Go Nellie
Nellie McKay does a remarkable impression of an utter ditz. The singing, songwriting pianist arrived onstage at Manhattan's Zankel Hall Friday night carrying an awkward armful of notebooks and sheet music, which she smooshed onto the Steinway's music stand before sitting down and tearing into the very funny "Feminists Don't Have a Sense of Humor." For ninety minutes, and minus the strings that accompanied her prior local gig, McKay pinballed between her diverse musical personas. "Gladd" evoked the torchy heyday of Julie London, "Old Enough" the piano-stool toppling antics of Jerry Lee Lewis, "Waiter" the cabaret sophistication of Annie Ross, and an improvised atonal interlude acknowledged our location directly underneath Carnegie Hall's better-known Stern Auditorium. She sang tunes from both of her double-CD albums, Get Away From Me and Pretty Little Head, as well as material from an unprintably titled upcoming album.
What ties all her music together, I think, is the sense of a young performer (she's only twenty-five) with a sense of history, many beautiful ideas, and a body full of raw urban nerve endings struggling with a world of hurt. There was a new global aspect to McKay's performance tonight. At different times she sang (poorly, it must be admitted) in Japanese, French, German, and Mandarin. The latter tune involved a three-part audience sing-along (ending in a group primal scream) and an impassioned rant about Gongtan, a 1,700-year-old southwestern Chinese town that will be flooded when a downstream hydroelectric dam is completed later this year. McKay is a reluctant vegetarian and ardent animal-rights advocate possessing no qualms about using her stage status as a bully pulpit. As refreshingly talented as she can be vaguely annoying, McKay is definitely one of New York's more organically homegrown artists.