ZohoMusic.com - Latin Jazz With A New York Vibe

Tony Bennett never formally studied music, but, after he was discharged from the US Army in 1946, he was able, courtesy of the GI Bill, to attend drama classes at the American Theater Wing. Not surprisingly, the 20-year-old aspiring vocalist quickly realized that he could take what he learned there and apply it to his singing. Tony was particularly taken with advice from a teacher named Mimi Speer. His influences were already far and wide: Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. But Ms. Speer impressed one overriding idea upon him: “Do not imitate another singer, because you’ll end up sounding just like they do, and you won’t develop an original sound. Instead, find a musician you really like and study their phrasing. That way, you’ll create a sound on your own.”

The musicians that Tony cited in this context were Stan Getz, Art Tatum, and Lester Young. The latter is particularly important in that Young himself is credited with one of the great truisms regarding instrumental improvisation, namely that when he played a ballad, he made a point to learn the lyrics to the song as well as the tune.

What makes the playing of Adrian Galante so special is that he has fully assimilated both of those mantras, the singer who studies the approach of the great instrumentalists, and the horn player who not only plays the melodies but the words as well. When most musicians play a song, they’re usually content to play only the music; Adrian, however, plays the whole song.

This is especially true on the opener—in fact, fittingly, he starts this, his premiere album, with two numbers from the Tony Bennett Songbook. He begins It Amazes Me with the verse, “singing” it out-of-tempo. The pacing is altogether like a great storyteller going to work: after a piano intro sets up his entrance, Adrian lingers a split second longer than we expect before playing his first note. He pulls back, in such a way as to preface what he’s about to tell you, as if to let us know, “Okay, now I’m really going to tell you something.”

He then glides seamlessly into Cy Coleman’s familiar melody, still holding back, playing the tune with such gentle deliberation as to convey a quality of genuine amazement. Drummer Joe LaBarbera, who himself has an important history with Tony Bennett, sets up a backbeat that is vaguely suggestive of the iconic percussion pattern that Vernel Fournier played, famously with a mallet in one hand and a traditional drumstick in the other, on Ahmad Jamal’s “Poinciana.”

Guitarist Larry Koonse and pianist Tamir Hendelman, both solo in a kind of hesitating, staccato fashion that also bespeaks the same sense of amazement; further, the two solos are so simpatico that it’s easy to miss when the guitar ends and the piano begins. When Adrian returns, he strays further away from the written melody, but never loses the thread of the story.

Adrian learned You’re All the World to Me from Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding. He swings with a purposefulness that both Bennett and Astaire would admire. This is a further exploration of the concept that Sinatra pioneered in Songs for Swingin’ Lovers (1955), the idea of taking a love song and swinging it, even while retaining its romantic qualities. Like Sinatra and Bennett, Adrian swings here with a kind of erotic energy.

A later Cy Coleman song, With Every Breath I Take has Adrian playing very introspectively. David Zipple’s lyrics have him communicating his feelings to another person—the “you” of the text—but Adrian rethinks it as a kind of interior monologue, as if he were taking stock of his emotions and pondering them to himself; it’s less a statement than a reverie

Conversely, on I Hadn’t Anyone Till You one gets the impression that Adrian is singing to a definite external “you” rather than a metaphorical one. It opens with an intro in which all four members of the rhythm section, piano, guitar, bass, and drums (mostly brushes here), phrase together in a manner reminiscent of George Shearing (After all, both Shearing and composer Ray Noble were countrymen.) After stating the melody, Adrian lets bassist Alex Frank romp through the tune for a chorus.

Again, when he returns, he treats us to a friskier frolic through the harmonies, and there’s a drum statement, although Joe is smartly cocooned, by the piano, bass, and guitar, which leads into Adrian commanding our attention with a succession of false endings, which aren’t the only way that this arrangement aligns itself with the tradition of New Testament-era Count Basie.

He understates Cole Porter’s melody on It’s All Right With Me rendering the tune in such a nonchalant way as to imply that it really is all right with him. In the background, the rhythm section plays a contrapuntal figure that suggests Dexter Gordon’s “Tanya,” as well as Donald Byrd’s “Jeanine” and Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments,” and reharmonized using Nelson’s signature parallel voicings.

I’m particularly impressed by Adrian's phrasing in the bridge; this exemplifies what Sinatra once described (in his famous interview with Bill Boggs) as “making his case,” stating his argument logically but also passionately - “Don’t you want to forget somebody too?” Tamir and the rhythm section build to a big crescendo that suggests Oscar Peterson or even the instrumental break in Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” before Adrian returns and plays it cool to take it out.