Despite missteps, Ross still supreme
Legendary songstress puts on a great show, even when backing band doesn’t quite mesh
Diana Ross has given the world songs of such indelibility that almost any fan who hears her live is often likely also to hear, as if they were spectrally powerful backing tracks, memories of the canonical recordings of those songs.
That didn’t mean Ross needed those conjured backing tracks while performing at the BMO Harris Pavilion on Friday night: Now 73, she has one of the better-preserved voices of an era that began in the early 1960s when she was part of the Supremes.
She didn’t neglect those earlier years: By the third song of her set, she was handling “My World Is Empty Without You” and following it with a nearly youth-restoring “Baby Love” and “Stop! In the Name of Love,” the last of which is, without the exclamation, the name of her current tour.
The true level of vocal preservation became tricky to ascertain — her nine-piece band was very skilled, but its mixes, arrangements, volume levels or some combination of those things either tried to cover the cracks Ross didn’t want to be heard or accidentally submerged her pipes.
Not unlike bands assembled around other ’60s sages, including Brian Wilson, the ensemble for Ross could sound as though its players were piecing together the sonic equivalent of a famous photo from fragments of several different sizes and colors of reproductions.
Busyness was the result more often than was the crispness of classic Motown dynamics, although a Tito Puentestyle vamp on “Love Child” and an extra bump or two in the disco sass of “I’m Coming Out” proved the band could create its own sharp images, as it were.
The band kept the momentum going whenever Ross left the stage to change diva outfits, and it did display restraint a handful of times: during the overly plaintive 1975 hit “Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To),” for example.
With a set of 70 or 80 minutes, the restraint was less important than the momentum, especially when Ross closed with an extended version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” mingled with a snippet of DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” that amused and mystified a crowd whose adoration made up for its size. (About twothirds of the seats were filled, while the general-admission area was basically deserted.)
Ross reprised the Gaynor song in a brief, delayed encore that, with a version of the Billie Holiday heartache “Don’t Explain” (Ross portrayed Holiday in the 1972 film “Lady Sings the Blues”), elegantly suggested that indelibility isn’t always a matter of memory.