John Pizzarelli Trio
Birdland
Through March 8

It was 20 or so years ago in these very pages, which were actually printed back then, that I described John Pizzarelli as the jazz world’s most formidable triple threat. 

As a singer, he is a warm, engaging, and highly effective vocalist and interpreter of lyrics; as an irreverent funster, his jokes aren’t necessarily hysterical in and of themselves but he is such a great spirit of fun and laughter that you you find yourself smiling throughout his show — even on comparatively more serious and even sad songs like “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”  

Most importantly, Mr. Pizzarelli has few equals as a jazz guitarist. He plays with such virtuosity, laying down so many notes and chords — with such blinding speed and with such a masterful sense of organization and balance — that he is virtually the Oscar Peterson of the guitar.

John Pizzarelli is always at least three things at once, and his set is often much more than that: He progresses from segment to segment, each of which is a virtual show-within-a-show. 

On Tuesday, he started with a quartet of songs mostly associated with Tony Bennett, among them “Watch What Happens” and “Young and Foolish,” as well as two slices of Ellingtonia from Bennett’s songbook, “In a Mellotone” and “Love Scene.” Along the way he tells a very funny anecdote about asking the late Tony about the provenance of the latter.

He follows the Bennett mini-set with an introduction of his sidefolk, longtime bassist Michael Karn and keyboardist Larry Goldings, temporarily replacing Isaiah J. Thompson as he tours in Europe with Wynton Marsalis. While Mr. Goldings is best known in the jazz world as an organist, he is also the regular keyboard player with James Taylor.  

Mr. Pizzarelli details how he and Mr. Goldings first met at a Taylor session, and this leads into a sequence of Taylor tunes, starting with “Mean Old Man” and including “Sweet Potato Pie,” as well as “Lonely Tonight.” Mr. Pizzarelli recounts how Mr. Taylor expressed to him that he feels “Sweet Potato” is the song of his that most sounds like the Great American Songbook. Even so, the way Mr. Pizzarelli sings the James Taylor songbook, all of these songs sound worthy of being heard alongside those of Richard Rodgers and Duke Ellington.

Next there’s a subset of bossas nova from Antonio Carlos Jobim, starting with “Dinji,” associated with Frank Sinatra, and then “So Danco Samba,” associated with Ella Fitzgerald. While Mr. Pizzarelli has chops to spare, with these Brazilian songs he becomes an astutely swinging minimalist. “Waters of March” is usually very long and wordy, but he edits and accelerates it in just such a way that it becomes much more to the point than usual.

He then gets somewhat more serious — you should forgive the expression — in a sequence of unaccompanied guitar features on his seven-string acoustic instrument. “This Nearly Was Mine” is the iconic arrangement by his father, the late Bucky Pizzarelli, of the “South Pacific” ballad, followed by “Some Other Time,” which uses the Bill Evans arrangement as a starting point and incorporates Evans’s highly modal variation, “Peace Piece.” These showtunes are followed by Pat Metheny’s meditative “Last Train Home.”

The concluding segment amounts to a satisfying finale. Bobby Troupe’s light and swinging “Lemon Twist” gives way to the poignant “Carefully Taught,” a song that seems more welcome than ever in an age when cultural diversity as a very concept is under fire, proving that we haven’t come very far since 1949. He finishes resoundingly with a hard-swinging, uptempo trio instrumental titled “MJQ.”   

Mr. Pizzarelli jokes about his lineage — often referring to “My famous father, Les Paul” — but he is also an honorary scion of another family, the Coles of Montgomery by way of Chicago, who gave us Nat and Freddie along with the lesser-known Eddie and Ike. What they all have in common is possessing a way to make us laugh and smile often in spite of ourselves; we always feel better at the end of each set than we did when we walked in.  

Even if we had been contending with the unsavory aspects of Times Square or the current political situation, by the time Mr. Pizzarelli finished, it was as if he was addressing a room full of golden retriever puppy dogs: “Who’s a good boy?”