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Folk Goddess Judy Collins Descends from Her Lofty Pedestal

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Judy Collins in a six-week engagement at Caf Carlyle.

It wasnt always so. But nowadays a Judy Collins concert is a seamless flow of music and storytelling. Alternating between the guitar and the piano, Ms. Collins offers a version of a personal musical history that is too complicated and rich to be covered in a single evening.

On Tuesday night at the Caf Carlyle, where she began a six-week engagement, the emphasis was on her folk-music side, and for more than half the show she accompanied herself on acoustic guitar, with Russell Walden assisting on piano and backup vocals.

Her song Mountain Girl, performed early in the evening, set the tone. Ms. Collins grew up in Colorado, and her silvery vibrato-free voice might be described as an Alpine instrument. Especially when she sings a cappella, it has the ringing purity of a voice emanating from a lofty altitude and reverberating in an endless echo chamber of mountain passes. Ms. Collins, who will turn 70 on May 1, has miraculously retained her upper register. The higher she sings, most of the time with perfect intonation, the more she projects the ethereality of a flute played by the wind.

The influence that propelled her from a piano prodigy who played Mozart, she recalled, wasnt the sound of the Weavers or Woody Guthrie, but that of Jo Stafford on her 1950s folk albums. In particular it was Ms. Staffords recording of Barbara Allen, first heard on the radio, that drew Ms. Collins away from classical piano. And as she sang this ballad of unrequited love, death and grief, her vocal similarities with Stafford, who died last year, were striking. Both singers expressed a demure self-containment in unadorned phrases that imbued their performances with faraway longing.

In recent years Ms. Collins has descended from the folk-goddess pedestal to emerge as a funny, self-effacing Irish-American storyteller, and the tension between her pristine singing voice and her salty reminiscences lends her shows a theatrical dimension. She reminisced at length about her first meeting with Leonard Cohen, who had no confidence in his talents until she recorded his song Suzanne. He returned the favor by persuading her to take up songwriting.

Judy Collins performs through May 30 at Caf Carlyle, at the Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan, (212) 744-1600, thecarlyle.com.

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