Ferocious. That is the word the pop-jazz singer Jane Scheckter applies to Lena Horne in “From This Moment On,” her tribute to Ms. Horne, who is now 90. Ms. Scheckter recalled at Broadway Baby bistro on Wednesday evening that Ms. Horne, along with Bobby Short and Tony Perkins, was one of her youthful idols. Holding up an old LP of Ms. Horne’s 1957 live album at the Waldorf-Astoria, she credited it with rerouting her girlhood fantasy of movie stardom to nightclub singing.
She discovered the force of Ms. Horne’s ferocity in the video of her celebrated one-woman Broadway show, “The Lady and Her Music,” whose close-up photography revealed her hurt and anger. For Ms. Horne’s dazzling smile has always had the ominous quality of a wary tiger baring its teeth. Her alluring seductiveness coincides with a forbidding hauteur, the whole driven by an innate theatricality.
That Ms. Scheckter is not ferocious, visibly angry, haughty or especially theatrical helps her to separate herself from her complicated subject in the most positive way. What she has appropriated from Ms. Horne is invaluable musical skill.
She has a bright, clear voice with a brassy edge and a luscious, rounded vibrato, and she swings. If her pristine enunciation, intense concentration, meticulous phrasing and sultry lower register are all Horne trademarks, the influences are fully integrated. Ms. Scheckter was accompanied on piano by one of the strongest trios in cabaret: Tedd Firth on piano, Tom Hubbard on bass and Peter Grant on drums.
“From This Moment On” is not a biographical show, although Ms. Scheckter imparts a lot of information. High points are the witty “New-Fangled Tango,” a sexy dancing lesson (from the 1956 show “Happy Hunting”) that advises dancing partners not to move at all; two great ballads, “Something to Live For” and “Roundabout”; and for a finale, a charging, full-tilt “From This Moment On.”
Ms. Scheckter sensibly uses Ms. Horne’s signature song, “Stormy Weather,” only as an instrumental overture.
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