Live From Las Vegas

Nancy Wilson's unimpeachable combination of high sophistication and artistic substance was tailor-made for entertaining both the high-rollers and rubber-neckers assembled at the Sands Hotel & Casino's Copa Room for this August 1968 performance. She began with a delightful tweak of any star-gazers in the room, dedicating the opener to a "specific" (but unspecified) group in attendance at the show, then launching into a bustling version of "Hello, Young Lovers." Although Wilson had been sneaking contemporary pop songs on to her LPs for several years ("Sunny," "Ode to Billie Joe," "Goin' out of My Head"), she was undoubtedly mindful of the preferences of a nightclub audience, and avoided most of the crossover feel. She builds the first half of her set using traditional standards, most of them torch songs ("I Can't Get Started," "The Folks Who Live on the Hill," "The Man That Got Away") and a few obscure songs from the great-vocal-songbook repertoire. There are a few nods to her popular audience, however, including her brassy performance of "Face It Girl, It's Over" (a Top 40 hit for her that year) and an ambitious, theatrical three-part suite, "K.C. Medley," that salutes not the Missouri cradle of swing but a small boy. Overall, a subtle performance in the kind of city (and the kind of room) where subtlety is ignored, if it's even recognized. [Initially recorded by Capitol with an eye to a 1969 release, Live From Las Vegas was only first available in 2002 on Wilson's box set, The Essence of Nancy Wilson: Four Decades of Music. Three years later, it was issued separately as part of the Capitol series Las Vegas Centennial Collection.]