[Dixielandjazz] The Pizzarelli's

[Stephen G Barbone]

Not Dixieland, but surely OKOM. Worth a visit if near NYC.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

October 19, 2009 - NY TIMES - by Stephen Holden

A Couple’s Dialogue: He Gives Her Swing, She Gives Him Soul



Who wouldn’t want to grow up in a household where the music of Duke  
Ellington, Stephen Sondheim, Les Paul, Joni Mitchell and Nat King  
Cole, performed by Mom and Dad and their friends, transforms family  
gatherings into screwball jam sessions? This must be what life is like  
with the Pizzarellis, I fantasized last Wednesday evening while  
leaving John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey’s new show, “Lost and  
Found,” at Café Carlyle. Might they please consider adopting me?

Mr. Pizzarelli, a jazz guitarist, friendly crooner and comic  
storyteller, and his wife, Ms. Molaskey, who comes from Broadway,  
suggest a pop-jazz Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers gliding across  
Manhattan as they exchange sophisticated musical banter. Revising  
Katharine Hepburn’s famous observation about that dancing couple —  
that she gives him sex, and he gives her class — Mr. Pizzarelli’s gift  
to Ms. Molaskey is swing and hers to him is soul, if soul is taken as  
a synonym for the psychological subtexts of lyrics.

“Lost and Found,” which began a one-month engagement at the Café  
Carlyle last week, is the couple’s most musically far-reaching show,  
delving more deeply into jazz history than usual. It gives Mr.  
Pizzarelli and his band, which includes Larry Fuller on piano, the  
younger brother Martin Pizzarelli on bass and Tony Tedesco on drums,  
more elbow room, with an extended instrumental of Ellington’s “Cotton  
Tail.”

It also includes a version of “Perdido,” for which Ms. Molaskey,  
adopting the bop language of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, wrote words to  
an instrumental introduction of the song from an old recording: “Yes I  
took the craziest trip/And flipped for a Freudian slip/Now I am  
forever, ever, ever, ever lost.”

Like the duo’s earlier shows, “Lost and Found” is built around  
pairings of songs to create musical dialogues. Performing “While My  
Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” Mr.  
Pizzarelli murmured the George Harrison lyrics, quietly accompanying  
himself on guitar, while Ms. Molaskey sang the Roberta Flack hit in  
which a besotted fan imagines that a self-absorbed musician onstage is  
reading her mind. The two ballads made a natural fit.

A more adventurous coupling interwove Rodgers and Hart’s “She Was Too  
Good to Me” with Ms. Mitchell’s early lament “I Had a King” to evoke a  
bitter variation of the same dynamic; in this case a husband is  
unaware of his wife’s discontent until it is too late. In Ms.  
Molaskey’s slowed-up swing rendition of “Raised on Robbery,” one of  
Ms. Mitchell’s few out-and-out rockers, she stepped gingerly into the  
role of a cash-strapped woman who “ain’t asking for no full-length  
mink,” offering sex for money to a well-heeled stranger in a hotel  
lounge.

The show became airborne during the program’s ultimate hybrid, “Wrap  
Your Troubles in Dreams,” followed by a re-creation of the Les Paul- 
Mary Ford recording of “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” A  
secret musical ingredient in every Pizzarelli-Molaskey concert is its  
pulse: an irresistible buoyancy that springs from Mr. Pizzarelli’s  
guitar and his ebullient personality. The music doesn’t merely swing,  
it bounces, and happiness reigns.

John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey perform through Nov. 7 at Café  
Carlyle, at the Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan; (212)  
744-1600, thecarlyle.com.