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Nancy Wilson appeared onstage Friday night in a dress and shoes the same shade of yellow that she wore on the cover of “Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley,” her record from 1961. She welcomed the audience, then disappeared for a while, letting her friends come on one by one and do the work.
Nancy Wilson celebrating her 70th birthday with fans and friends at Carnegie Hall on Friday with Rufus Reid on bass.
This was at Carnegie Hall, for a JVC Jazz Festival New York concert in honor of her 70th birthday, which was in February. Her absence went on long enough that we were beginning to miss her. She came back only when the pianist Herbie Hancock called her out.
What was this all about? Old-school party etiquette, maybe: allowing time for everyone to get to know one another without her hovering presence, then taking charge when really needed.
Ms. Wilson’s voice is thin and smooth, but she uses her own devices, doled out in pinches, that give it an almost brawny power. Among these are a quick, accurate upward slide of a whole step in pitch; a quick voice break, like a yodel; a short, consternated yell; a flirty whisper; fading out a phrase by singing it out of the side of her mouth; breaking up her rhythm by placing mild emphasis on certain words and boldfacing others.
When she sang “Guess Who I Saw Today?” — in which the narrator delicately (and devastatingly) tells her husband that she saw him with another woman — she used all these ingredients. The yell came in the first two words of the title phrase, and they were the two loudest sounds of the evening. It doesn’t matter how calculated that gesture was; it did the job. Rows of people in the audience made simultaneous reflex motions, startled.
This concert was jazz as we know it, though Ms. Wilson’s records have been marketed as adult contemporary or smooth jazz. The guests all played with her three-piece band: the pianist Llew Mathews, the bassist Rufus Reid, the drummer Roy McCurdy.
The violinist Regina Carter played Duke Ellington’s “Imagine My Frustration,” making bowed blues phrases sound vocal. Nnenna Freelon broadly sang two songs, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “If I Had You”; she’s a generation younger than Ms. Wilson, and pours it on where Ms. Wilson holds back.
Kurt Elling performed two of the best songs in Ms. Wilson’s repertory, “Sunny” and “Save Your Love for Me,” using more or less her original 1961 arrangement in the second one; it worked as well as ever. And Mr. Hancock — an admirer of Ms. Wilson’s who had never played with her — got off a subtle, highly altered version of Cole Porter’s “I Love You,” before she finally returned to sing the ballad “Old Folks” with him.
But the most effective guest turn belonged to Dianne Reeves, a supremely self-confident singer who looked nervous and incredulous that she was being given the opportunity to sing with one of her idols. She sang “Midnight Sun” — it’s on Ms. Wilson’s 1967 record “Lush Life”— and a weird thing happened: The crowd went bonkers. Before she had finished the opening verse, she had gotten the biggest applause of the night.
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