A tweet leads to sweet music

Andrea Capozzoli performs this week at Club Cafe in Pittsburgh.

By Scott Beveridge

PORCHVIEW, Pa. – A tweet on the Net was enough this week to take me away from a project around the house on a recession-proof vacation close to home this week.

The independent 91.3fm WYEP used Twitter to promote another one of its Third Thursdays happy hours that provide live performances by the best local musicians, free food and beer.

The band, “Meeting of Important People,” was on the menu alongside chips, pretzels and beer from Pennsylvania Brewing Co.

I left after few songs at the station’s community headquarters in Pittsburgh’s trendy South Side district because the music, while it had a good beat, was too loud to tolerate.

An unexpected reward, though, came around the corner at Club Cafe, where a female rhythm and blues singer was on stage.

Pittsburgh native Andrea Capozzoli immediately drew me inside the lounge at 56 S. 12th St., and her talent, and especially those scat numbers, kept me there until the set was over.

The decision was set when she performed the number, “Can you stay for a while.”

An instructor at Berklee School of Music in Boston, she also held her own on the keyboard and when she pulled out a muted trumpet. Her guitarist, Casper Gyldensoe, was spot on with his performance, too.

Capozzoli’s love songs were perfect for this dim, intimate venue accented with blue and plum walls and twinkle lights strung on tree branches around the ceiling. There were just a dozen people in the audience, making it seem as if they were at a jam session in her family room. All she needed was sexy, silk ballroom gown to melt the room, where everyone was keeping time with the beat.

“You got to make time to make love,” she crooned.

It would be hard not to fall in love with her voice.

It’s too bad that I didn’t purchase one of her albums before leaving to later liven up the mood at home during that miserable job of painting the entrance hall. Click here to listen to a sample of her music.

Meanwhile, Club Cafe wasn’t the place to seek out a good meal. The menu is limited to such small dishes as chili and pizza. The bruschetta pizza with green and black olives I selected arrived undercooked, and it didn't appear in any way to resemble bruschetta.

And while Pittsburgh is so lucky to have WYEP, the station needs to find another room to hold its concerts, or at least break a second door from the lobby into the studio to ease the congestion. The room is just too cramped.

"Ella" patters beautifully in Pittsburgh

"Ella," the season-opening play at Pittsburgh Public Theater, bears some resemblance to an older production about Billie Holiday, but it ends on a happier note.

By Scott Beveridge

PITTSBURGH, Pa. – Ella Fitzgerald doesn’t do chatting between songs, a gimmick that is better suited to such performers as "Lady Day" Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra.

Holiday has something interesting to say on stage because she’s lived through more than enough drama with a drug addiction and string of bad men to drip melancholy with the blues, according to a play underway in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Fitzgerald is known as “the good one” because she never captures headlines for making bad choices, says actress Tina Fabrique, who lends her perfect-pitched voice to “Ella,” a hit play that is opening the 2009-10 season at Pittsburgh Public Theater.

“Lady Day does patter,” Fabrique said while her character’s manager urges her to cut a song in an upcoming concert lineup to make time to talk to the audience in Nice, France.

It’s 1966, two days after Fitzgerald buried her beloved sister, Frances, and the crowd not only wants to hear her voice, but needs to know if she’s OK, the manager, Norman Granz, explains during rehearsals.

Directed and co-conceived by Rob Ruggiero, the Public’s showing of “Ella” is the 20th time this two-act play has gone to production since it’s world premier in 2005 at TheaterWorks in Hartford, Conn.

There can be no doubt that Ruggiero’s “Ella” draws its inspiration from “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” a play about jazz singer Billie Holiday by Lanie Robertson that took the stage at the Public in 1995.

Both stories are told in similar fashion between songs about black women who crossed racial boundaries to make hit records. But while “Lady Day” that starred Debra Tidwell is a story about self destruction, “Ella” leaves the stage on a good note and without the singer having to turn to heroin to get through the show.

And, Fabrique seems to channel the late Fitzgerald with every slight degree.

The first act takes the audience to the rehearsal for the Nice concert where Fabrique is wearing an ordinarily black dress suited for a funeral. It doesn’t take long, though, for the story line to reveal some of Fitzgerald’s darkest moments that defined her sultry voice and made her the “First Lady of Song.”

The story touches on the time Fitzgerald spent in a New York reform school after her mother died young, how she escaped it only to be molested by her stepfather and then went to work for a pimp dancing on the street to lure customers into his brothel.

A new manager – Norman Granz – eventually helps to make Ella a star by encouraging her to sing scat, or improvised music where random syllables mimic the sounds of the instruments.

“I’m no glamor puss Mr. Granz but I will sing you songs that barely have a word,” she says at the prospect of playing Carnegie Hall.

Fitzgerald would go on to perform on that esteemed New York stage 26 times before her death in 1996 at 81 from complications of heart disease and diabetes.

Meanwhile, Fabrique belts out 23 Fitzgerald favorites in vocal a range that allows the audience to pretend for just two hours that maybe Ella is still alive.

Her version of “Something to Live For” is the song from this show to remember.

It comes near the end when Ella – dressed in a sparkling blue ballgown - cries uncontrollably over the loss of a sister, while also acknowledging her shortcomings as a mother. The spotlight shifts to a fantastic trumpet player, Ron Haynes, only to reappear moments later on the star at the microphone after she regains her composure, knowing the stage is her one true love.

Fabrique takes the song home, delivering Ella on stage in a performance that is worth seeing a second time before the final curtain is drawn November 1 on this production.

More info: www.ppt.org or 412-316-1600.