Partridge brings her own voice to songbook standards
NEW YORK -- The Algonquin Hotel here is one of the grand names in a certain kind of jazz: the elegant, debonair, supper-club kind, in which a well-put-together crowd gathers to enjoy the timeless offerings of the Great American Songbook.
Yet neither the venue nor the material can be taken for granted these days. Many once-grand jazz spaces have been given over to schlock or turned into tourist-driven money machines, if they survive at all. And the great songs made famous by Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, and company aren't exactly the freshest of fare.
So when Sarah Partridge, a committed songbook performer who has become a presence on the national torch-song circuit, selects the Algonquin lobby bar as an interview location, she's taking a cultural stand, low-key yet determined.
Partridge, who regularly plays the hotel's Oak Room, is a jazz striver: a singer who found her calling comparatively late and honed her craft in a genre full of potential pitfalls, all the while raising a family. She's been rewarded for her perseverance with three albums and a growing reputation. She makes her Boston debut at Scullers on Wednesday.
Partridge -- who was born in Brookline and lived in Weston into her teens -- is well aware of the risks in taking on standards, and the paucity of new material that mines the same sensibility.
"There's not a lot of new stuff," she says. "Luckily there's a lot of the old stuff. But let's face it, it does tend to be done again and again. You have to try to find your own voice. This is the way the music is evolving. It's demanding reinterpretations, which are sometimes good and sometimes not."
On Partridge's latest album, "You Are There: Songs From My Father," the arrangements are warm and well paced; her delivery is crisp and lean yet never runs cold. Her takes on songs such as "Stormy Monday Blues" and "Stars Fell on Alabama" are neither rehashes nor deconstructions, a vital balance if the songs are to retain both freshness and identity.
An encounter straight from showbiz lore got Partridge her start. Out one night for drinks with some girlfriends, she succumbed to their pleas that she try a karaoke number. She scoured the song list for one she felt comfortable attempting. Suddenly she was onstage doing "Summertime." A guy came up, introduced himself as a jazz booker . . .
And a star was born, sort of. "I didn't become Diana Krall right then and there, but it started the ball rolling," Partridge says. "It got me working with great musicians and doing this music I loved, and I realized I could do it."
That wasn't the first quirky moment in Partridge's career. She began as an actress, studying theater at Northwestern University, and her first role came playing the baby sitter in the 1983 hit movie "Risky Business," which, somewhat more famously, introduced a young actor named Tom Cruise.
Partridge's two scenes opposite Cruise seem destined to follow her around as a sort of signature anecdote. Not that she's complaining.
"As a first job, it was pretty cool," she says. "Most of it ended up on the cutting room floor, but I did end up in it for two scenes, kissing Tom Cruise, so how bad can that be?"
Yet after this start, Partridge struggled in the movie industry. "Put it this way," she says, "I supported myself most years." That meant doing cartoon and commercial voice - overs and TV pilots and maintaining a part-time job.
So her music break, at age 32, came at an opportune time.
"I wasn't getting many acting roles anymore," Partridge says. "I had turned 30, and at that point the acting roles, if you're not famous, are starting to dwindle."
From her Hollywood days, however, Partridge retained a tenacity that would serve her well on the slow road to recognition as a jazz singer, paying dues in a difficult, even hidebound genre with scant commercial prospects.
Along the way she married her fiance, a television producer, and had two sons, now 11 and 8. The duties of motherhood only compounded her load.
"The family thing and being a little older is probably not on my side," she says. "What I should be doing more of is traveling, because this music is so prevalent in Europe and Japan. And I've made a decision not to go away from my family for a month at a time. But it hasn't stopped me from making albums and keeping a career going."
In fact, as a classic songbook singer, Partridge has chosen a field where the life experience that comes with age adds depth to the material -- indeed, might even be considered a prerequisite for soulful delivery.
"I feel that if you're going to sing and be my age, you might as well sing this music, because people take you more seriously when you're older," she says.
Her new album is a case in point. It is a tribute to her deceased father, and the one original song, the affecting "Dancing in My Mind," finds her reminiscing on childhood memories, and on loss, from a grown-up, philosophical perspective.
That same perspective pervades Partridge's outlook on the state of her nontraditional, yet largely happy, career.
"My aspirations are high, they always have been," she says. "But I'm more realistic now than I have been. I'm just on a journey now. It used to be about the goal. Interestingly enough, now that I'm not thinking so much about the goal, bigger things are happening."
