Jeff Harnar
‘A Collective Cy: Jeff Harnar Sings Cy Coleman’
PS Classics

Halfway though Jeff Harnar’s album launch show, the singer informed the Monday night crowd at Birdland that Cy Coleman was something of a musical Zelig: Shows of his including “Wildcat” (1960) and “Barnum” (1980) are classic mainstream musical theater, not all that different from, say, Jerry Herman. Contrastingly, the cast album of “The Life” (1990) is much more soul music-driven and could have been on Motown Records, while “City of Angels” (1989) is a musical film noir, “The Will Rogers Follies” (1991) includes some country-style songs, and “On the Twentieth Century” (1978) evokes comic operetta.

Nearly 20 years after his death, and for the foreseeable future, Coleman will be remembered as one of the major canonical contributors to the legacy of the Broadway musical. Yet the Cy I knew was foremost a jazz guy; whenever we got together or picked up the phone, that was always what he wanted to talk about. 

Just a month before he died, in November 2004 at the age of 75, Cy performed with his jazz trio at the old Feinstein’s at the Regency. At that time, I had the pleasure of profiling him for this paper, and we had our last of many conversations. As usual, it was all about jazz — specifically jazz piano. 

Famously, Coleman worked jazz harmonies and rhythms into many of his show scores and popular songs: As Mr. Harnar also observed, “Sweet Charity” (1966) launched an emergence of modern sounds on Broadway.   While the score leaned toward bebop and cool modes, it explicitly foreshadowed the coming of contemporary pop sounds in “Promises, Promises” (1969) and “Company” (1970).

Mr. Harnar and his musical director, Alex Rybeck, are well aware of this: A proper Cy Coleman salute would start with his show tunes but reinterpret them with more than a dash of swing. A mainstay on the New York music scene for more than 30 years, Mr. Harnar has a distinctive high baritone that would be equally at home crooning in front of a big band or in a traditional cabaret room or on a Broadway stage.

The album’s guest stars are deployed accordingly, starting with Ann Hampton Callaway and Liz Callaway: the former appropriately joins Mr. Harnar for one of Coleman’s swingers, “I’ve Got Your Number” from “Little Me,” while the latter, who has one of the finest Broadway voices of our time, sings the soprano role on the more classically styled “Our Private World” from “Twentieth Century.” 

Messrs. Harnar and Rybeck are consistently creative in a way that resonates as faithful to the material. There’s a collage of two New York-centric songs, “My Personal Property” and “My City,” with a subtle go-go beat; you could dance a rich man’s frug to it. Closer to the end, he combines three more introspective, downbeat numbers, “The Rules Of The Road,” “Come Summer,” and “I’m Way Ahead,” into a unified, coherent, and very bittersweet statement.

Two trio numbers make such effective use of counterpoint that they sound like medleys unto themselves. “The Doodlin’ Song” drew humor from the contrast between the child-like goofiness of the lyric and bassist-vocalist Jay Leonhart’s deadpan delivery. In “Sweet Charity,” Coleman and librettist Neil Simon tipped their hand by creating a character named “Daddy Johann Sebastian Brubeck” and having him sing “The Rhythm of Life,” a jazz fugue even to surpass “Cool” in “West Side Story.”  

Mr. Rybeck arranged a copasetic trio with guests Nicolas King and Danny Bacher, the latter also soloing on soprano saxophone. On the CD, the audio engineering, alas, is way overdone to the point where it’s hard to tell these three usually distinct voices from each other. Still, it’s glorious counterpoint on the part of Coleman and Mr. Rybeck. 

Coleman’s first major hit, the 1957 Sinatra classic “Witchcraft,” has been recast from a swinger to a more intimate contemplation of life and love beginning with a lesser-known verse and a slow but sure buildup to final lines sung in very high head tones. Likewise, he closes with “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” normally exuberant, but here movingly bittersweet.

Some of the best numbers performed at Birdland, surprisingly, aren’t on the CD, such as his opener, a triptych of “Hey” songs starting with “Big Spender,” which also makes key use out of the word “hey.” There was also “You’re Nothing Without Me,” thoroughly rewritten from “City of Angels” by the original lyricist, David Zippel, as a duet of mutual admiration between Messrs. Harnar and Rybeck.

The many such numbers not on the album may be considered promising, and makes me look forward to volume two, especially as Mr. Harnar embraces both the melancholy numbers and the upbeat ones with equal enthusiasm. The rhythm of life, as he makes clear, is a powerful beat.

Correction: Zippel is the correct spelling of the last name of the lyricist. The name was misspelled in an earlier version.