June 28, 2012 by Will Friedwald, The Wall Street Journal
The crowd at Feinstein’s reacts most excitedly to Jack Jones’s big high notes and other displays of vocal virtuosity. At an age when most of his heroes began losing their chops, that’s nothing to take for granted. Yet it isn’t the pure power of his voice that’s most impressive; it’s the sensitivity with which he animates a lyric, a sensitivity that only increases with age. No one has ever rendered “People” so intimately; it’s the first time I’ve felt like it was being sung by a person who actually needs people. Mr. Jones enacts the lyrics to “Angel Eyes” so vividly that when he moves about the tables at Feinstein’s, you feel like he’s really searching for his lost love, and finding resolution in the bottom of a glass. With tenor-saxophone great Houston Person providing support, Mr. Jones swings mightily, his timing off only in that this run only lasts a week.Mr. Jones is among the youngest in the pantheon of major male vocalists, with a lineage that goes back to Al Jolson and Bing Crosby and extends through his immediate mentors, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme and Tony Bennett (all of whom encouraged him). All of them combined elements of pop music and jazz, and were equal parts crooner and jazz singer.
In the past decade, working in the late, lamented Oak Room and now Feinstein’s, Mr. Jones has proven that he’s also a cabaret artist. He has a relentless drive to relate to everyone in every room in which he sings. He bookends his show with video clips of his 50-year career (including snippets of duets with every ’60s celebrity short of Fidel Castro), and even images of his family. People who have never met him say “…and say hi to the kids” on their way out.
His opening number (“I am a Singer”) notwithstanding, Mr. Jones is more a than singer—he’s emcee, toastmaster, party host. He continues to show a predilection for songs that celebrate the act of singing, as with “The Gypsies, Jugglers, and Clowns,” and occasionally to toast himself as well, with “Here’s to Life,” long the self-congratulatory go-to song for veteran vocalists.
Such reflective intimacy serves him well on his latest album, “Love Ballad,” a set of songs, with musical direction by the brilliant pianist Mike Renzi, both new and familiar in his catalog. The title number, by his guitarist Patrick Tuzzolino, concerns itself with both nouns in the title, being a song about love and a song about love songs. In a way, “I Can’t Wait to Miss You” is also a song about songs, deriving its impact by playing off the expectations that have accumulated from listening to a thousand generic love songs. The melody is cut from a straight romantic ballad, but if you listen closely, the witty lyrics (by Mr. Jones himself) are actually telling someone’s significant other to take a hike: “I Can’t Wait to Miss You / so when are you leaving?” Mr. Jones sings it completely seriously, like a brilliant actor making a comic role funny by playing it straight.
Mr. Jones is also the sole jazz crooner out of the traditional continuum to make much of songs of the past 50 years: He sings Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows,” and as an encore at Feinstein’s, he deliberately puts the jazz concept aside to sing the two key songs from “Man of La Mancha” (which he’s played in regional theater): the title number and “The Impossible Dream.” It’s certainly stirring, but I prefer the more personalized treatment of the latter on the album, which frames “The Quest” with Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” in an obvious homage to the Tony Bennett-Evans album. Yes, Mr. Jones has the chops to treat this show-stopper as a big, 11-o’clock number, but by making it small and personal, he makes any dream possible.