‘Jazz in July’
Through July 27
John Scofield With Bill Charlap, Scott Colley, and Bill Stewart
Livestream Here

“Men in love should never sing.” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s a truism from one of Woody Allen’s short stories. He was even more adamant that, as he added, “they should never talk the lyrics to the songs.” Yet Bill Charlap began his concert on Tuesday with a venerated modern jazz guitarist, John Scofield, by doing precisely that, when he spoke Howard Dietz’s lyrics to Arthur Schwartz’s melody on “Alone Together.” 

Mr. Charlap knew what he was doing: The audience for “Jazz in July,” now in its 38th season, has traditionally leaned toward the more conservative side of the jazz spectrum. Under founder Dick Hyman’s direction, it focused mostly on the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and on composers from the Great American Songbook. 

In Mr. Charlap’s 18 years of running the series, he has made it considerable more bebop-centric. Notably, in the last two seasons he presented team-ups between himself and two of the most modern players in the series’ history, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman last year and now Mr. Scofield.

Thus, by introducing a songbook standard, and then by reminding the audience — and possibly the quartet, which also included bassist Scott Colley and drummer Bill Stewart — of what the song is all about, Mr. Charlap was fixing the song in everyone’s minds, so that we could better appreciate what they were about to do with it.

Mr. Scofield is, at least by modern jazz standards, a very melodic player, and he is driven mainly by single-note playing in a manner that guitar buffs associate with Charlie Christian. Certainly we in the crowd would have recognized “Alone Together” in the first eight bars, at which point Mr. Scofield began to improvise more aggressively — first melodically, playing with the tune itself, and then harmonically, weaving his own lines over the chord changes.  

Mr. Charlap then picked up where Mr. Scofield left off, concentrating on right hand melody notes, gingerly dancing around the edge of the tune, bringing it back occasionally as if it were a quote from another song.

The second tune was Sonny Rollins’s uptempo bebop romp “Airegin,” inspired as much by Wes Montgomery’s 1960 version as by the composer himself. One of the advantages of hearing Mr. Charlap with a second headliner, like Mr. Redman or Mr. Scofield, is that he is especially brilliant at spontaneous trades with other musicians of his caliber. 

This particular trade put the quartet in the pantheon of great piano-guitar matchups — Nat King Cole and Les Paul, Bill Evans and Jim Hall. Unlike some such trades, this wasn’t so much a competition, but something more like a conjoined solo. Rather than playing call-and-response, each man built on what the other had just played, as if they were sharing the same thoughts but expressing them on two different instruments.

Another standard followed, Rodgers & Hart’s “It’s Easy To Remember.”  This was superior ballad playing. Invariably, when most musicians — especially younger male players — announce a ballad, they start out nice and slow but gradually accelerate, so a few choruses later the ballad mood has been left behind.  

Conversely, the ability of Messrs. Scofield and Charlap to hold to a romantic tempo was highly impressive. Mr. Scofield started with a thoughtful introduction before proceeding into the tune, and then rendered Richard Rodgers’s melody with admirable restraint. Mr. Scofield ended with an extended coda that wasn’t exactly an “outro” but a lovely postscript that fit the tune superbly. 

Other tunes followed: Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation,” then “Green Dolphin Street,” played in 7/4, which inspired Bill Stewart to observe that it should be therefore retitled, “Greek Dolphin Street.” Next came “Always,” another ballad, in which the bass and drums sat out and the piano and guitar held fast to Irving Berlin’s original waltz tempo, thus resisting temptation to jazz it up into 6/4 or 6/8.  

Contrastingly, Mr. Scofield transformed the 1926 “‘Deed I Do” into a 1960s-style jazz-funk number — and even then Mr. Charlap found a way to insert a quote from the “Rhapsody in Blue.” Next, Mr. Scofield essayed a bucolic “Georgia on my Mind.”  

The show ended spectacularly with two Thelonious Monk classics, “Well You Needn’t” and “Blue Monk.” The first was the fastest and most furious uptempo bopper of the night, climaxing in a drum solo by Mr. Stewart. We were on our feet applauding even before the last cymbal crash sounded.

We all would have thought this was a perfect climax, but they immediately launched into Monk’s blues with hardly a pause. This was the major blues outing of the evening, the one that we were waiting for, and Mr. Scofield played with a highly vocalized tone. Even though it wasn’t the loudest or most uptempo tune we would hear that evening, it turned out to be a perfect closer.