MUSIC REVIEW
By Peter Landsdowne Telegram & Gazette Reviewer
John Pizzarelli
(ANDREW SOUTHAM)
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WORCESTER — Jazz guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli has come a long way since he made his Worcester debut some two decades ago at the late, lamented El Morocco restaurant’s Nile Lounge as part of the El’s famed Monday night jazz series. Back then, Pizzarelli was a fresh-faced jazz wannabe in his 20s who was perhaps best known as “Bucky Pizzarelli’s kid,” Bucky being Bucky Pizzarelli, the legendary jazz guitarist who performed with everyone from Benny Goodman to the Tonight Show band during the Johnny Carson years.
These days, John Pizzarelli has matured into a superb jazz guitarist in his own right who also has a way with jazz vocals. Pizzarelli and his group (pianist Larry Fuller, drummer Tony Tedesco, and bassist Martin Pizzarelli — yes, he’s John’s brother) appeared Saturday night at Mechanics Hall as part of Music Worcester Inc.’s 152nd Worcester Music Festival.
Pizzarelli has a well-deserved reputation as a skilled interpreter of the Great American Songbook. He proved as much at Mechanics Hall by opening with “Straighten Up and Fly Right” and “Frim Fram Sauce,” two vintage tunes first performed by Nat “King” Cole, an acknowledged early influence on the guitarist-singer. An audience of close to a thousand Pizzarelli fans applauded Pizzarelli’s crisp and clean guitar solo and also saved some applause for Fuller’s rollicking piano solo.
The quartet caught fire on a romp on “Avalon,” another vintage tune. Pizzarelli counted off the song at a seemingly impossibly fast tempo that didn’t hinder either his vocals or his fleet guitar solo. An obviously inspired Fuller contributed a blockbuster of a piano solo that made good use of chords voiced in octaves.
“I guess you can’t play this song too early or too late,” Pizzarelli said as he introduced Frank Loesser’s “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” a perfect vehicle for Pizzarelli’s breathy tenor voice. As a singer, Pizzarelli is more of a crooner than a belter, a fact that emerged on his whimsical approach to the Rodgers and Hart ditty “I Like to Hear the Tune,” a rarely heard song from 1938. Pizzarelli incorporated a few bars of “Blue Moon” into his guitar solo, and then topped that with a quote from Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology,” a bop standard based on the chord changes to “How High the Moon.”
Intended as a tribute to the pro football playoffs, Johnny Mercer’s “Jamboree Jones,” a song about a marching band clarinet player who inspires a football team to a winning season, seemed to fall flat. The quartet quickly recovered on a fast version of George Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” that featured Pizzarelli scat-singing in unison with the notes of his fleet guitar solo.
A mellow medley of songs associated with Frank Sinatra grabbed the crowd as Pizzarelli moved seamlessly from “You Make Me Feel So Young” to a loping version of “Witchcraft” to an up-tempo outing on “Ring A Ding Ding” that had Pizzarelli inserting quotes from Duke Ellington’s “Rockin’ in Rhythm” and “I’m Beginning to See the Light” that presaged the Ellington medley that would end the second set.
Before that, Pizzarelli and his group played a selection from Double Exposure, an album due out in May that attempts to fuse jazz and rock. In this case, the quartet juxtaposed jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery’s “Four on Six” with The Allman Brothers’ “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and somehow pulled it off.
A juxtaposition of another sort was one of the highlights of the aforementioned Duke Ellington medley. This one melded the lyrics of Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” with the dolorous melody of Duke’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo.” The crowd also responded favorably to the quartet’s versions of Ellington’s “Satin Doll” and “In A Mellotone.”
The capper, though, was a no-holds-barred outing on Duke’s “C Jam Blues” that featured some fast and furious playing from both Pizzarelli and pianist Fuller, a standout throughout the concert.
The audience responded with a standing ovation that elicited a beautifully rendered medley of standards from the quartet as an encore, with Pizzarelli doing some fervent singing on “The More I See You,” “It Had to be You,” Misty” and a heartfelt “As Time Goes By.” Pizzarelli pointed out that the Mechanics Hall gig was the quartet’s first engagement of the new year and that the group will soon be touring the United States, South America, Europe, and Japan. Let’s hope that Pizzarelli and his crew can make it back to Worcester before the end of 2012.
