Jeremy Pelt
‘The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 2: His Muse’
High Note Records

The biggest pioneer — in more ways than one — of the musical subgenre of  jazz-with-strings was, believe it or not, Jackie Gleason. Starting with his 1953 10-inch LP, “Music for Lovers Only,” the TV star produced a series of albums featuring love songs played by great jazz soloists against string backgrounds. Years later, he explained that whenever he saw a love scene in a movie, it was considerably enhanced by romantic background music, and on “The Tonight Show” in 1985 he told Johnny Carson: “If Clark Gable needs music, a guy in Brooklyn must be desperate!”  

The motivation to play ballads with strings was not necessarily strictly a commercial impulse. Even the most hardcore modern jazz players, like Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and Cannonball Adderley, all wanted to make such albums to show different aspects of their musicianship.

For trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, making an album of ballads with strings is a way of engaging with tradition — not just the jazz tradition itself, but with the tradition of the Great American Songbook that lives right next door to jazz; in fact, these two areas of music are hardly distinct, as they overlap considerably. 

Mr. Pelt’s latest album, “The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 2: His Muse” is a followup to his 2018, “The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 1” — clearly when he made the first one, he had already decided that this would be the first in a series. That earlier effort in this vein was ambitious and intimate in equal parts, in that it was slow love songs played against scaled-down backgrounds of just pianist and bassist, though he was greatly aided in that his two collaborators were the formidable George Cables and Peter Washington.

“Vol. 2,” which he showcased earlier this month at Dizzy’s Club, is ambitious in a different way. Here the challenge is to keep the intimate feeling with a considerably larger ensemble, with as many as eight or nine players on most of the tracks.  Essentially, it’s a rhythm section plus a string quartet backing a soloist — a format that Frank Sinatra put on the map with such albums as “The Voice” (1945) and “Close to You” (1956).

For the current album, Mr. Pelt collaborated with the arranger and conductor Dave O’Rourke for a program of mostly vintage love songs and a few originals composed specifically for the project. As with the predecessor, he put together a group with two formidable veterans, in bassist Buster Williams and drummer Billy Hart, along with the excellent young pianist Victor Gould, and a string ensemble of Andrew Griffin and Josh Henderson on violins, Nicole Neely on viola, and Susan Mandel on cello.

At Dizzy’s, Mr. Pelt began with “I Can’t Escape From You,” which Leo Robin and Richard Whiting originally wrote for Bing Crosby and has long found favor among jazz and African-American musicians; Mr. Pelt said he learned it from Dexter Gordon’s 1945 recording, but he apparently got the verse from Carmen McRae’s great 1957 version. 

Although the album starts with an excellent original, “For Whom I Love So Much,” “I Can’t Escape” is a perfect portrayal of the jazz musician as a balladeer, a baritone, or even a crooner. He sticks to the melody as written and clearly has the lyrics in his head. When he plays the tune, he stays within the confines of what a singer could do, but after the initial melody statement he allows himself a little more liberty to improvise on both the tune and the harmonies.

In another sense, the album is a tribute to the great African-American singers of love songs — what drummer and historian Kenny Washington calls “Sepia Voices.” In addition to Carmen McRae, there are songs associated with Johnny Hartman; Henry Mancini’s evocative, even steamy “Slow Hot Wind,” which is one of the few with just the rhythm section; as well as Marvin Fisher’s “When She Makes Music,” from Joe Williams and Nancy Wilson. 

Cyril Ornadel’s “If I Ruled the World” opens with a flourish that reminds me of Tony Bennett’s signature performance.

One of the most staggeringly moving performances, both at Dizzy’s and on the album, is Marian McPartland’s “There’ll Be Other Times,” which Mr. Pelt plays at a crawl tempo and with a very tight metal Harmon mute, two sonic attributes that will put listeners in mind of Miles Davis — though he doesn’t mimic Miles’s famously anguished intonation. 

At Dizzy’s, Mr. Pelt commented several times about how these songs also show the flip side of love, the not-so-rapturous aspects of love, those parts of the romantic experience wants to escape from. He also included a lesser-known melody famously recorded by Coleman Hawkins in 1962, “Don’t Love Me,” which was also hardly your basic rah-rah “hooray for love”-type tune. 

It’s that willingness to indulge in the darker side of love that distinguishes Mr. Pelt’s “intimacy” albums from the more simplistic “make-out music,” promulgated by Jackie Gleason. To that end, he also includes an original blues, titled “Blues in Sophistication.” It’s probably to no one’s surprise that this is among the more rapturously romantic moments on the album, and shows that the blues are no less worthy of a string background.

Mr. Pelt concludes on a melancholy note with Mancini’s “Two for the Road.” He communicates all the mixed emotions within this profound, highly nuanced text, working with neither the rhythm section nor the strings but merely guitarist Chico Pinheiro. It’s a beautiful, bittersweet way of saying goodbye, and Mr. Pelt makes it even more moving by intoning Leslie Bricusse’s lyrics in a sweet, understated voice that recaptures what the late Roy Hargrove created when he sang “Never Let Me Go.” 

Still, I hope it isn’t goodbye; I’m eagerly awaiting volume three.