I was drawn out to Wendy Matthew’s show at The Triffid by the promise of Billie Holiday. The stage was lit in blue, and you got a sense that it was on purpose, a fitting backdrop to a lady who sings the blues. I had looked forward to this night, not knowing much about the band but hoping they would play ‘Strange Fruit’.

The show opened with Matthews’s rendering of some of Billie Holiday’s best known songs including ‘The Man I Love’ and ‘Good Morning Heartache’. The band also has a good take on ‘When It’s Over and Done (No More)’, which Billie Holiday once described as her own favourite tune. Matthews’s most recent CD presents well-loved classics alongside lesser known ones, all in time for the centenary of Billie Holiday’s birth.

This lady sings the blues to a guitarist, a keyboard player and a double bassist – which suits everyone just fine. It’s easy to see the influence of Billie Holiday on Wendy Matthews’s stage presence: the playful banter with the band, the storytelling to the audience, the performer who can play any old standard as though it was about her own broken heart. Though, what I liked about Wendy Matthews’s show is that she has fun with the music she performs, and you got the sense that the night would have ended in dancing if it had been a Saturday.

In the second half of the show we heard some of Matthews’s old songs as well as some new material. ‘The Day You Went Away’, which won an ARIA for Highest Selling Single in 1991, was played as if for the first time. The reflected (blue) light from Moon over Bourbon Street was used to maximum effect for ‘Square Moon Over Manhattan’, a song written for Matthews by a lover/ friend and featured in her 1990 solo debut album Émigré. Of all the songs in the show, my favourite was ‘Little Boy’, an upbeat, tender tribute for a lost pet deer.

If your comfort playlist includes music by the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Aretha Franklin, Emmylou Harris, Chrissie Hynde and Joni Mitchell, be sure to catch Wendy Matthews at the Noosa Jazz Festival this September, or in Townsville later in the year. You may or may not delight in the band’s jazzy 90s sound, but there is no doubting that Wendy Matthews is an extraordinary vocalist. And judging by the absence of falsettos in her show, she’s a judicious admirer of Billie Holiday’s music too.

So even though the band didn’t play my song, I was happy to hear some old classics lovingly rendered to celebrate 100 years of ladies singing the blues, both borrowed and new.

- Carolina C