Just as Tony Bennett exudes good cheer, so Todd Gordon is a singer with a penchant for all-round positive thinking and uncomplicated swing anthems. Raised on the Beatles and Sinatra, the slight, greying Scottish vocalist is a relative newcomer to the circuit — he pursued a business career before finally deciding to follow his dreams — but having caught the eye of two of our best performers, Claire Martin and Ian Shaw, his name should become more familiar.
Shaw, in fact, serves as producer on Gordon’s new album, Love’s Illusion, a collection that illustrates his taste for unexpected juxtapositions. While You Make Me Feel So Young adds a conventional nod in the direction of the classic Sinatra-Riddle recording, Gordon unearths one of Richard Rodney Bennett’s lesser-known songs, Anyone Home? and kicks up a blues chorus on Jimmy Reed’s You Got Me Runnin’. That dependable double-act of the saxophonist Alan Barnes and trumpeter Bruce Adams rounds out the arrangements.
This Soho performance offers a slimmed-down version of the studio set, with the tenor player Dave O’Higgins sitting in with a polished trio led by the pianist and musical director David Patrick. Gordon’s calmly understated light baritone cut a neat path through But Beautiful, and he resisted the temptation to embellish the bittersweet sentiments of Miss Otis Regrets. Whether the bluesier material works as well is another question. Sinatra could get away with That’s Life, to be sure, but Gordon doesn’t really possess the visceral energy needed to do the numbers justice.
My Blue Heaven worked well, though, wrapped in a Horace Silver-ish Latin vamp. Clearly a Frank Loesser fan, Gordon treated I Believe in You as a pacey swinger, the drummer Tom Gordon and double-bassist Andrew Cleyndert effortlessly raising the tempo. Mack the Knife had all the necessary swagger (and a playful mention of Robbie Williams amid the references to Ella and Bobby Darin). If Nelson Riddle and his men would have struggled to squeeze on to the bandstand, Patrick cleverly reduced the fabled Capitol arrangement of I’ve Got You Under my Skin to compact proportions.