JAZZ REVIEW : Sparse Crowd Doesn’t Hinder Cunninghams’ Swing : Husband / wife vocal duo crank up the energy in a wide-ranging, sophisticated set Sunday in Huntington Beach.

Don and Alicia Cunningham are troupers. Put them on stage and it doesn’t matter if there are three listeners in the audience or 300. The veteran jazz vocal duo will turn on the fire, crank up the energy and do a crackerjack job.

On Sunday, the first breezy afternoon after weeks of a soggy heat wave, people apparently were far more inclined to stroll the nearby Huntington Beach Pier than to sit inside Maxwell’s restaurant where the Cunninghams were singing.

But for the Cunninghams, a sparsely populated room posed no problem. They dug into their opening set with an instantly (and appropriately) swinging excursion through “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.”

During Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” Don Cunningham ripped off a vocalized improvisation that spun around the be-bop chord changes with a complexity and a drive that would have done any horn player proud. Short of Jon Hendricks, it’s hard to think of any singer who performs at such a sophisticated level of jazz spontaneity.

Indeed, on the Basie standards “Corner Pocket” (“Until I Met You”), “Centerpiece” and “April in Paris,” the husband/wife team brought to mind the colorful vocalise of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. And Alicia Cunningham sounded a bit like Sarah Vaughan and a bit like Cleo Laine with a lovely reading of “But Beautiful.”

A bright, jaunty, humor-tinged rendition of Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” and an unusual blending of Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day” with “Our Love Is Here to Stay” revealed the Cunninghams’ ability to explore a remarkable range of less jazz-related material.

Bassist Jim DeJulio, pianist George Gaffney and drummer Jimmy DeJulio backed the singers impressively and were featured during “You Came a Long Way From St. Louis,” “Blue in Green” and an especially strong treatment of “Love for Sale.”