Bringing the Jazz Duo Back Into Style

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The New York Sun

Ah, the wonders of technology: When I heard this recently released CD of a great tenor saxophonist playing duets with a great pianist, I immediately ripped the opening track to iTunes and e-mailed it to half a dozen friends. Clever me: I changed the tags of the file so that every friend who heard it was told it was a different pair of musicians: Some were led to believe it was Joe Lovano and Hank Jones, others thought it was Harry Allen and Brad Mehldau, and still others were told George Coleman and Harold Mabern. I didn’t fool anyone, but no one correctly guessed the identity of the two players, either. They are, in fact, Houston Person and Bill Charlap, and their album is called “You Taught My Heart To Sing” (Highnote).

Of the two principals, Mr. Charlap is easier to recognize because he has frequently played without bass and drums in public, although if anything, he plays with even more unabashed romanticism here than on his own projects. Mr. Person, however, is a wild card: the South Carolina-born tenor star, who turned 72 a few weeks ago, is typically associated with the blues and bop style of Gene Ammons and Illinois Jacquet, who trace their lineage back to such pioneers as Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. When they play a love song, you generally hear an electric organ in the background, not a piano.

“You Taught” is Mr. Person’s first duo project (even though he was for decades in a partnership with the late jazz singer Etta Jones), and he sounds like I have never heard him before. The big-toned tenor school, of which he is perhaps the leading contemporary representative, typically plays with no shortage of passion and gusto con brio, but it’s a very masculine, up-front and in-your-face kind of emotion. Here, on the opening track especially, Mr. Person plays with a lot more vulnerability. His tone is saturated with a bittersweet melancholy, as if he were happy and sad at the same time.

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The jazz horn-keyboard duo began in a big way on records with the 1924 “King Porter”and “Tom Cat”by two extravagantly named New Orleanians: the cornetist King Oliver and the pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Four years later, the format was cemented as a proving ground for jazz immortals by Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines with “Weather Bird,” a composition co-credited to Oliver. Then as now, the duo format forces players to do some of their best work because it prods them into a creative sphere where they can’t rely on familiar patterns or go on automatic pilot. Duos tended to be more prevalent in the post-modern era, when mavericks like Lee Konitz and Steve Lacy made a specialty of them, but creative players out of the earlier schools, such as the multi-faceted cornetist Ruby Braff, also worked extensively in the format.

The duo format is particularly effective when applied to the familiar and unfamiliar melodies of the Great American Songbook. In fact, the melody that Mr. Person and Mr. Charlap play for an opener also helped throw off those friends of mine who attempted the blindfold test: “You Taught My Heart To Sing” is an under-recorded gem of a song from the one-shot team of McCoy Tyner and Sammy Cahn. The former, a pianist associated with John Coltrane and the avant-garde, and the latter, a multiple-Oscar-decorated lyricist of Old Hollywood, may seem like an odd couple at first. That is, until you remember that Mr. Tyner was the most lyrical member of the Classic Quartet and John Coltrane’s chief collaborator in his explorations of the Songbook; and if you knew Cahn at all, you know he could find a great, soaring, romantic melody no matter where it might have come from, and always come up with absolutely the perfect words to go with it.

“You Taught My Heart To Sing” is a fitting opener because that’s what Mr. Person and Mr. Charlap do throughout the nine songs on the album: sing directly from their hearts: Even the improvisations seem like love songs. They sing the songs, instrumentally that is, in a straightforward manner that has nothing to do with the rhapsodic embellishments typical of jazz interpretation or Broadway-style bravura.

Where “Sweet Lorraine” references Nat King Cole, “If I Ruled the World” alludes to Tony Bennett, and throughout, both leading men here have been touched by the spirit of Mr. Bennett’s two classic duo albums with the great Bill Evans. “Namely You” was famously swung by Sonny Rollins, but Mr. Person plays it more like a lover’s serenade, and “Where Is Love,”Lionel Bart’s children’s song from “Oliver” has Mr. Person breathtakingly voicing the song’s ascending chromatic lines and the twosome playing “where’s Waldo” with the melody in a way that suggests they really are looking for love. Toward the end, Messrs. Charlap and Houston find their way home with a melody by Mr. Charlap’s father, “I Was Telling Her All About You” — a punchline-driven song that works surprisingly well without lyrics — and with an original by Mr. Person, “Don’t Forget the Blues.” For the last track, they return to Mr. Person’s home turf with “I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone,” a classic soul-ballad by the pianist-bandleader Buddy Johnson.

In the past, Mr. Charlap recorded duo albums with the cornetist Warren Vache, with his mother, the singer Sandy Stewart, as well as bassists Sean Smith and Michael Moore. Curiously, the duo format makes horn players like Mr. Person sound more like human voices and singers sound more like jazz horns. That was my experience with Nancy King, a singer who is revered among listeners, musicians, and especially other singers in the Northwest, but who is only rarely heard in New York or on recordings of any kind. Ms. King was recently in town sharing a bandstand at Dizzy’s with Karrin Allyson, an especially generous act on the latter’s part since Ms. King’s intonation and time are so perfect that virtually no living vocalist could help but come in second place to her.

Ms. King’s first appearance in New Yorkin many seasons occurred two years ago thanks to the pianist Fred Hersch, who invited her to be one of his sparring partners in his annual duo series at Jazz Standard. The performance was subsequently released by Ms. King this year on Maxjazz and titled “Live at Jazz Standard With Fred Hersch.” According to Mr. Hersch’s comments in the notes, the two did not rehearse or play together in any way prior to the performance, yet what they created spontaneously was so exceptional that it was well worth issuing commercially. Ms. King is one of the few vocalists in all of jazz-time whom one really wants to hear scatting at length. Luckily, she is well aware of the difference between melody and improvisation; she sings the tunes more or less straight without distorting the words or music, then improvises on them wordlessly like a human horn. The last choruses of most of the songs on the CD are especially satisfying because Ms. King combines melody, lyric, and improvisation in a free reinterpretation of the tune.

Each of the two “wind” players on these albums, Mr. Person and Ms. King, turns in an outstanding performance for different reasons: Mr. Person because he’s not used to this setting and therefore works harder; Ms. King, meanwhile, seems perfectly at home testing herself by engaging on the fly in a remarkable level of interplay with a pianist whom she’d never even met in person. Mr. Person out-does himself by working outside of his familiar comfort zone, while Ms. King seems most comfortable when she’s taking chances and soaring without a net.

wfriedwald@nysun.com


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