Review/Pop; Songs of Love by Vandross and Baker
Review from NY Times 9/10/1988 by Jon Pareles
Two of pop's most luxurious voices were on display Wednesday at Madison Square Garden, where the national tour featuring Luther Vandross and Anita Baker started a four-night engagement. It's a perfect pairing. Mr. Vandross and Ms. Baker are gifted singers and love-song specialists; each has sold millions of albums of plushly produced ballads, sultry mood music for consenting adults.
While their music serves the same purpose, Mr. Vandross and Ms. Baker arrive at it by different routes. Mr. Vandross is a pop-soul tenor in the lineage of Nat (King) Cole, Johnny Mathis and the ballad side of Sam Cooke. With his voice floating above the beat, warm and supple, he plays the role of lover as supplicant, pleading for physical affection or begging for a reconciliation, as in the hit the crowd called for, A House Is Not a Home. The moment he describes in song after song is the moment before the embrace, as he declares his respectful affection in pure, yearning tones.
Performing in the round at Madison Square Garden, where he shared a revolving stage with three backup singers (the band was at floor level), Mr. Vandross was leisurely and assured, teasing out his songs like an extended seduction. He's a large man, but was light on his feet as he joined the backup singers in synchronized movements recalling the Supremes or simply strolled the stage, pouring out perfect phrase after perfect phrase in full voice or a pearly falsetto.
Every so often, Mr. Vandross would galvanize the crowd with some vocal bravado - suddenly scooping up to a handful of notes, dropping into a baritone range, touching on every note in a rising phrase like someone dancing up a staircase - but it is his sustained, liquid, utterly sincere-sounding delivery that seems to ease every romantic tension. Gregory Hines, who joined him for a duet in one song, seemed earthbound by comparison.
Where Mr. Vandross sings about being on the verge of consummation, Ms. Baker's songs are about ecstatic moments when she is, as one lyric puts it, caught up in the rapture of love. On stage, most of her songs are like miniature trysts, starting with articulate verses and dissolving into extended vamps behind wordless, ecstatic singing. Ms. Baker is steeped in jazz, especially the throaty, enfolding tones of Sarah Vaughan; she has also learned from the husky pop-soul of Gladys Knight.
Although she does scat-sing now and then, Ms. Baker is rarely percussive. She glides into notes and turns melodies into sumptuous swoops and curves, with phrases that melt and trickle over the beat. Her tone is sometimes veiled, sometimes open, sometimes growling or moaning, and she makes every gradation a matter of high drama. At times, as in her version of God Bless the Child, the lyrics are secondary to the flow of sound, but in her own songs that swooning emotionality is exactly what she's singing about.
Ms. Baker shared the stage with one band member at a time, and between songs she was cheerfully down to earth, even joking about her two-and-a-half-year-long engagement. But most of the time she stood alone in a fluttery white dress, cooing endearments with dreamy voluptuousness.
The show's staging looks understated but must be elaborate. On Wednesday an hourlong set change between Ms. Baker and Mr. Vandross interrupted a romantic evening that stretched until nearly midnight.