A Beautiful Secret

Can there be a reason behind Joe Wilder’s decision to open his early set at the Village Vanguard on Wednesday with “Secret Love”? Was the octogenarian trumpeter celebrating the centennial of composer Jule Styne, who wrote this, Doris Day’s greatest hit? Was he referencing Ms. Day to call attention to his bright, sunny tone and an upbeat sound? Or was he pointing out that his status as a major jazz musician is, in fact, a beautiful secret?Mr. Wilder is one of the great living jazz trumpeters, but he has spent most of his 60-year career hiding his light under a bushel. He came up through the big bands of Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, and Benny Goodman, then spent nearly two decades as a staff musician for ABC TV. Until he was 70, Mr. Wilder had only made a couple of obscure LPs under his own name, and it is only this week – on the eve of his 84th birthday – that he is making his debut as a bandleader in a New York club.For this week’s auspicious occasion, Mr. Wilder is working with Michael Weiss, piano; John Webber, bass, and the drummer Lewis Nash. Such a quartet is a demanding format for a trumpeter but perfectly appropriate for one who wants to spotlight himself after a career of waiting.Mr. Wilder plays the kind of jazz that used to be called “mainstream,” which most of the major swing-era soloists played into the 1970s and beyond. Mainstream draws on some of the advanced harmonies of modern jazz but with more recognizable melodies than bebop.The highlights of Wednesday’s opening were two medium-tempo variations on the blues: Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” in a major key, and a song he called “Joe’s Blues” in minor.The most moving of Mr. Wilder’s slow numbers was “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” which he played with a ripe, full tone, injecting emotion with notes that wheezed slightly, and treating the Burton Lane melody to a variety of trumpet timbres and textures. Mr. Wilder essayed it with a lover’s urgency and ended with a florid yet compact a cappella coda.Mr. Wilder also proved himself to be a skilled prankster, throwing irreverent quotes into his solos throughout the set. “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” and Chopin’s “Polonaise” showed up in the middle of “Secret Love”; a little of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” appeared in “Body and Soul,” and “I Cover the Waterfront” spiced up “But Beautiful.” His quartet also played “It Might as Well Be Spring” to a rhythm that was equal parts calypso and samba, detouring through “When Yuba Plays the Rhumba on the Tuba.” Seeing the great saxophonist Lou Donaldson in the audience, Mr. Wilder called “Bird of Paradise,” Charlie Parker’s framework for “All the Things You Are,” in which he interjected a fragment of “The Continental.”***If Mr. Wilder is the oldest performer doing standards in New York this week, the youngest is probably Maude Maggart, who opened her Valentine’sthemed show, “Comes Love,” at the Algonquin on Tuesday night. She may be in her 20s, but Ms. Maggart is reluctant to sing anything written after 1929, and “Comes Love” makes clear why.There’s simply no one better at taking the simple lyrics of pre-Depression songs and investing them with personality. Ms. Maggart has mastered the craft of sounding sophisticated without being salacious. She avoided the double-entendres and risque jokes of “Let’s Begin” and “Coffee in the Morning” (the latter being a marvelous Harry Warren song from the original “Moulin Rouge” that no one’s touched in 70 years), sounding innocent without coming off as naive.Ms. Maggart has a beautiful voice with a folkish timbre, but like Andrea Marcovicci, one of her primary mentors, she stresses interpretation over chops. She was especially winning on “The River Is So Blue,” a Kurt Weill rarity written in an American folk vein. She saved “Hooray for Love” for an encore, but Leo Robin’s lyric to the contrary, Ms. Maggart is anything but too blase for love.***The danger with mega-icons on the level of Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley is that who they are tends to speak louder than what they are saying. Sometimes we need someone to interpret their songs in a whole new light for us to grasp the essential truth of what they were trying to tell us in the first place.This is Barb Jungr’s approach to Elvis’s music, both on her new CD, “Love Me Tender” (Linn 255), and in concert. (She performed last week at Joe’s Pub),and will return there on Sunday.) Described in some places as an “alternative cabaret” artist, Ms. Jungr treats Elvis’s country, pop, and blues songs like Schubert lieder, using minimal, repetitive background figures that mirror the cyclic nature of human emotions. She sings “Long Black Limousine”as if it were Kurt Weill, and jokingly refers to Burt Kaempfert’s “Wooden Heart” (which Elvis picked up during his Army tenure in Germany) as coming from Presley’s “Brechtian period.”Mr. Wilder performs February 3, 4 & 5 (178 Seventh Avenue South, 212-255-4037). Ms. Maggart performs until February 25 (59 W. 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-840-6800). Ms. Jungr performs February 5 (425 Lafayette Street,between 4th Street and Astor Place, 212-539-8778).

A Beautiful Secret

A Beautiful Secret

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