Svetlana & the Delancey Five: New York’s Most Deliciously Unpredictably Vocal Jazz Band

There were some delicious ironies at Svetlana & the Delancey Five’s Birdland show last week. With most vocal jazz acts these days, the situation is frontperson – more often than not a woman – plus backing unit. Although they got their start as a swing dance band, this crew share much more interplay and push-and-pull than most bands in the field. Which makes them vastly more unpredictable: you literally never know what they’re going to throw at you.

Their most recent Blue Note show was all about jaunty improvisation, a game of street ball with everybody throwing elbows and getting dirty. So this Birdland gig was something of an anomaly – because it was the song set. Watching this band, it’s never completely clear how much of what they’re doing is actually composed, and how much improvisation is going on. Frontwoman Svetlana Shmulyian is a connoisseur of clever charts – Wycliffe Gordon is a favorite source – and obviously revels in keeping the audience guessing.

Which might explain why, in between songs, she was in rare form as snarky comedienne: sticking more closely to the page might not have been everything she needed to really blow off steam. There were many levels of meta: she never came right out and said, “You people are just a bunch of tourists from the sticks,” but for the hometown contingent, she was redemptive.

To paraphrase Mae West, this time out the quintet were a band what takes its time, parsing the arrangements’ innumerable twists and turns. They made bossa nova out of the Ella Fitzgerald version of A Tisket, a Tasket, with a fleeting, surreallistically triumphant klezmer interlude when least expected. By contrast, their take of I’m Just a Lucky So and So had a slow, lustrous sway lowlit by the harmonies of trumpeter Charlie Caranicas and tenor saxophonist Christopher McBride, pianist Willerm Delisfort ramping up the starry ambience. It was the ”Midnight in a tropical forest,“ that Shmulyian had promised to deliver.

Dynamics and subtle tempo shifts were front and center throughout Cheek to Cheek and then What a Little Moonlight Can Do, ramping down In the Wee Small Hours over the tersely tuneful pulse of bassist Endea Owens in tandem with similarly purposeful drummer Rob Garcia and his counterintuitive snare work. Then the group took it up again with a soaring, practically vengeful take of a Shmulyian original, You Turned the Tables on Me.

Much of this material is slated for release on the group’s forthcoming 2019 album A Night at the Movies, including a mamboish reinvention of an 80s ballad dating “From when hair like mine was popular,” as Shmulyian put it (she’s got one of the most seriously leonine manes in jazz).

The upbeat, bouncy Baby I’m Back, a triumphant return-from-the-tour tableau, contrasted with Garcia’s glimmering, harrowing, New Orleans funeral remake of the Beatles’ Because. They took it out with what has become Shmulyian’s signature closer lately, Blue Skies, just Delisfort and the bandleader slowly pushing the clouds away before the whole band brought the big light up. Shmulyian’s next show is this Jan 12 at 8 PM with the NY Swing Collective at the Cell Theatre in Chelsea; cover is $15.

Svetlana & the Delancey Five Reinvent Classic Swing at the Blue Note

The difference between Svetlana & the Delancey Five and virtually every other female-fronted vocal jazz act out there is that they’re not just a singer and a backing band. There’s more interplay and musical conversation in this group than there is in practically any other similar lineup. Case in point: the take of Lady Be Good at their Blue Note show on Saturday. “Here’s one from when we used to be a dance band,” frontwoman Svetlana Shmulyian told the crowd as the ensemble launched into a lickety-split version peppered with counterpoint and call-and-response between both singer and instrumentalists, along with a striking handful of sudden syncopated shifts.

Of the original band’s original lineup, only the bandleader, and trumpeter Charlie Caranicas remain  – if you buy the argument that there was an original one. Like another New York institution, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, this band have always had a semi-rotating cast: Shmulyian’s address book is as deep as her collection of edgy original charts.

Throughout the rest of the set, the animated jousting between bandmates was nonstop. Tenor saxophonist Christopher McBride exchanged clusters and bursts with Caranicas, whose effortlessly rapidfire descent through a biting series of chromatics during an epically shapeshifting Nothing But Blue Skies was one of the show’s high points.

Bassist Endea Owens – most recently witnessed propelling the mighty all-female Sisterhood of Swing big band at Lincoln Center – voiced terse piano lines and horn lines, and then went into some lowdown funk in a radical remake of Remember Me, from the animated film Coco. Pianist Willerm Delisfort, who’d switched to a resonant, organlike Fender Rhodes setting for that one, tossed off an especially smoochy boudoir soul riff that drew an eye-rolling “I can’t believe you just did that” from the bassist. From the side seats, it wasn’t possible to see Delisfort’s reaction, but it was probably, “There’s more where that came from.”

Drummer Henry Conerway III turned his predecessor Rob Garcia’s arrangement of the Beatles’ Because into a New Orleans funeral theme – in 6/8 time, most of the way through. Likewise, he and the bandleader pounced through more than one jaunty drum-and-vocal duet.

Shmulyian – whose interpretations depend on whatever exchanges are going on with the group – was characteristically dynamic on the mic. Her signature delivery is as clear as a bell, but this time she added an unexpectedly welcome grit to A Tisket, a Tasket, her opening number. It may have been a throwaway for Ella Fitzgerald, but Shmulyian took a carefree playground rhyme and made a fierce double-dutch anthem out of it. Contrastingly, she turned the ballad Sooner or Later – from the Madonna film Dick Tracy – into swoony wee-hours saloon blues.

For upstate fans, they’re at the Falcon,1348 Rt. 9 W in Marlboro, NY on July 29 at 8 PM. They also have a new album, Night at the Movies, in the can, whose reinvented songs from films across the ages are reputedly as eclectic as the setlist as this gig.