Tokeli (no last name, thanks) snagged a master’s degree in musical theater from Tufts University, teaches voice, has a jazz CD and some radio play under her belt and heads the drama department at an area high school. You can hear some of the byproduct of all that on Thursday nights at the Empress Hotel’s Manhattan lounge in La Jolla, where she interprets a litany of classic lyrics alongside one of the greatest keyboardists in the history of the universe.
And if you ask nicely “” very, very nicely ” she might just reel off a chorus of “Who Let the Dogs Out.”
“Actually, ‘who let the dogs out’ is at least metaphorical,” she said of the throwaway sports anthem. “I don’t even know what ‘who let the dogs out’ really means, but at least there’s something going on there. So much of today’s lyrics are all superficial thought and superficial, visceral feeling: ‘I love you; I want you; I need you.’ The older tunes are written in such a way that they’re shaped to tell a story.”
And not just any cruddy ol’ story, like the one you’re reading. To hear the Coronado resident tell it, the best of those tales are inside The Great American Songbook, a vocalist’s term of art for this country’s definitive musical archive. “Skylark.” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” “Embraceable You.” Almost anything by Johnny Mercer or Irving Berlin. That book features hundreds of worthy titles, rife with the anecdote that speaks to Tokeli’s serious flair for interpretation. In her hands, “I’ll sing to him / each spring to him / and worship the trousers that cling to him” is less a rhyme than a raison d’etre. It’s all colored in no mean fashion by keyboard accompanist Ed Kornhauser, who lays down complex melodies the way the rest of us take a shower ” the tougher the assignment, the more fluid the result. Unbelievable.
Tokeli is also head of the drama unit at Imperial Beach’s Mar Vista High School. For her, the work provides a useful parallel to the supposed decline in the nation’s lyrical acumen.
“I don’t know why we don’t have more to say now,” she continued. “But because I’m a teacher as well, I think it’s a societal thing, a cultural thing. In our schools, it used to be that music was part of education. Then it became a seventh-period thing or an elective, and then it became an after-school program, and then it became a pick-up program, whittled down to almost nothing.
“The same idea can be said of culture and music. It used to be that people would go to supper clubs and jazz clubs. Then at least they’d go to the movies. Then they’d at least rent a DVD. It’s just TV now, and it’s gotten worse and worse and worse. We call it The Great American Songbook because it is. Finding lyrics [like those] today [is] like looking for the needle in a haystack.”
She catches herself midsentence, and advisedly so. That needle, after all, looms eminently larger in certain post-1970 musical contexts. Billy Joel is a superb storyteller; his saga of Brenda and Eddie in “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” is a masterstroke, as is the songcraft behind his “Piano Man” and “Always a Woman.” Bruce Springsteen, the closest thing we have to a national troubadour, has been laying down lyrics-based working-class anthems for more than three decades. Pianist-composer Leon Russell (my all-time favorite and a criminally underrated honky-tonk rocker and sessions man) played with Sinatra and Streisand and wrote poetic masterpieces like “Hummingbird,” “Superstar” and “This Masquerade” “” and on the strength of that work, he tours to this day.
But none of those guys is singing at Manhattan, see. Tokeli is. And she’s doing stuff that predates ’em all, with lyrics that constitute playlets in themselves. It’s kind of like the deal behind her name, a variation on the Potawatomi Indian word for “I love you.” The latter term may say it “” but as a lyric, it likely had worn out its welcome just about the time Tokeli had had all of it she could take.
The gig starts at 8 p.m. Thursdays. Manhattan is at 7766 Fay Ave., near Silverado Street. The number is (858) 459-0700.