JAZZ REVIEWS : TORME, SHEARING

It would be wrong to label Friday’s agenda at Hollywood Bowl a pops concert--Mel Torme and George Shearing are too sophisticated musically to qualify as hosts of that sugar-water genre.

Instead, the virtuoso singer and master pianist brought their jazz stylings to bear on a program that traveled from balladry to tone poem to Baroque counterpoint to swing music. Deftly, imaginatively. And with no small inspiration from Erich Kunzel, who led an altogether alert, engaged Los Angeles Philharmonic--especially the brass, which kicked in with a robust, big-band sound.

Left to their own devices, Shearing and beloved bassist Ray Brown indulged a kind of jazz sonata form in a Duke Ellington medley--probing and transmuting musical cells of “Sophisticated Lady,” “Take the A Train,” etc. But not before taming the wild Romanticism of--are you ready?--the Caprice of Rachmaninov’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” which they reduced to genteel syncopations and contrapuntal forms.

Torme took the spotlight after intermission and demonstrated for the 11,307 assembled his flair for turning standard tunes into art songs. Who else has the taste to unearth “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” and deliver its lyricism in long, arching lines? Who else can play with the harmonic dimension of “It Might As Well Be Spring” or dangle melismatic ornaments on “My Foolish Heart?”

Shearing matched Torme here as collaborator. And, in the upbeat department, the two offered gems like “Pick Yourself Up,” done with marvelous rhythmic rightness.

As if that were not enough, the singer belted out “Don’t Be That Way” and other tunes from a rafter-raising Benny Goodman medley he arranged for the Philharmonic--only to cap this final set by taking to the drums for an all-out “Swing, Swing, Swing.”