of following the buoyant and delicately phrased They Can't Take That Away From Me - with shrewd fills and interjections from Hamilton and pianist David Berkman - with a repertoire of Christmas songs. At times, Monheit's relaxed timing and faultless intonation almost elevated the music from the cheesiness, but Santa Claus is Coming to Town, sung straight at 11.30 in a Soho nightclub, is something of a ball-and-chain on the most sublime of musical sensibilities.
At the moment Monheit is a wonderful singer with nothing to sing about. When she does, anything could happen.
