Word: charlap
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MUSIC: Jazz pianist Bill Charlap has finished paying his dues...
Jazz pianist Bill Charlap approaches a song the way a lover approaches his beloved. He wants to know its origins, its shape, its moods. He wants to view it from every angle--melody, harmony, lyrics, verse. He even wants to hear about its romantic history--what other improvisers have done with it. When he sits down to play, the result is an embrace, an act of possession. The tune rises, falls, disappears and resurfaces in new forms as Charlap ranges over the keyboard with nimble, crisply swinging lines, subtly layered textures, dense chords and spiky interjections. But no matter...
...Charlap himself is coming into bloom these days, after years of paying his dues as a musician's musician. His deepest ardor is for the works of classic songwriters like Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers--the so-called Great American Songbook. In the annals of composition, he maintains, "these songs represent a new blueprint for a truly American style. They will always be vital and au courant, as timeless as Beethoven." Over the past few years, with his trio mates, Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington (no relation) on drums, Charlap has built on that blueprint...
...Charlap, 38, can claim this music as a birthright. His father, who died when he was 7, was Broadway composer Moose Charlap (Peter Pan, Kelly) and his mother is singer Sandy Stewart, who toured with Benny Goodman and co-starred on Perry Como's 1960s TV show. In his parents' Manhattan apartment, young Bill mingled with composers like Charles Strouse, who wrote the musical Bye Bye Birdie, and lyricists like Alan and Marilyn Bergman (The Way We Were) and the one he called "Uncle Yip," E.Y. Harburg (Somewhere Over the Rainbow, April in Paris...
These days Charlap's career is getting down deep too. When Jazz at Lincoln Center unveiled its Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola last month, Charlap was the opening act. Lincoln Center has booked him to present a concert in February titled Great American Songwriters. He was also named to take over next year as artistic director of the well-regarded Jazz in July festival at Manhattan's 92nd Street...