Tonet sings the story of your life

She hadn’t been singing for the last 10 years, and we hadn’t seen each other for about that time, which would be like a hundred years for us, but on the first night of her once-a-week singing stint at the Captain’s Bar of the Mandarin Oriental Manila, Tonet Salcedo showed time had not diminished her star power, singing her jazzy songs, nor her affinity with her longtime friends and admirers who have kept their faith in her.

And there were a big number of us who showed up at her first night, among them older ones like Paul Potassys and his wife Lita in a red dress and her Gina Lollobrigida hairdo, and model colleagues Lani Aquino and Vina Cansino (Gaisberger, wife of the Mandarin GM), and younger ones like Alex Jentes, son of Minnie Cagatao and Peter Jentes, who had brought along his young friends who probably had not even heard Dinah Washington’s What A Difference a Day Makes and yet had decided to stay. Alex was telling everyone: "We’re here for Tonet."

The rest of the audience who strayed into the Captain’s Bar that night were captivated by Tonet and her instrumentalists, the incomparable trio of pianist Romy Posadas, percussionist Ramon Guevarra and bassist Roger Herrera–some of the best session musicians in the country – and decided to sit tight with their drinks till her last set toward midnight.

With her first song (A Lot of Living to Do), she swept her audience to a time of the smokey-voiced jazz divas, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Shirley Horn, when listening to their songs evoked a very personal experience, a very secret, maybe also forbidden, passion. You could curl yourself around Tonet’s songs and feel once again the fiery ardors of a young love affair or the bittersweet pain of long-ago loss and the despair or the anguish of betrayal, especially one’s own betrayal.

Tonet Salcedo is everyone’s idea of how a jazz singer, or a torch singer, looks like: wounded by love, consumed to a wraith by her own desire and despair. Tonight, Tonet is shoe-horned into a silver lame gown that only emphasized how thin she is, wispy as a whisper, sinuous like a tendril, you can imagine being able to encircle her 22-inch waistline with your arms.

Tonet was at first kind of nervous – as she admitted herself – facing an audience once again and finding her voice again after 10 years of hibernation. Her admirers would remember that she was the owner and manager of Weinstube in Malate in the ’80s – "by the way," she said, bedroom-breathy, in her radio commercials for Weinstube, "I’m also your singer" – before she put up the very popular restaurant called Endangered Species. She would almost become an endangered specie herself as she would practically stop singing then.

Well, as this attests, she certainly has not forgotten her true love, after all the men in her life, I must say. Tonight, she’s taking the blues (and jazz and pop) a little and singing, in her own personal style, about the story and the glory of love, hers and ours. As the evening wears on, her voice also gets warmer and more insistent, even manipulative, so that when she feels she has you in thrall she takes you to the skies in Summertime, or like Amanda MacBrown, confronts you with the frustrations of your life in a few narrative lines. Tonet sings about loving with all your strength and trusting that you or the other is worthy of that love. (Gosh, I don’t believe I’m saying all this. It must be Valentine fever).

Mrs. Potassys, though, had another reason for liking Tonet’s songs: "I know the words," she told me on her way out of Captain’s Bar. "I can empathize with the singer, I can connect to her emotions, I can move with her rhythms."

Nothing could more tersely describe that first-night show at the Mandarin oriental Manila of the incomparable, irresistible and durable Tonet Salcedo.

(Salcedo sings every Monday starting at 9 p.m. at the Captain’s Bar of the Mandarin Oriental Manila.)