Liquid American Song, Filtered Through German Pipes

If Americans go to Europe and sing Mahler, there is no reason Thomas Quasthoff can’t come here and sing Stevie Wonder. And so he did at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, along with Gershwin and a raft of American popular standards. This German bass-baritone, known for his fine voice and musicality in the concert repertory, is in New York overseeing the latest in his Carnegie Perspectives series. This concert was subtitled “An American Songbook.”

Like every good musician, Mr. Quasthoff is a listener, and obviously he has listened with attention to many singers, among them Frank Sinatra, Lou Rawls and Johnny Cash, whose range comes closest to his own. He has a lot of the style down pat: the flat American vowels, the choice of accents, the idiosyncratic distribution of words in a jazz singer’s phrase and the held notes that begin straightened and harsh before blossoming into a vibrato.

Americans can only be flattered that Mr. Quasthoff loves their music well enough to mimic it with such skill. Wednesday’s audience could also delight in his easy stage manner and humor, and his own uninhibited version of scat singing, complete with sound effects, owl hoots, birdcalls and even a Zulu click or two. Elsewhere the music ranged from “The Lady Is a Tramp” to “Danny Boy.”

The attractions of the evening were more about context than subject matter, the contexts being Mr. Quasthoff’s personal appeal and his courage in taking on American music on its home ground. To get at the music itself, however, context has to be scraped away; and a listener with no idea of Mr. Quasthoff’s musical background would probably take him, at the least, as a good lounge singer, and at the best — when he summons his full operatic voice and his sophisticated strategies for building climaxes — as somewhat more. If there had been a glass on the piano, I would have put my five dollars in.

Lounge singers, on the other hand, are not backed by the kind of slick, handsome jazz quintet Mr. Quasthoff had behind him. Til Brönner was a brilliant trumpet player and Alan Broadbent’s piano playing was as smooth as could be. With Chuck Loeb’s guitar, Dieter Ilg’s bass and Peter Erskine’s percussion, Australia and the United States as well as Germany were represented.

It all pointed to a triumph of internationalism, but it wasn’t. The dynamic of popular music is to create musical personalities, individual and distinctive — people who are celebrated for the not-like-anybody-else they bring to their art. Mr. Quasthoff is a wonderful student and a master of compilation, but he hasn’t much new to say.