The musical marriage of singer Laura Tate Goldman and guitarist Dan Lambert is an odd one.
She's a veteran singer and performer who worked in music, theater and TV in New York and Los Angeles, toured with the Smothers Brothers and fronted her own band before moving to El Paso nearly 20 years ago.
A former president of the Junior League of El Paso, Goldman performs occasionally, including charity gigs.
Lambert is a veteran guitarist, originally from the Chicago area, a musical restless spirit who's lived here for years and whose sound is in a constant state of motion, having started out as a blues guy and evolving into a world music artist, for lack of a better term.
Most recently, he's performed either solo or with some combination of bass and percussion, including the Double Drum Trio with which Lambert, who performs mostly on acoustic guitar, released the impressive musical travelogue "The Double Drum Trio" earlier this year.
These two forces teamed up again July 28 for the third in a growing series of dinner shows at the Magic Pan, a longtime Lambert hangout.
Their musical meeting point was the hope-filled and sensitive songs of Carole King, one of the most successful songwriters and recording artists of the last 50 years and easily one of the top female artists of the last half century.
It's not exactly a musical marriage made in heaven, this Goldman/Lambert thing. It's more like a work-in-progress. Goldman said after Thursday's 1-hour, 12-song set that she's never really worked with a band like Lambert's (augmented by the lyrical, articulate bass playing of Greg Gonzalez) and sometimes it was obvious.
The opening song, "Smackwater Jack," one of several of King's landmark "Tapestry" album, didn't really mesh together. The band, which included veteran John "J.D." Davis on drums, sounded pretty fired up and raring to go. Goldman, however, sang it lounge style, which would have been fine with that kind of band, but not this one. It begged for a rock vocal approach.
It was pretty much uphill from there. Goldman's vocal range is somewhat limited, and her version of "(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman" tested those limits a bit.
But she has a pleasant and at times quietly strong voice that excelled on the songs to which it was better suited, like the less obvious "Oh No Not My Baby." She was particularly impressive on ballads like "It's Too Late" and "You've Got a Friend" and a dramatically slowed version of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"
Any musical incongruities at the start slowly melted away. Goldman is nothing if not a seasoned pro, an entertainer who knows how to work a room (a room with a lot of friends and acquaintances; I saw City Manager Joyce Wilson, El Paso Museum of Art Director Michael A. Tomor and Realtor Janice Windle there, among others).
There's an effervescence about her that fit snugly with the band's musical exuberance.
This particular group of musicians stole the show a few times, particularly on a forceful, unique take of "I Feel the Earth Move" and the less obvious "Being At War With Each Other," on which the idiosyncratic Lambert hammered out a circular riff on the neck of his guitar, Ricardo Amaya's percussion percolated in the background and Gonzalez elevated things with a busy and flawlessly executed solo.
The real golden moments were when the band gently nudged her out of that comfort zone and she responded in kind, which was the case on the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" (the only non-King composition in the set), a song with which Goldman was clearly comfortable. But she but also pushed herself on it more than on any other song — and got some friendly help on the "woo-woo-woos" by some of the women in the sold-out crowd of about 100.
No matter the ups and downs, the songs that King wrote, either herself or with former husband Gerry Goffin, were the real stars Thursday night. The '60s idealism of a couple of them sounded dated, sure, but King always writes with such heart, sincerity and optimism, a spirit that both the musicians and the singer served with a certain reverence.
This relationship is all about one man's musical restlessness and one woman's willingness to trod new ground. There's a lot of room to grow here, no doubt. But it'll be interesting to see where they take it.
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