Hey, Piano Bar Lady!
Linn Lorkin’s musical autobiography travels from her New Zealand farmstead via a stint at Ronnie Scott’s in London to the piano bars and walkup flatshares in New York’s SoHo. It’s spiced with gentle anecdotes and features several of her own jazz compositions. The anecdotes need tightening and whilst the lyrics are amusing, many of the songs have similar flavours and rhythms.
However, her piano playing is tremendous and the snatches of more famous songs she references are tantalizing. After a few bars of “La Vie en Rose” in faultless French, I wished she’d favoured us with some Jacques Brel or Marguerite Monnot, and a dozen bars of “As Time Goes By” simply weren’t enough to show her interpretative style.
She could do with a more conducive venue, too: the scrubbed pine tables and late evening chill of Henderson’s Vegetarian Restaurant don’t really conjure up the bead curtains and tasselled shades of a louche nightclub which is Lorkin’s natural habitat.
– Johnny Fox
