During a Tedd Firth show at Birdland this week, I spotted the veteran singer Jane Scheckter in the house. Mr. Firth usually plays Birdland many times a month, almost always as the accompanist to some lucky singer. Yet this show was a rare opportunity for Mr. Firth to perform with his own trio as a featured attraction. The presence of Ms. Scheckter reminded me that she was the first to pull my coat-tails to Mr. Firth; about 20 years ago, she called me — on a landline, no less — fairly bursting with enthusiasm over a pianist she claimed to have discovered. In fact, she described Mr. Firth as “the new Bill Charlap.” Notwithstanding that Mr. Charlap was only about 35 and hardly finished with being the original Bill Charlap, she had a point: Mr. Firth was then a young player with formidable virtuosity, a deep harmonic sense, and swing for days. Whether he was serving as an accompanist or a soloist, he always played exactly enough, never overwhelming the listener with too many notes or, alternatively, providing an overly passive and bland, skeletal background. Over the past two decades, Mr. Firth has become the accompanist of choice for all the top singers in town. The side benefit of working with master storytellers such as Marilyn Maye, Melissa Errico, Tom Wopat, and Brian Stokes Mitchell, to name less than a handful, is that the association has doubtlessly helped sharpen Mr. Firth’s inherent sense of drama and narrative. Mr. Firth never just plays a song merely for the sake of playing a song: He’s always telling a story, with plenty of tension, plot development, and comic relief along the way.Mr. Firth’s general attitude is that he’s content to spend most of his time serving as a musical director for someone else, and only rarely feels the desire to step into the spotlight. He has, in fact, recorded an album of his own, titled “Starting Now”; it is, as of yet, unreleased, but Mr. Firth offers downloads to anyone who asks. (I asked.) At Birdland, he was among friends, starting with his bassist David Finck and drummer Mark McLean, but the whole house might be considered friends-of-Firth, and I counted at least half a dozen singers who have worked with him, among them Ms. Scheckter, Ms. Maye, Karen Oberlin, and the redoubtable Rex Reed.The album and the Birdland show started with a rather remarkable harmonic construction that, about halfway in — after Mr. Finck played his solo — turned out to be the 1926 jazz standard “Sunday.” There followed an incredibly catchy piece that few in the house recognized, in which the melody was essentially a line of five notes going up followed by another line of five notes going down. It was actually derived from a 1972 number by Stevie Wonder, “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You).” Mr. Wonder’s eight-minute track is effectively two complete songs joined together, and Mr. Firth and his trio soloed on what is more properly the second of them. The next two songs, Harry Warren’s “This is Always” and the Gershwins’ “For You, For Me, Forever More,” were introduced in forgettable Hollywood musicals of the mid-1940s, but the latter in particular became a jazz standard thanks to Charlie Parker. “This is Always” opens with a shimmering piano intro that recalls Erroll Garner on the 1947 Parker record, almost like he’s setting it up for a singer or a horn to enter, but then he plays the tune with a touch that, indeed, suggests that a second “voice” has taken over. He plays the first chorus in a haunting romantic style, then gets somewhat more frisky in the second, before Mr. Finck plays a whole chorus bowing arco (though he plucks pizzicato on the unreleased CD).What he did for Stevie Wonder, turning a soul ballad into a bop confection, he did for David Shire and Richard Maltby, with “Starting Here, Starting Now,” which may be the first time I’ve heard that title song from a 1977 Off-Broadway revue transformed into a jazz instrumental — albeit a lovely and lyrical one, prefaced by a really stunning, completely solo introduction that sets it up beautifully. He introduced one piece by Mr. Finck, a lovely arrangement of Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie” rendered sensitively as a bass solo. Mr. McLean shared an original composition titled “Tango Palace,” which wasn’t an Argentine dance number but a zingy riff inspired by a coffee emporium at Toronto. (Clearly there’s enough new material here for a second CD — that is, if the first one ever gets released.) He also recreated Oscar Peterson’s 1953 arrangement of the Burke and Van Heusen Oscar-winner, “Swinging on a Star,” playing from a transcription.With Marilyn Maye in the house, we would have been disappointed if she hadn’t taken the stage at least once, and she obliged with a brief Johnny Mercer medley of a ballad, “I Remember You,” that turned into a swinger, “That Old Black Magic.” (Yes, she also plugged her forthcoming concert at Carnegie Hall with the New York Pops on March 24.) The trio wound up with a thunderous romp through “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” a playful song if ever there was one.After “This is Always,” Mr. Firth told the house, “They don’t write ’em like that anymore.” He acknowledged that this is sort of a cliche, but, in fact, it’s true. Furthermore, as young as he still is, they don’t make piano players like Tedd Firth anymore, either.
