All That Jazz: The Best of Ute Lemper

by William RuhlmannLondon Records' Ute Lemper compilation takes its title from a song she sang in her London appearance in the musical Chicago in 1998; it is followed at the start of the disc by her performance of "Don't Tell Mama," a song from another Kander & Ebb show, Cabaret, that she appeared in 1986, and which she recorded on her debut album for Columbia, Crimes of the Heart, in 1987. The two songs neatly dovetail her work over the 12-year period, not only because they are show tunes by the same songwriters but also because they are both pastiches of interwar music, and Lemper has specialized in actual interwar music in between. After several film songs, the compilation includes seven selections from her two albums of Kurt Weill music, followed by four tracks from Illusions, an album devoted to music associated with Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf. Then there is one contemporary song, drawn from her Michael Nyman Songbook release, and finally four numbers from Berlin Cabaret Songs. The wonder is that she is always so assured on material that makes different kinds of demands on a singer from formal precision to uninhibited projection (not to mention being in three languages, English, German, and French). Lemper makes it all sound easy, and she brings alive musical styles we are used to hearing on scratchy old recordings, if at all. She is very much a singing actress, creating characters to perform the disparate material, some of them distinctly unsavory, from Chicago's deadly Velma Kelly to the narrator of "I'm a Vamp!," who declares, "I bite my men and suck them dry, and then I bake them in a pie." Her lusty enthusiasm for such decadent material is her strongest suit, and this is an excellent pricis of her career so far.