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Brooklyn Vegan

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Singer/songwriter and actress Nellie McKay is releasing the followup to 2010’s Home Sweet Mobile Home this year with My Weekly Reader on March 24. It’s a ’60s covers album that has her taking on songs by The Beatles, The Kinks, Crosby Stills & Nash, Small Faces, Frank Zappa, Herman’s Hermits, Steve Miller Band, Richard & Mimi Farina, Moby Grape, Country Joe McDonald, Gerry & the Pacemakers, The Cyrcle and Alan Price. Keeping with the ’60s theme, she recorded it with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. Her cover of Moby Grape‘s “Murder In My Heart for the Judge” came out a little while back and can be streamed below, and we’ve now got the premiere of her cover of another California psych/folk rock artist, Country Joe McDonald. She does “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine,” as you can hear while you watch the very appropriate visual accompaniment (by The Joshua Light Show), below. Tracklist below too.
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By David Noh – Gay City News

NOH-tipton-ISOne of the great enigmas in the music world, William Lee “Billy” Tipton (1914 – 1989) was an American jazz musician and bandleader, who, it was discovered after his death, was born a woman. Named Dorothy Louise Tipton at birth in Oklahoma, he took his father’s name, “Billy,” when he started his music career and bound his breasts and stuffed his pants to pass when he performed. By 1940, he was living as a man in private as well as public life, and no one, apart from a couple of cousins and perhaps his lovers, knew his secret. He toured the country with different bands, eventually forming the Billy Tipton Trio, which was signed by Tops Records in 1957 and recorded two moderately successful albums.

The band was offered a permanent position at a Reno hotel and more Tops recordings, but Tipton decided to move to Spokane, Washington, to work as a talent broker and lead his trio as a local club’s house band. He had many paramours, but the chief one was a stripper named Kitty Kelly with whom he adopted three sons. They split up and he took custody of the boys, moving into a mobile home and living in poverty. By the late 1970s, arthritis forced him into retirement from music, and in 1989 he died from a hemorrhaging ulcer.

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Nellie McKay is a supreme stylist, with broad, substantial musical intelligence behind every single flourish. She combines heart-on-sleeve sincerity with supremely arch, dry wit; she’s utterly unique, her performance style multifarious and unpredictable, drawing ideas from extremely diverse eras and genres.

Her Cafe Carlyle debut, nuttily entitled “Nellie with a Z”, is as edgy as anything I’ve seen at that rarefied venue – she sings something about “motherfuckers” at one point – all the while displaying musical taste and restraint so impeccable you dare not take issue with her cabaret bona fides. It’s 100% a solo act, just Nellie in a sophisticated, spangled dress accompanying herself on piano, and exceptionally expressive, um, ukulele (I’d go so far as to call her a virtuoso of the uke).

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Nellie McKay Sings Homemades and Standards at Café Carlyle

With a head full of blond curls, and wearing a glittery blouse, Nellie McKay flounced into Café Carlyle on Tuesday evening, ushering a gust of downtown freshness into this elegant uptown precinct. Ms. McKay, 31, has been a presence on the cultural scene for at least a decade. But she still wears the mystique of a willful prodigy who is smarter, more talented and hipper than everyone else: a performer who answers only to herself. Gifts that others spend years refining seem to come naturally to her.

Ms. McKay has merely to sit down at the piano, open her mouth, and out comes the sweet lilting sound of a classic pop-jazz singer, a mixture of Mildred Bailey, Billie Holiday and Doris Day, paradoxically sophisticated and girlish. There is a subtle bounce in her delivery as she lingers behind a phrase just long enough to convey a steady pulse of swing.

Her new show, “Nellie With a Z” is a 50-50 mixture of standards and original material. Because of the uncanny accuracy of her ear, she can write and sing in any style, and you can’t always be certain that one of her original songs is not an obscure period piece. Her impeccable renditions of “Skylark,” “Midnight Sun,” “I Cover the Waterfront” and “Moon River” (in Portuguese) were dreamy and light. If you closed your eyes and listened, you were transported to the land of long ago and far away. But she also delivered an original up-to-the-minute hip-hop ditty, “Russky Rap,” timed for the Winter Olympics.

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The old and the new dance a strange and thrilling pas de deux in the singer-songwriter’s Café Carlyle debut.
By Zachary Stewart

The star of the evening emerged from behind the bar, doddering slowly through the dining room like an 89-year-old weighed down by the burden of decades of showbiz memories. No, it wasn’t Elaine Stritch, returning triumphant to Café Carlyle. It was 31-year-old Nellie McKay, making her Carlyle debut in Nellie With a Z. For a little over an hour McKay infused the Great American Songbook with a quirky hipster ennui that was at once non-threatening and subtly subversive.

“It’s so nice to be back at Feinstein’s,” she said in her opening moments before launching into Walter Donaldson and Harold Adamson’s “Did I Remember?” from the 1936 Cary Grant-Jean Harlow drama “Suzy.” Her ghostly voice will sing you into another era. She’s like listening to Jonathan Schwartz  in a haunted house.

McKay is a one-woman juggernaut. She accompanies herself on the piano and ukulele. She tickles the ivories with the greatest of ease, drawing out the kind of improvisational jazz riffs that were always meant to echo off the painted walls of Café Carlyle. She gives fresh life to old standards like Mercer & Carmichael’s “Skylark” and the Fats Waller/Harry Brooks/Andy Razaf collaboration “Black and Blue.” “What did I do to be so black and blue,” she sings in her wispy-yet-crystal-clear voice. Later she strums out a sotto voce rendition of “Rio De Lua” (“Moon River” in Portuguese) that is sweeter and softer than any lullaby.

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By Andy Battaglia

Nellie McKay’s sound harks back to the gee-whiz spirit of the 1940s and ’50s, with timeless melodies and tributes to the likes of Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day. But her mind, musically and otherwise, finds much in the present to protest.

“There’s such a rich history of protest in this country, and such ripe disdain,” she said, cheerfully, while holding a sign last week outside the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. She was there, at Madison Square Garden in the cold, with about a dozen others to suggest that breeding dogs is immoral when dogs in shelters go without homes. (Her sign: “Every dog bred is a shelter dog dead.”)

On Tuesday, Ms. McKay brings her mission to a setting of a different sort: the cabaret at the Café Carlyle, where she will perform a five-night stand.

The atmosphere may diverge, but the singer has made a habit of recasting her surroundings in her own image.

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