Review: Debby Boone's 'Blue Skies'
Rosemary Clooney's gift broadens singer's career horizon
By Porter Anderson
CNN
 |  Debby Boone, performing this month at Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood, California. |
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| | TOUR INFORMATION |  Debby Boone is being staged by Richard Jay-Alexander in performances to support her new CD, "Reflections of Rosemary."
June 16, Rossi's Blue Star, Minneapolis, Minnesota
June 22, Scullers Jazz Club, Boston, Massachusetts
August 27, Chautaqua Institute, Chautauqua, New York
October 25-30, Plush Room, York Hotel, San Francisco, California
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NEW YORK (CNN) -- One perfectly frayed hole shows at the knee of Debby Boone's jeans as she sinks into a leather armchair for a waiting glass of wine in the Regency's Library lounge on Park Avenue.
After singing two shows on a Saturday evening in Feinstein's, the hotel's signature cabaret room, Boone is returning fast to her role as mom to four kids.
She talks college housing and commencement exercises but sends across the table a quick smile of success to her director, Richard Jay-Alexander. The ease of their conversation is a clue to why Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" sounds as comfortable as those jeans look on this 48-year-old with the new CD, "Reflections of Rosemary."
Audiences at Minneapolis' Rossi's Blue Star on Thursday and Boston's Scullers Jazz Club on June 22 won't miss the simple sound of certainty behind Boone's delivery: "Never saw the sun shining so bright / Never saw things going so right."
"Even though Richard understands that this music is a tribute to Rosemary Clooney," Boone says, "he also knows that it's a matter of self-revelation. This is about me, too. Rosemary is so much a part of my life, and the music is a vehicle we can use to let people know more about me, not just more about her."
One of the first things many jazz fans are learning since the release this spring of her CD is that Boone is the wife of Gabriel Ferrer, son of Rosemary Clooney and actor Jose Ferrer. When Clooney died three years ago this month, she left her jazz vocal arrangements to Boone.
Boone's "reflections" on her mother-in-law's famed legacy include notes on each song's selection, a ready narration that Jay-Alexander has "stood on its feet" as Boone's running commentary between songs in her stage show.
Jim Henson, we learn, for example, used Clooney's recording of Lerner and Loewe's "I've Grown Accustomed to His Face" as a green frog puppet's first foray into amphibian lip-sync.
And Dave Frishberg and Johnny Mandel's wrenching "You Are There," Boone tells us, is a song that she and her son Jordan "wished that Rosemary would record .... She never got the chance."
Onstage, on message
In performance, Boone is remarkably present, emotionally engaged, nestled in the curve of arranger John Oddo's piano and intensely aware of every syllable she sings.
"There's a very intimate connection with each song for me," she says, guaranteeing that she never "phones in" a note. "Just as in theater, you keep discovering new things. It's alive and fresh every night."
Fresh, yes, you see it even in her face. Essentially a Breck-beauty from the era she sings, Debby Boone is the American Songbook's cover girl in the flesh. But what makes that face and her work even more interesting is "this image," as she refers to it. And she's not talking about blond hair or the club-couture beige gown she wears in performance.
What image? Two weeks after her run in New York has closed, Boone is in a Chicago hotel room getting ready for another performance in support of her CD. She reads aloud an ad for her appearance in Time Out Chicago magazine, a city guide aimed at tourists. "Listen to this: 'Debby Boone brings her Christian and apparently satiny music to Davenport's (Piano Bar and Cabaret) on Saturday night.' "
In one sentence, that advertisement has summed up the challenge of "this image," as she calls it. The music of "Reflections of Rosemary" is not Christian. And the implied skepticism about how "satiny" she might sound is moot to anyone who has heard the CD.
'This image' a boon and bane
|  Of her "Reflections of Rosemary" CD released in April, Boone says, "This is about me, too." |
Boone was born in New Jersey to Pat Boone and wife Shirley. A boy-next-door answer to Elvis Presley in the 1950s and '60s, he segued into Christian music in the '70s. By the time she was 14, Debby Boone was touring with her father and her sisters, becoming a young fixture of family-safe pop in the days of TV dinners on tray tables.
Her 1980 Grammy for "With My Song I Will Praise Him" and one in 1984 for "Keep the Flame Burning" locked her for many into the contemporary-inspirational category. (She has a third Grammy, for "You Light Up My Life," 1977.)
"When I started to do some Christian music," Boone says now, "it was never an intention to leave what's characterized as secular music behind. But I became categorized. People started to pigeonhole me as a Christian singer.
"I'm not trying to depart from my Christianity," she says. "I'm not trying to get away from anything. My faith is a central part of who I am and what I believe in. But my Christianity doesn't separate me from anything."
Even those who have an oil-and-water concept of sacred and secular music may understand what Boone means when, in performance, she turns to Randy Newman's "I'll Be Home," a piece her daughter Dustin helped her choose to evoke the welcoming character of Clooney's house.
"I'll be home / When your nights are troubled / And you're all alone," Boone sings with devotional confirmation, positioning each word as a profound pledge earnest enough to crack her voice with emotion. "Wherever you may wander / And wherever you may roam / You come back / And I'll be waiting here for you ... I'll be home."
And finally when in Jay-Alexander's vest-pocket staging for tiny cabaret stages, she appears to be at her most vulnerable, herself -- in Rodgers and Hart's achingly beautiful "It Never Entered My Mind." You know that Boone understands the challenge she faces in the marketplace, the difficulty of turning around the kind of branding one part of a career can stamp on another.
Jay-Alexander, she says, took away even her corded microphone so she'd have nothing to cling to or hide behind. "To stand alone in a room and sing," she says, "is so awkward, you feel so exposed."
"Once I laughed when I heard you saying / That I'd be playing solitaire / Uneasy in my easy chair ? It never entered my mind."
References to loneliness run through many of Boone's best moments. They make it clear why "Blue Skies" means so much to her -- Clooney's and her own.
"I really do believe," she says, searching out her own words as she does her songs' lyrics, "that when you're doing something that's really honest and high quality, it wins out in the end."
And that's her new credo. "The public gets it when it's really good."
Boone pauses, maybe four beats. "I'll just have to push through this image."
