Music Review: Broadway Encounters Jazz Not Far From The Actors Studio

Abbey Lincoln’s great jazz ballad “Throw It Away” is the kind of philosophical reflection that invites Method interpretations by singers willing to connect their personal associations with its advice to divest oneself of unnecessary personal baggage. “You can never lose a thing if it belongs to you,” concludes the song, whose final image evokes the singer standing alone and unencumbered on a beach, with arms outstretched.

Betty Buckley at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency on Tuesday.

Betty Buckley sang it quietly with her eyes closed in a voice that broke with emotion at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency on Tuesday evening. “Throw It Away” “perfectly encompasses the now of things in my life,” she explained in her introduction. It was the show’s most moving and vulnerable performance.

Ms. Buckley, who is appearing at Feinstein’s through Feb. 24 with a five-member band, epitomizes the singer as Method actor, passionately (sometimes scarily) living inside her material. Every song becomes a Performance with a capital P. Her show, titled “Then & Now,” includes songs from two recently released albums, one recorded in 1967 and unheard until recently, the other brand new.

Few if any singers with Ms. Buckley’s Broadway background have ventured so fearlessly into jazz. Especially when she uses her piercing, steely voice to belt, her sound and style are decidedly un-jazz-like. She doesn’t swing in any conventional sense. Yet her fusion of theatrical grandeur with open-ended pop-jazz arrangements, which elongates songs into iconoclastic think pieces, is wildly ambitious and never less than fascinating.

This fusion is a product of Ms. Buckley’s increasingly daring collaboration with her longtime musical director, the pianist Kenny Werner, who is joining her on Feb. 12 for the last two weeks of her engagement. On Tuesday, Christian Jacob, playing Mr. Werner’s arrangements, substituted in a band that featured Billy Drewes on reeds.

Typically offbeat was a reharmonized arrangement of “You’ve Got a Friend” that began in a minor key. The swooning Brazilian ballad “So Many Stars,” in Ms. Buckley’s hands, became an expression of confusion in which she played the role of dizzy astronomer reeling around in the heavens.

“It Might as Well Be Spring” amplified the theme of romantic restlessness into an expression of high agitation. What Ms. Buckley called her “Pimp My Ride” version of “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” was a jouncing stop-start journey on a bumpy Western trail.

How to describe Ms. Buckley’s nightclub persona? The Kim Stanley of Cabaret is one label I’ve heard. With this totally dedicated, fiercely independent artist, there is no halfway; you go with her or you resist.

Betty Buckley appears through Feb. 24 at Feinsteins at Loews Regency, 540 Park Avenue, at 61st Street, feinsteinsattheregency.com; (212) 339-4095.

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