Pop and Jazz Reviews : Michel Legrand in Grand Style

The windmills of Michel Legrand’s mind must have been turning fast and loose on Friday at the Jazz Bakery. The result was a session so memorable that it should have been preserved on videotape.

In town to write the score for a new movie, the composer was presented for two nights at the Culver City room in his all-too-rare roles as pianist and singer.

Introduced by Alan Bergman, who sat with his wife, Marilyn, in the front row, Legrand turned the evening almost exclusively into a recital of Legrand songs for which the Bergmans had supplied lyrics.

Legrand’s talent as a jazz pianist has been largely overlooked. He has listened to all the right people and absorbed all the right influences. His instrumental numbers were marked by authority, swing, touches of sly humor and the superb support of John Guerin on drums and the phenomenal bassist Brian Bromberg.

Vocally, Legrand makes up in Gallic charm and self-deprecation what he may lack in technique. He had help: The delightful Sue Raney, after a couple of solo vocals, joined him in seemingly spontaneous harmony on “Little Boy Lost.” Even Allan Bergman took a vocal turn, nervously holding a cue card to remind himself of his own lyrics to “One at a Time.”

Legrand capped himself and everyone else with a hilarious multipurpose version of “I Will Wait for You”--played in half-a-dozen keys, in 4/4, in 3/4, as a 1920s tango and finally in a mad accelerando. Incredibly, Bromberg and Guerin kept up with all this.

If he had never written a hit song in his life, Legrand could enjoy a successful career as a sort of latter-day Victor Borge.