There’s one place in Bangkok where you’ll hear the ballads beloved of jazz musicians, and one singer who loves them, too

Rubeth Bumatay’s dad was a musician, and at home in the Philippines he’d start the day playing records so that the family would get up to the sound of music.

“He’d play all kinds, Latin, Top 40 but also jazz, and that was the sound I liked best. Those were the songs I wanted to sing. And maybe I wanted to be different to everyone else.”

But singing wasn’t on the cards for her as yet: it was school, college, getting an education, and her mother only let her sing at competitions. Then her brother, who had a band working in Thailand, called her to ask if she knew a girl singer who could join them. As it happens, she did.

“I told him, why not me?” she said. Her mother didn’t object as she would have a big brother to look after her, so she began her singing career in Chiang Mai. For three years she was doing covers of pop songs while nursing her ambition to sing jazz.

Her chance came at the Sundowner lounge at the Imperial Queen’s Park and led to engagements in other Bangkok hotels and eventually the Plaza Athenee’s Glaz Bar. Originally booked on a three-month contract, she made a hit with the customers singing her own kind of music with a jazz trio and has been the resident singer for four years now.

“I feel at home here. There’s a great working atmosphere, good audiences and a lot of regular customers who I’ve got to know. I know what they like to hear, and when I see them come in, I’ll surprise them by singing their usual requests without telling them.”

Her attitude to requests is welcoming. “I like to sing what people want to hear,” she says. “Sometimes they’re not sure that they like jazz, but I can always find something they’ll enjoy, and they say, ‘That’s jazz? I like it!”‘

It can go the other way, too. Western visitors sometimes ask her if she’ll sing a jazz classic from way back, and when she says yes, they look doubtful. “I can see what they’re thinking,” she said. “They’re wondering if an Asian singer can really do that song. So I show them I can.”

At Glaz Bar she is accompanied by a pianist, Sing, and bassist Long who provide a crisp, swinging background and have plenty of opportunities to step forward and solo.

“It’s always a jam session when we’re on,” says Rubeth. “I like to be spontaneous, and I want them to do whatever they want. I want them to fly.”

They began flying at 8 o’clock, opening with a brisk, uptempo version of a Rodgers and Hart song, My Romance. Rodgers and Hart were a composer/writer duo who in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s who composed many of the songs beloved of jazz and cabaret singers. In this one, the singer enumerates the things her romance doesn’t need: twinkling stars, soft guitars and all the usual songwriter’s trimmings, and the punch like is: “My romance doesn’t need a thing but you.”

Apt, really, because Rubeth describes singing to an audience as a relationship. “I’m not just doing a song,” she says. “I’m singing for them and for myself, and if they smile, or if I see they’re happy, that gives me energy.”

A request for My Funny Valentine came next. Once again the words were by Lorenz Hart and the music by Richard Rodgers, and Rubeth gave it a kind of breathless romantic treatment, but with a smile to keep it from falling over into sentimentality.

“I choose a song because I like it and want to sing it,” she says. “I listen to the words and respond to the emotions. But sometimes the emotion comes first, and I choose a song because it suits the way I feel.”

A family group then sent up a request for a song that is always associated with one artist, and since the artist was Judy Garland you will probably guess that their request was for Over the Rainbow.

Judy Garland was 16 when she sang this as Dorothy in the classic movie, The Wizard of Oz. Everything had gone wrong for Dorothy and she dreams of finding a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops.” The words are by Yip Harburg, music by Harold Arlen and Rubeth caught the wistful longing of the song in her performance. Perhaps we’re all feeling it at the present time.

The tempo surged again with a song from 1943, Speak Low, by the German composer, Kurt Weill and a writer usually known for comic verse, Ogden Nash. The song has an urgent rhythm that propels it forward because it’s all about time and how quickly it passes: “We’re late, darling we’re late - the curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon.”

Rubeth, pianist Sing and bassist Long are well in control of the quick changes of mood and style required for each song, so they are always varied and clearly defined.

The next number, however, had no big emotional deal. I Love Paris is not one of Cole Porter’s better songs, but it works as a lively, straight-ahead swinger allowing Rubeth’s outgoing personality to come to the fore. Part of her performance style is coming out to the audience, and that’s much easier when the song is not laden with emotion and she can smile without breaking the mood.

No chance of that with the next one, however. Unashamedly romantic, My Foolish Heart comes from a 1949 movie of the same title and won an Oscar nomination for Best Song. It begins quietly and cautiously but gradually the emotional temperature rises.

Not every one of her songs will be a jazz standard or a ballad from the Great American Song Book. But it’s now known that Glaz Bar is where you can hear these great songs in the appropriate style: neither cool nor intensely hot, but delivered with feeling.

Rubeth Bumatay sings at Glaz Bar, Plaza Athenee Bangkok from 8pm till midnight Wednesday till Saturday. For reservations, please call 02-650-8800 ext 1234.