Live show reminds us how to breathe
Crowd feels energy of singer Spencer Day’s performance at Feinstein’s in S.F.
This past year, breath was terror. We isolated it and muzzled it. We inhaled and exhaled strategically when we espied strangers ahead. We kept visualizing its particles and droplets, worried that they contained coronavirus, an act to remind ourselves how dangerous a once mindless, involuntary activity had become.
But there’s another breath that’s relaxing and freeing, communal and joyful, one that was on rich display at Spencer Day’s “Here Comes the Sun,” his fourday residency that opened Wednesday, June 23, at Feinstein’s at the Nikko in downtown San Francisco.
A thing kept happening at the concert that many in the audience have likely forgotten about: One person’s sigh sets off a chain reaction. One spectator holding her breath makes a neighbor unconsciously do the same. Through a million little signals bouncing off each other in an intimate room, we all decide together when to focus and when to release, when to soar and when to snicker, just by the way we breathe.
Day, a singersongwriter who works in jazz, pop, show tunes and beyond, only accentuates that feeling, thanks to his exquisite phrasing, on both his own compositions and standards. He can make a brassy belt melt into faraway birdsong. In his “I’m Always Drunk in San Francisco,” form mirrors content, but not so gratuitously as to devolve into sloppiness; his style is more fat and sassy, as if to sing is to lick his lips.
During his “Close the Door,” sung to a wouldbe lover on the cusp of giving in, he makes clear, in each verse, how far along he is in his persuasion, concluding with a crescendo that says, “You’re almost there! Come on!” followed by a diminuendo that conjures, finally, the pair’s quiet but private decision to make themselves scarce. Throughout the evening, he and guitarist John Storie (also accompanied by bassist Alex Frank) conjure the ebb and flow of a single lung.
Sometimes, Day’s very respiration seems to be in swing rhythm, as if he exhales only on the offbeat. Sung whispers have the sturdiness of an oak, down to the last wisp. His low register — sparely deployed, but full and resonant — reads as a secret weapon.
Bounding onstage in an iridescent suit with magenta and teal sparkles, Day channels retro charm. His upbeat patter seems to live in both 2021 and the crooner era; his joke about getting through the pandemic with “denial, toxic positivity and music”
could, with different terminology, live outside time.
Day’s training, craftsmanship and discipline are so sharp they make you aware of the thousand choices that shape a single phrase. Such double consciousness — being inside and outside the song at the same time as an audience member — affords a distinct pleasure. In his song “Shadow Man,” for instance, you might marvel that he dares, in his lyrics, to characterize his darkest urges as a whole separate, frightening person within himself. At the same time, you appreciate the way his performance seems to marvel at that separate self, too.
But occasionally, “Here Comes the Sun” isn’t commenting on itself but simply being. When Day performs “Ghost of Chateau Marmont,” based on the Latin American myth of La Llorona, about a mother who’s lost her children, there seems to be no choice about rounding out this syllable, that phrase. Only bottomless grief, shorn of schmaltz, drives each ululation.
“72 and Sunny,” another Day original, stands out along the same lines. Day can make one lyric radiate a blazing sun’s face, the next peek through a dusty window as a distant sunbeam.
Just make sure you prepare yourself before he launches into his “Movie of Your Life,” whose lyrics show such imaginative empathy for you, their unknown listener, that you might have to pause to reestablish that Day has not taken up residency inside your brain: “Did you have a happy-everafter?” he asks. “Did you want your money back?” Either way, a consolation: “In the movies, no one ever dies.”