Here's a review of Frank D'Rone singing last night feb 8 in Chicago.
He appears again tonight Feb 9
The referenced CD is excellent.
I recorded it at a club, BENCHLEY's ON BROADWAY in 1983.
It's been in the vault till last year when mastered.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...,6996570.story
chicagotribune.com
Jazz notes
Major fame eludes him, but sublime singer keeps at it
By Howard Reich
TRIBUNE CRITIC
February 8, 2008
It was a quintessential Frank D'Rone moment.
In November, when Chicago jazz singer Judy Roberts was playing her farewell performance at Chambers restaurant in Niles, she asked one of the diners to come to the stage.
D'Rone put down his fork, strolled to the stage, picked up the microphone and sang a serenely beautiful version of "My One and Only Love," earning a stormy ovation. Then he returned to his table and resumed eating dinner, as the spotlight returned to Roberts.
It takes a lifetime to develop that kind of nonchalant professionalism, the ability to deliver a polished performance with zero advance notice. Yet it was the level of D'Rone's singing -- musically virtuosic, dramatically poised, emotionally moving -- that distinguished this work even more than its spontaneity.
"I don't like to pat myself on the back, but I truly feel that I'm at a stage in my life where I'm singing better and I'm playing better," says the septuagenarian singer-guitarist, who performs this weekend at the Green Mill Jazz Club.
"I think the lyric means more to me," continues D'Rone. "I've learned how to phrase better, how to read the lyric better, how to hit better notes within the chord structure of the song."
Maybe so, but D'Rone has ranked as a first-rate jazz musician for more than half a century. When he released his first album, "Frank D'Rone Sings," in the late 1950s, no less than Nat "King" Cole penned the liner notes. "Frank D'Rone is a singer with an individual sound that invites no comparison," wrote Cole.
That was when D'Rone, who grew up in Providence, R.I., and moved to Chicago in the late '50s, was on the ascent. His appearances at the long-gone Dante's Inferno on the Near North Side routinely had listeners queuing up outside. Sarah Vaughan, Stan Kenton, Oscar Peterson and other jazz luminaries attended his Chicago shows, and the support of Cole catapulted D'Rone to multiple appearances on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" in the 1960s and '70s.
D'Rone opened for Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby and Mort Sahl at the legendary hungry i nightclub in San Francisco. And from the '60s through the '80s, he played the lounges of plush Las Vegas hotels at the request of Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli when they were headlining there.
So, if D'Rone is so accomplished and widely exposed, why hasn't he enjoyed the kind of global acclaim lavished on his peers, such as Tony Bennett?
For starters, D'Rone never achieved a breakthrough hit record, while stars such as Sinatra, Bennett and Cole had several. Though exquisitely refined D'Rone recordings such as "Bluesette" and "Joey, Joey, Joey" earned him some national acclaim, none became indelibly associated with him (unlike Sinatra's "My Kind of Town" or Bennett's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco").
Worse, the rise of rock 'n' roll in the late '60s and '70s marginalized singers such as D'Rone.
None of these commercial considerations, however, has anything to do with the tonal luster and sublime musicianship of D'Rone's best work, which steadily has deepened. Chicagoans know this, which is why lines snaked around the corner when D'Rone played the Green Mill last year.
"For me, things are great," says D'Rone, who expects that his next recording, "Falling in Love With Love," will be available at the Green Mill date.
"Thank God I've got a nice following -- true music lovers."
Among them is Bennett, who penned the liner notes to D'Rone's new CD.
"Frank D'Rone and I have been brothers in music for many years," writes Bennett. "In this album, Frank proves to be one of the masters of the art of intimate singing."
FRANK D'RONE
A singer's singer still swinging
When: 9 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Green Mill Jazz Club, 4802 N. Broadway
Price: $12; 773-878-5552
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