Review: Kat Edmonson at Kessler Theater

“How are you lovebirds doing?” Kat Edmonson asked those gathered at the Kessler Theater Friday. “Are you here with your valentine? I hope so.”

The singer-songwriter’s query cut to the chase: it was Valentine’s Day Eve, and more than a few members of the near-capacity crowd were getting a headstart on the holiday devoted to love.

As amorous aperitifs go, one could hardly do any better than Edmonson’s langourous yet lithe catalog.

The Houston native, who now makes her home in Brooklyn, has carved out a successful career as a nominally jazz-focused vocalist, who, not unlike a certain other Lone Star export, Norah Jones, has found freedom in the genre’s surprising elasticity.

The ability to improvise and do it well, it would seem, has given Edmonson the freedom to go anywhere.

Edmonson’s latest, the 2014 LP The Big Picture, is the impetus for her current tour, and said album’s freewheeling, melting pot sensibility was on full display Friday throughout her 80-minute set.

With a well-oiled quartet at her back (multi-instrumentalist Laura Scarborough, shifting from vibraphone to accordion to piano to melodica with aplomb, was a particular stand-out), the 31-year-old Edmonson moved through her own material, along with the songs of others, displaying prodigious range and acute sensitivity.

Hers is a somewhat controversial voice, inspiring either fervent devotion or instant disdain. As a card-carrying member of the former camp, Edmonson’s mellifluous, multi-octave vocals hit my ears like a shot of gin: astringent, clean and wholly intoxicating.

That voice can surprise you, caressing with restrained tenderness, but capable of leaping up to the lights above, or roaring forth, flooding the room, as it did during the climax of Avion.

That voice is a key ingredient, cultivating a continental sophistication, reflected not only in the band’s natty attire, but the set list as well, whether it was the fizzy Champagne, the aching Hopelessly Blue or, arguably, the evening’s highlight, a heartstopping rendition of Alejandro Escovedo’s Sensitive Boys, bathing in the song’s inherent melancholy.

“Happiness feels like this,” Edmonson sang late in the evening, during Lucky, a track from her 2012 LP Way Down Low.

Fitting that the song speaks of love, as Edmonson was also describing the near-tangible feeling filling the intimate Kessler space.

Opener Robert Ellis came dangerously close to upstaging the headliner, with a searing 45-minute set. Joined by guitarist Kelly Doyle, Ellis pulled from his critically acclaimed album, The Lights from the Chemical Plant, and showed off a few works-in-progess (the tentatively titled Elephant in the Room and Maybe I’ll Move to California).

Like Edmonson, Ellis is nominally described as one thing (an alt-country troubadour), but the results are anything but easily defined. California, for instance, evoked Jackson Browne fronting Steely Dan, while Ellis’ take on Richard Thompson’s folk-rock classic 1952 Vincent Black Lightning seemed to stop time.

This story was originally published February 14, 2015 at 11:13 AM with the headline "Review: Kat Edmonson at Kessler Theater."