[Dixielandjazz] John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey; Kurt Elling reviewed

Robert Ringwald rsr at ringwald.com
Wed Oct 13 13:24:59 PDT 2010


John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey; Kurt Elling reviewed

Comebacks and Co-Conspirators
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2010

This week brings two of the jazz world's most compelling entertainers -- both male
singers of a comparable generation -- to Greater New York: Kurt Elling is doing 10
shows at Birdland, while John Pizzarelli (and his wife and musical partner, Jessica
Molaskey) is ensconced for the month at the Carlyle. At the start of their careers,
I tended to dismiss Mr. Pizzarelli as strictly a guitar-playing emulator of Nat King
Cole, and Mr. Elling as little more than a junior-league Mark Murphy.
But in the last 20 years or so, each has developed into one of the most uniquely
charismatic showmen in contemporary music. Both have found a mega-niche for themselves
that incorporates both awesome musicianship as well as the kind of miraculous timing
that is equally useful in humor and music. More to the point, both Messrs. Pizzarelli
and Elling are simply incapable of being boring.
Beyond hipness, beyond funniness, beyond extreme musicality, it's becoming increasingly
clear that the John Pizzarelli-Jessica Molaskey show (in its fourth Fall at the Carlyle)
is, in an offbeat way, about male-female relationships. You can't help but notice
that neither he nor she is anything like a vocal virtuoso; he's primarily a musician,
she's essentially an actress. Yet coming from different places is almost an advantage,
since it places them on a level playing field and helps them find a center to focus
on -- a spot that no one knew was there before, a common area that jazz, cabaret
and pop all somehow share. In bridging these gaps separating different kinds of music,
they're also showing how the two sexes can relate to each other.
The point you might not notice is that though Mr. and Mrs. Pizzarelli sing together,
they don't do anything that might be called a conventional "duet" -- they rarely
sing the same song at the same time. Rather, one will start something and the other
will come in with another song that complements the first, lyrically, philosophically
and harmonically. They're corroborating each other's statements, not making like
Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavoratti. When he launches into a sequence of Ellington
tunes (from his latest album, "Rockin' in Rhythm"), she answers him with Tom Waits.
(When he later offers his Waits impression, it somehow sounds more like Louis Armstrong).
Their show, naturally enough, opens with a sequence of four songs that pivot around
the very nature of yin and yang, bad and good, from "I Want to Be Bad" to "Something
Good" (the latter is by Richard Rodgers, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear them
tackle the 1964 Herman's Hermits hit).
Speaking of gender issues, males of the world owe a collective debt to Kurt Elling
for being the first "dudeski" since 1993 to bag the Jazz Vocal Grammy (for last year's
"Dedicated to You"). Now and forever, Mr. Elling is a hipster, a flipster and a finger-poppin'
daddy, but at the same time, he's a picker, a grinner, a lover and a sinner. On one
level he seems indecipherably cryptic and gnomic, crooning highly original texts
that it would take a rabbinical scholar to decode. But at the same time, he's the
most accessible, energetic, dynamic, in-your-face, supercharged personality in the
jazz clubs today.
Mr. Elling's treatments of standards (like "Stairway to the Stars") are amazingly
straightforward and heartfelt -- and his baritone is deep and warm. As with the Pizzarellis,
it's not as if the performance stops when he talks; his inter-song rants and recitations
are an integral part of the overall presentation. I recently saw him sing both "Easy
Living" and "Norwegian Wood," thus equating Billie Holiday with the Beatles, and
his explanation of the song's internal meaning was no less provocative. Never before
has the act of not getting any and sleeping in the bath seemed so profound.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/806-9551
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

"Last night my wife met me at the front door. She was wearing a sexy negligee. 
The only trouble was, she was coming home."  --Rodney Dangerfield





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