February 1998

Canadian chanteuse Holly Cole might not write the songs, but she sure knows how to make the whole world sing. And while the cozy downtown Westbeth Theatre isn't quite Carnegie Hall, Cole didn't seem to mind too much. Her glowing set redefined the term "soulful," packed as it was with jazz-tinged reworkings of pop standards and personal faves, all sung straight from her very own deep, dark heart.

With a smooth and sultry voice that positively oozes class, Cole doesn't fall back on movie-star radiance or elfin chirpiness to seduce a crowd. Which is a good thing, because Thursday night she was looking just a little shop-soiled, her mane of brunette hair seriously tousled, her face showing the effects of road lag. (Cole and band are just settling in to a mid-sized North American tour.) But when Cole buried herself deep in a song, as she did on numerous cuts from the top-notch Dark Dear Heart (Metro Blue/Capitol), it wouldn't have mattered if she hadn't showered for weeks; she could sing a Chinese menu and you'd hang on every number.

Her clubby, electro-pop shimmy through The Beatles "I've Just Seen a Face" was an immediate hit, but for me it was Cole's deeply-felt crooning on tracks such as Joni Mitchell's "River" and "Make It Go Away" that left my soul shaken and stirred. "World Seems To Come and Go" was another well-chilled, mid-tempo peak, while her take on the old chestnut "Tea For Two" in which Cole and pretty-boy drummer Mark Kelso performed a dazzling duet – she scatting frantically, he going ballistic on the high-hat – was astonishing in its execution and vivid in its imagination. Then, when Cole wrapped her sinewy lungs around the theme from "Baghdad Café," the awed silence in the Westbeth was deafening.

Of course, without her high-caliber band, this Toronto torch-singer would probably be draped in a little black number doing the supper club circuit (maybe not, but they're not too shabby anyway). Man-mountain bassist (and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin lookalike) George Koller piled groove upon groove, alternating between upright and standard electric bass, while skin-man Kelso threw in jazzy syncopations, tight rhythms and sweet harmonies, and Aaron Davis added fluent piano fills, mixing pop melodies with seriously cool embellishments. The band's empathy with their leader's dazzling vocals was crystal clear.

OK, so the reality that Cole is an interpreter, not a tunesmith, has to work against her in various ways (such as royalties, for starters). But rather than faithfully reproduce someone else's song note-for-bloody-note, Cole revamps and recreates, either updating a '60s classic using end-of-the-millennium technology, as she does with "I've Just Seen a Face," or twisting something familiar right out of shape, conjuring a new interpretation that the tune's owner probably wouldn't even recognize. Much more than a cover artist, Holly Cole is a sonic magician, the Houdini of groove.