Music review: Suzanne Vega
At the Palms at Crown, city, February 1-2 suzannevega.com

The old joke about folk singers is that their introductions are longer than their songs. Suzanne Vega has long shaken off that tag, and verbosity has never been her strong suit. But the artful preamble is a thread that links her journey, and a key to her extraordinary emotional impact as a performer.

Some songs, such as the opening a capella version of Tom's Diner, are monologues in themselves, descriptive snapshots that invoke undercurrents of mood and story through words and melody.

Most of us remembered something about a painting that inspired Marlene on the Wall, the waifish New Yorker's seemingly naive single of '85 that still harbours as many secrets as the Mona Lisa. We knew the damaged kid upstairs, Luka, like a lost friend; and we needed few words about the forbidden allure of Caramel, a song that oozes temptation.

More context was in order as Vega and her polished jazz-pop quartet shook off the cabaret spangles of the Crown Casino and got to the heart of her new album, Beauty & Crime, and its first selection, New York is a Woman - "but not always a lady", she explained.

Her brother lived in Ludlow Street, we learned before the next, the past tense emphasised in the empty ache of its chorus. The fullness of her tragedy unfolded later, when she told us about the Ground Zero cop in Angel's Doorway who carried too much for words to bear.

So she drew us into her world, with the stealth and consummate voice of a master storyteller - in spite of every other phrase seemingly composed of little more than breath.

The point was that it was our world too, a realisation underscored as older songs filtered. Prefaced with funny and poignant introductions, Gypsy and In Liverpool formed a universal circle of love found and lost forever.

Left of Centre and Blood Makes Noise were accompanied only by the fluid bass guitar of Mike Visceglia, highlighting the rhythm of speech that has remained a constant. A gracious visitor, she finally traded one more from Beauty & Crime for a request from the floor: her devastating, folk-styled allegory of '85, The Queen & the Soldier. It needed no introduction.