“I don’t read music. Not essentially. Not even nonessentially.”

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI


Everything about singing came to Barbra Streisand naturally, she explained, adding, a little sheepishly, that she hardly ever does vocal exercises.

“I’m terrible about warming up,” she said. “That’s just too boring to me.”

Whatever vocal power, finesse and richness she has was not the product of traditional study and analysis, she said.

“I didn’t do it intellectually,” Ms. Streisand said. “I did it intuitively, unconsciously. I kind of like that.” Ms. Streisand, who lives in Malibu, California, was in New York in anticipation of a recent one-night-only appearance at the Village Vanguard, the jazz club. But the big event for Streisand fans is Ms. Streisand’s latest album, “Love Is the Answer.”

The recording is a collection of 12 songs, and a bonus track, all of them mellow, jazzy, intimate reflections on love, with standards like “Make Someone Happy” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” more recent songs by Johnny Mandel, songs by Leonard Bernstein and Jacques Brel, and other offerings that nestle into the club gig concept.

The album, produced by the pianist, arranger and songwriter Diana Krall, features Ms. Streisand singing with a jazz quartet, enriched with subtle orchestrations. “Some people like the simplicity of the voice with just instruments,” she said. “And that’s the way I started. And I thought, ‘Why not?’”

The sound of her voice, at 67, is remarkably fresh. But back in the mid-’60s, her singing was already mature and rich, never girlish.

“I remember when I was 5 living on Pulaski Street in Brooklyn, the hallway of our building had a brass banister and a great sound, a great echo system,” she said. “I used to sing in the hallway. I was known as the girl on the street with the good voice. No father, good voice. That was my identity.” (Her father, Emanuel Streisand, a high school teacher, died from complications of an epileptic seizure while directing a summer camp in the Catskills. Ms. Streisand was 15 months old.)

More than the pleasure of singing, it was her capacity to use her voice to act, to express herself and convey words, that hooked her as a young girl, she explained.

“Life was peculiar to me then,” she said. “I was allergic to the country. I was raised on the streets, in hot, steamy Brooklyn, with stifled air.” But “there was - I don’t like to say pain, I don’t want to be too whiny,” she added. “But words meant something to me, words spoke to me. So I think it somehow unconsciously influenced whatever I do.”

When I asked her if it was true that she essentially cannot read music, she answered: “I don’t read music. Not even essentially. Not even nonessentially.”

In learning songs, usually all she needs to do, she said, is to hear a melody once, and she gets it.

Besides winning a best actress Oscar in 1968 for her performance in “Funny Girl,” Ms. Streisand earned an Oscar for best original song, “Evergreen,” the love theme from her 1976 film “A Star Is Born,” which she composed to lyrics by Paul Williams. The depth of her musicality came through when she talked about her fantasy of composing a symphony. “I hear these melodies,” she said.

“I hear horn lines and string lines. That’s what’s fun about recording with an orchestra.” She can sing things, and composer-arrangers like Bill Ross or Jeremy Lubbock have the skill to write them down, she said.

During her career Ms. Streisand has been all over the stylistic map, but she is still the top-selling female artist in American recording history.

Yet some of her insecurity came out, touchingly, when we talked about the new album. She asked, “Did you like ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’?”

Did I like it? Are you kidding?


BARBARA GINDL/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY