CD - Barbra Streisand - Love Is The Answer

Reviews, By Mark Adnum, 23rd October, 2009

Love Is The Answer, Barbra Streisand’s first studio album since 2005’s Guilty Pleasures, has sailed majestically past new albums by Mariah Carey and Madonna to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, and it has also topped the charts in Britain.

This nifty feat makes Barbra the first artist to have number one albums in five separate decades, beating the previous record of four decades set by Barbra in 1997 with that year’s excellent album of songs of faith and devotion, Higher Ground.

Barbra’s frightening ability to emerge from her Malibu estate whenever she feels like it to invade and conquer the entertainment industry is still intact, evidently, but a turn to jazz standards after such an extended career lull initially seemed like a curious, eclectic choice. Just what is so special about Love Is The Answer that it has returned Streisand to the top of the pop charts, with a bullet?

Over the past few years many critics, and even die hard fans such as myself, had started to question Barbra’s musical direction and general sense of happily-married-ennui, and her chart appeal had slid into oblivion. Her latest set of farewell concerts reached a startling nadir when she incongruously appeared and sang at the opening of the Planet Hollywood casino in Las Vegas, beset by the flu and barking her way through Evergreen et al. in front of Danny de Vito and a couple of hundred mildly-interested gamblers. 2003’s abysmal The Movie Album was a dreadful, aimless flop that only insulted memories of 1986’s incredible The Broadway Album which is easily Barbra’s greatest recording.

The voice, too, was not what it had been and while many suggested a Vocoder-influenced turn to disco music was in order, a la turn-of-the-century Cher. Others suggested a detour into the smoky tones of jazz music was what Barbra’s suddenly dusty pipes were most suited too. It’s this latter suggestion that seems to have filtered through to Barbra’s sacrarium sometime last year, as it was around that time that she picked up the phone and started bossing Diana Krall around.

Double Grammy winner and jazz singer Krall became the producer of Love Is The Answer, which features Barbra approaching very well-covered jazz standards such as Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning with a jazz quartet, on one disc, and then on the Deluxe Special Edition’s second disc, the same set accompanied by a full orchestra.

It isn’t really apparent how well things are going to turn out when the album opens with a shaky and generic turn of Here’s To Life, but by the time she hits the ashtray bottom notes of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (track 10) it’s beyond clear that this sultry new album is one of Streisand’s most interesting recordings and that the sound found in her by Krall is the way of the Streisand future.

The subtler orchestrations and smaller focus of the material here delivers Streisand to the perfect late-career place. One of the really fascinating successes of Love Is The Answer is how it sounds like and evokes a sense of something that may have been recorded many decades ago, when Streisand was a New York nightclub singer who opened for Phyllis Diller at The Bon Soir in 1961.

Complementing this special allure is Barbra’s maturity. Mellowed by marriage, but still fascinated by the twists and turns and mystifications of life, love and romance. On Love Is The Answer Barbra growls sensually and intelligently emotes through a demanding track list and shows that if jazz is the genre that suits the 21st century Streisand timbre, then it will be taken very seriously and performed perfectly. Both the quartet and the orchestra provide appropriately sublime, but separate contexts.

Streisand’s recent promotional performance at the Vanguard, a tiny jazz club in New York City, was a marvellous novelty that teased at what a great club singer Streisand would be if only such an engagement would be financially viable. Sarah Jessica Parker and the entire Clinton family attended, along with 75 lucky fans who won a competition on the official Barbra website (I entered one-hundred-and-twenty-nine times; didn’t win). Barbra in concert at a one hundred seat venue? Tickets would have to be a hundred thousand dollars a piece, and that would only cover her catering rider.

Barbra is too famous and too expensive to be able to be a jazz singer at this penultimate stage of a fifty year career, but if we are to be treated to more new albums, this sort of understated collection of scotch whiskey tunes is just the ticket. It’s perfect for late night backgrounding or listening to at high volume, in detail, at any time of the day. One of Barbra’s most enduring skills is to flirt dangerously with elevator music and come up with a quirky and excellent sound that is impossible to ignore.

And, anything that gets Barbra away from disturbing on-stage duets with Sammy, the petrified Coton du Tulear dog that has been dragged on to the stage at recent Barbra concerts has to be green lighted. And speaking of which, an elegant double album of jazz songs by the world’s most deluxe singer does not deserve a clumsily photoshopped cropped photo of a fluffy white dog on the back cover – but just try telling her that.

Listen to Barbra talk about the Love Is The Answer here:

Mark Adnum blogs at Outrate.net