The actress who sings is back

MANILA, Philippines - It was 49 years ago (on June 6, 1960) when Barbra Streisand won a talent show at the Lion in Greenwich Village by singing A Sleepin’ Bee. That was her first performance at a nightclub and the beginning of a long and enviable career in music. This year, she “returns” to the nightclub via Love Is the Answer, an album of standards produced by jazz musician Diana Krall.

Those who are expecting to feel the raw energy of her early nightclub days may be disappointed. Her electric performance at the Bon Soir in 1962, preserved in Just for the Record, seems an era away from the languorous and lushly (some might find overly) orchestrated set pieces that make up her latest album. Jazz purists — for Love Is the Answer was advertised as a jazz album — will find that it is more easy-listening than bebop, swing, bossa nova, or any other style that fall under the rubric of “jazz.” (The deluxe edition of the album, unavailable locally, has a second disc with Streisand singing with only Diana Krall’s jazz quartet.)

Love Is the Answer is Streisand at her laziest and lowest yet, and (here I risk the charge of ageism) Streisand sounding like and showing her age, something belied by the album cover in which she looks not a day past 45. The wear and tear in those once supersonic pipes, for which Dionne Warwick said she would kill to have, are evident. The Broadway-style belting and the D6s that she used to toss off so insouciantly when she was 18 are gone; the rasps have taken over.

Of course, at 67 and after 62 albums, with no formal training or regular vocalizing (she finds that boring), she shouldn’t be expected to have preserved her voice. Yet what she has preserved is more than serviceable. What she has lost in amplitude or in range she makes up for in phrasing. She has styled herself, after all, as “an actress who sings.” For the most part, she succeeds. Here’s to Life, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, Some Other Time, and Where Do You Start? are intelligently read and affecting. Listeners may want to compare the way she renders the last line of Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most in the current album with the way she did it in the 1960s. Her voice had more body then, but by simply bringing the last word a few tones down she adds pathos to an old song.

The jury is still out, however, about her reading of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. The problem with interpreting a tune that is as familiar as that is how to make listeners listen. Streisand’s characteristic chuckles and pitch bends are apposite for a persona trying to disguise her hurt. The tears, she says, are simply a function of smoke getting in her eyes. The problem begins in the reprise. Full-throated ornamentation pounds all the irony out of the tune like a sledgehammer on a poor chestnut. Streisand does end the song sotto voce, suggesting the persona’s regaining self-possession. But whether the side trip to hysteria was necessary is open to debate.

Streisand is best in You Must Believe in Spring, listed as a bonus track. Composed by Michel Legrand and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, it is also arguably the most poetic and intelligent song in the album. It begins: “When lonely feelings chill / the meadows of your mind, / just think if Winter comes, / can Spring be far behind? / Beneath the deepest snows, / the secret of a rose / is merely that it knows / you must believe in Spring.”

A song with lyrics like those risks being taken as mindless optimism, something like Don’t Worry, Be Happy. But accompanied only by a piano, the tempo slowed down and her vocals unadorned, Streisand brings to the surface the hard edges of the song. Happiness is an act of the will: “You must believe in spring and love.”

Love Is the Answer is easily Streisand’s best work in the studio since Back to Broadway released about 16 years ago. Some people may demur at the thought of Streisand as jazz vocalist in the league of, say, Sarah Vaughan or Shirley Horn (one of Streisand’s favorite singers). But then she has always been sui generis. Streisand, the designer Cecil Beaton once remarked, is “a self-willed creation” (or if one prefers Paul Williams’s more sarcastic spin, “Barbra Streisand is working on a tree — you know, only God and Barbra Streisand can make a tree”). Take it or leave it. Given her unparalleled string of awards in the last 49 years (skeptics may check the Sept. 12 issue of Newsweek) and now Love Is the Answer, how crystal clear the choice should be.