Loston Harris and Gianluca Renzi Duo
Birdland Theater, Tuesdays in November
Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, November 8-December 31

Loston Harris is appearing at Birdland for the next four Tuesday evenings. This is cause for celebration.  

It’s not that New Yorkers don’t have ample opportunity to see Mr. Harris in performance — after all, he continues to be the central attraction at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle, where he has been in residence for several decades. No, Loston Harris at Birdland is a big deal because while Bemelmans is a great many things, it is not now and has never been a place to listen to music. 

This is a space for social interaction, to sample cocktails and partake of Upper East Side sophistication, to see and be seen; in other words, a place for anything but listening. The crowd simply refuses to stop talking or even acknowledge that there’s a great piano player in the middle of the room pouring his heart and soul into beautiful and hard-swinging renditions of classic American songs.

Loston Harris is very much worth listening to. His first show of this run at Birdland opened with an instrumental blues — a bright, bouncy riff number — and then proceeded through a set of mostly swinging standards.  Rodgers and Hart’s “I Could Write a Book” and Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To” provide a framework and a launching point for a set of brilliant variations, and what seem like limitless ideas that just keep rolling out of him, one after the other.

It’s clear that he’s listened closely to the understated elegance of Nat King Cole and the percussive minimalism of Ahmad Jamal — his 1998 album “Comes Love” contains an arrangement of “Moonlight in Vermont” built on the foundation of Mr. Jamal’s “Poinciana.”  Most of all, there’s the sheer, upbeat joy that we associate with Erroll Garner.

The standards keep on coming: “Tangerine,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Almost Like Being In Love.” Mr. Harris is also a very capable vocalist — on his earlier records he has a breathy, husky tone similar to Harry Connick Jr. Still, it’s the piano solos that are the major point: He’s a pianist who also sings rather than the other way around. It’s not like he plays piano to accompany his singing, but rather he sings to enhance the overall performance experience and to further serve the song.

Nearly everything he plays is uptempo; there are very few ballads — like Marilyn Maye, he just doesn’t need them. We somehow tend to attach emotional resonance to tempo, as if the only way one can put passion into a song is to phrase it slowly. Mr. Harris shows how fast numbers can be soulful and not glib. He even plays the Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen love song “The Second Time Around” as a romping and stomping finger-snapper of a tune, spinning chorus after thoughtful chorus.

“So Nice To Come Home To” featured a passage of block chords similar to what he played on “There Goes My Heart” on “Comes Love.” Throughout, Mr. Harris is also a master of clever and witty quotes, in the manner perfected in jazz piano by Art Tatum. “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Raincheck,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and others appear and then disappear not just as momentary diversions but as what amounts to a string of carefully placed songs-within-songs. He doesn’t just quote the “Rhapsody in Blue,” he uses it as the capper for “Almost Like Being In Love” to end the whole show, much like the King Cole Trio did at the end of their classic version of “I Know that You Know.”

Mr. Harris’s premiere show at Birdland this past Tuesday flew by so quickly that I thought my new smartwatch must have somehow suddenly gotten stupid — it sure didn’t seem like 90 minutes. It’s a whole set in which every tune has the uptempo energy and engagement of an opening number.  

Alas, Mr. Harris hasn’t recorded nearly enough: only five albums total starting with “Stepping Stones” in 1996; the most recent is the highly recommended “Swingfully Yours” from 2013. This is another reason why I am very glad that there are five Tuesdays in November.