Back in the 1980s, arguably at the height of her popularity as a pop singer, Linda Ronstadt took a bold step back in time.
She dusted off some gems from the Great American Songbook and sang them with one of the genre's most respected arrangers and conductors, Nelson Riddle.
The recordings sold millions of copies and became a cornerstone of her career, and from the passion with which she sang them Friday night, you got a sense those songs strike an indelible chord to this day.
"They're fabulous songs and wonderful for singers," she told the audience of 1,800 about 20 minutes into her 75-minute show. "I wanted to spring them from their elevator jails."
Ronstadt, whose career has spanned the latter third of 20th-century pop music and beyond, still has the vocal chops to make those songs soar. Standing behind a mic on the AVA's sprawling stage, with her impressive six-man band and two backup singers around her, she wrapped her enormous alto around the words of Cole Porter ("Get Out Of Town"), George and Ira Gershwin ("Someone To Watch Over Me"), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart ("Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered") and Billy Strayhorn ("Lush Life").
This was Ronstadt's first big Tucson concert since 2001, when she performed Riddle works backed by the University of Arizona Symphony Orchestra and Jazz Ensembles. That concert was a whole evening of Riddle; Friday night was a whole half-hour of Riddle, but it was a memorable and flawless 30 minutes in which Ronstadt shed some of her notorious stage shyness and opened up to an audience that accepts her in all her musical and political shades.
"It's very nice to be back home in Tucson," she said from the outset, noting that on her way home after the show she would have to stop for cat food. "It's not like being in a hotel and getting room service and not having your cat with you."
Ronstadt admitted she prefers playing in a real theater "with a lid on it" to the stadiums she sold out in the 1970s and '80s and the outdoor venue she played at Casino del Sol. In a theater, she opined, you don't have guys lugging around 5-gallon buckets of ice and beer, hawking bottles aisle to aisle. There's no smell of popcorn, no smoke from the grill floating overhead and no grilled burgers perfuming the night air.
"It's like smoking 13 packs per note," Ronstadt complained.
But those were forgettable nuisances when she sang Nat King Cole's clever jazzy lyrics "Straighten up and fly right / Straighten up and fly right."
Ronstadt planted herself behind the mic stand and split her gaze from the audience to the flat-screened monitor at her feet — hardly the commanding stage pose you would expect from someone who has spent her adult life facing stage lights.
But fans do not come to see Ronstadt; they come to hear her.
She sounded her best and most confident doing the Riddle material. And while vocally she impressed on most of her pop hits — "Just One Look," "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," "Blue Bayou" and "Desperado" — her performance occasionally lacked the passion she brought to the standards. Twice during a duet with backup singer Arnold McCuller on "Somewhere Out There," Ronstadt's voice was inaudible. You could see her lips move, but for a dozen or so words, you couldn't hear her.
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Linda Ronstadt in concert Friday night at Casino del Sol's AVA.
