With a Song in My Heart - John Pizzarelli

Music critics, ideally, would know and care about all types of music. I absolve myself from such catholicity inasmuch as I am not a music critic. I am an aficionado of classical music, show tunes, and the best of Tin Pan Alley. I respect jazz, and have enjoyed it, but have not been impelled to become very involved with it.

So how do I review a CD such as John Pizzarelli's With a Song in My Heart? How does a man who is not a regular whiskey drinker, but is content with wine and beer, evaluate one of its brands?

Thus I must confess that, for all the expertise displayed on it, I could live without this song in my ear. It features, as its subtitle proclaims, the music of Richard Rodgers, which, let's say it right off, was not intended for this kind of arrangement, even if some of these 12 items have profited from the services of the renowned Don Sebesky.

Most of the tracks feature, in addition to Pizzarelli's voice and guitar, a combo of seven musicians, including John's younger brother, Martin, on bass. On some of the tracks, John's father, the perhaps even more prestigious guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, is guest artist; elsewhere we get the pianist Cesar Camargo Mariano to contribute a bossa nova flavor, as he did on a previous Pizzarelli album, Bossa Nova.

[IMG:R]If you want to know why I am so cool (not in the jazz sense of the word) about this endeavor, listen, for instance, to the last track, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught," Rodgers and Hammerstein's stirring attack on racism from South Pacific. Pizzarelli tells us it was "written in ¾ time, but we did it in 4/4 time. I sort of treated it as a James Taylor song." To me, that smacks of lese-majeste. This tempo does not suggest righteous indignation so much as querulous petulance.

Consider also the voice. True, the song is written for tenor, but not the kind of whispering tenor (there are not only whispering baritones) that Pizzarelli provides, meant to be insinuating like that of good lounge singers, but coming across merely as puny. Out the window goes the R&H message.

Where both the voice and the band come off best is in the quieter, more sentimental or melancholy numbers, such as "It's Easy to Remember," on which father and son offer indeed what the press release calls "a poignant and intimate guitar/vocal version."

But let us not give too much credit to whoever wrote the Telarc press release. It is bad enough that this person doesn't know that the possessive of Rodgers is Rodgers's, not Rodger's; what is inexcusable is calling the lyricists Lorenz Hart (so far, so good) and Lawrence Hammerstein II. If there were an Oscar for boo-boos, this one would win hands down.

But back to the disc, which has, in my view, two obvious lacunae. First, isn't 43'22" a bit skimpy for a CD? Second, if you have a wife as talented as the singer-composer Jessica Molaskey—and as long as you already have your father and brother on the disc—couldn't she too make at least one appearance? Perhaps in "He Was Too Good to Me," which was written for female voice, but is here hogged by John as "She Was Too Good to Me." Could it be that John, who did collaborate with his wife before, has become afraid that she might prove, this time round, too good for him?