Sondheim’s Swingin’ Session : Top jazz artists finally tackle Stephen Sondheim’s show tunes (some words too) on a new album, and he couldn’t be more pleased.

It must have been a remarkable sight. Composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim making an extremely rare appearance inside a studio, at the piano, ready to record. He walked into the empty room, sat down at the piano, propped up a piece of music on the stand and nodded at the control booth.

“He looked pretty relaxed, but he really hates performing,” said Miles Goodman, co-producer of “Color and Light” (Sony Classical), a new album of Sondheim tunes performed by such jazz artists as Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall and Nancy Wilson, with a brief appearance by the composer. “I think he promised to do it in a weak moment, and then he was just too good a sport to back out.”

The recording of the one short track Sondheim had agreed to do took only a few minutes. The reclusive composer had wrestled with which piece of music to select, starting out with five choices before finally settling on the almost completely unknown “They Ask Me Why I Believe in You,” a tune written for a never-produced television special in the 1950s.

Goodman kept the event as simple as possible--no photographers, no guests, just the producer, the engineer and Sondheim.

“I just had an intuitive feeling that it was the only way he’d do it,” Goodman said. “And that was it. He showed up on time, with the music in his hands, sat down at the piano and played it.”

On the recording, Sondheim’s spare but keenly focused reading is joined to an improvisation on the same tune by pianist Herbie Hancock. The coupling was assembled with an eye toward establishing a high level of immediacy between the two versions.

It worked for Sondheim.

“I was stunned that Herbie could find so much to take off from,” he said in a recent telephone conversation from his New York home. “And because it was piano, and because it’s the one instrument I know something about, I really was trying to get into his head and figure out what prompted him to go from Point A to Point B to Point C. I still haven’t gotten it, and maybe it’s because I don’t have an improvisatory head. But just trying to follow his musical mind is fascinating to me.”

The album’s other co-producer, guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves, agreed.

“When we brought Herbie in,” he said, “he hadn’t heard the song and, of course, didn’t know it at all. We played Sondheim’s tape for him. Herbie listened closely, scratched out a few chords, decided he’d modulate into a new key and went at it. It was totally spontaneous, which is exactly what we wanted to capture--his first, sudden impression of the song.”

The result is a perfect symbol of the album itself, a strikingly expressive creative linkage of Sondheim and jazz--the kind of linkage that many observers felt could never be effective. But there can be little doubt that this entertaining, breakthrough recording by an impressive lineup of performers opens the door to further examination of the wealth of material in his catalogue.

Sondheim, who celebrated his 65th birthday on March 22, has been for the last 2 1/2 decades (via such shows as “Company,” “Follies,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods”) the most persistently creative--not to mention one of the most persistently criticized--force in the Broadway musical theater. (His “Assassins” is currently being staged at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.)

Yet, with the exception of “Send in the Clowns”--recorded with great intensity by Sarah Vaughan in 1981--and isolated instances such as a Sondheim recording in the ‘80s by the vocal duo of Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, his music has rarely been performed by jazz artists. But neither he nor the producers buy the often-expressed premise that his music is somehow inappropriate for examination by jazz players because his tunes depart too far from standard song form or because they integrate lyric and melody too concisely to allow for free-ranging improvisations.

“I welcome the attention,” Sondheim said. “And I’m frankly surprised that others haven’t picked up on some of this music before. I guess I can understand why for freely improvising musicians--jazz people, let’s say--the music is maybe too structured and doesn’t give them enough freedom to just take off. At least I’ve heard that comment.

“But maybe it has something to do with unfamiliarity. I’ve written a number of standard-form works with very simple lyrics--ballads, mostly. And a couple of singers have picked up on them. So I think part of it is exposure. If people could hear the tunes it might be different.”

If the reception to “Color and Light” is any indication, Sondheim is correct about the importance of exposure. The album has been an almost instant hit, arriving on the Billboard contemporary jazz chart at No. 10 and later climbing to the No. 2 position.

The Sondheim jazz boomlet also includes a new release by pianist Terry Trotter’s trio in a reading of the music from “Passion” (Varese Sarabande). Unlike “Color and Light,” however, which modifies and adapts an eclectic grouping of songs, Trotter’s “Passion” remains close to the original material. Lyrical, thoughtful and well-crafted, Trotter’s subtle piano readings further underline the still largely unexplored interpretive potential in Sondheim’s music.

Goodman and Castro-Neves, with characteristic producerly aplomb, are happy to take an I-told-you-so stance about the reaction to “Color and Light.”

“The only given we had in mind when we started the project,” explained Goodman, “was that we didn’t want to do yet another version of ‘Send in the Clowns.’ ”

“And we really didn’t have to,” added Castro-Neves, “because there is so much musical material in the Sondheim catalogue that we knew that if we could find the right way to deconstruct the material so it could be approached by jazz musicians, the musicians would respond.”

A nd they did, with a colorful array of interpretations. Holly Cole, a performer who is fashioning a career out of discovering novel ways to explore familiar songs, had a field day with the far less familiar “Losing My Mind” (from “Follies”).

“Actually,” Cole said, “we didn’t have to make any special structural changes, because the form of the song is fairly straightforward. But what attracted me to it was the possibility that it could be sung with a completely different attitude from the original. The way we do it is much less of a pure love song and a much darker take on the song as a picture of obsession.”

Somewhat less revisionist interpretations are offered by Nancy Wilson with an upbeat reading of the title song from “Anyone Can Whistle” and Grover Washington Jr.’s “Every Day a Little Death” (from “A Little Night Music”).

Among other, more unusual readings: trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s energetic reworking of the duet between a samurai and a sailor in “Poems” (from “Pacific Overtures”); Peabo Bryson’s surprisingly soulful rendering, with help from Joshua Redman’s saxophone, of “Pretty Women” (from “Sweeney Todd”); Herbie Hancock’s fittingly pointillistic view of “Color and Light” (from “Sunday in the Park With George”).

Guitarist Jim Hall selected his two choices--”What Can You Lose,” the other song from “Dick Tracy”) and “One More Kiss” (from “Follies”)--only after profound consideration.

“We sent him a group of tunes,” Goodman said, “and he didn’t like any of them, so we sent some more. But those didn’t seem right either, so he finally went to a record store and bought every Sondheim record he could find. And even after he made his decision, he wanted to see the lyrics from the tunes. Jim’s a real perfectionist.”

S ondheim did not expect such a wide range of musical respon ses.

“I found each of the interpretations quite startling,” he said. “I’ve listened to the album about four times, I guess. And each time I hear things I haven’t heard before. You know, if you’ve written something and then someone does a fairly free improvisation on it, it’s a shock, at least to me, because I haven’t had it done before. I like some better than others, but they’re all fascinating.”

The “deconstructionist” approach to the music described by Castro-Neves, in which the producers and the artists had a relatively autonomous hand in reharmonizing and restructuring the songs, was done with Sondheim’s complete approval.

“He made it very clear, in our first conversation, that he would keep a respectful distance,” Goodman said. “And that, of course, made us all the more concerned about being respectful, in return, to the material and to him.

“But I think we were agreed on one thing. When we refer to what we do with music, it’s called playing music. And Oscar and I like to use both meanings of the word play . This is material that one can feel seriously about, and take seriously, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be treated seriously. To us, it doesn’t demean the work to play it, and play with it.”

It was a singular agreement for Sondheim to make--an acceptance of the kind of free and open jazz artists’ investigation of music that is virtually foreign to his experience.

“Being a formalist, I’ve never been into improvisation per se, either in acting or music,” he explained. “Because I was rigidly trained to do exactly the opposite.”

Sondheim paused for a moment, laughed, then added: “Now that I’m saying it, there’s a contradiction in terms, because, of course, I do improvise sometimes when I’m composing. But it’s improvising toward a formal end, as opposed to taking something that’s formed and playing with it--which, as I understand it, is what jazz is essentially about. It’s about expressing oneself through the vehicle of something already written and then just improvising, playing with it, et cetera, et cetera.

“So, in that sense, it’s not so much that jazz is opposite from the way I work. I think most composers essentially work the same way. It’s the desire to take off from the song rather than focus in on it that’s different.”

S ondheim’s closest association with jazz-tinged music prob ably came during his writing of the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s classic score for “West Side Story.” But Sondheim sees little jazz content in the songs.

“There may have been some in the dance music to something like ‘Cool,’ ” he said. “But the songs themselves were fairly standard things with sophisticated harmonies, particularly for the time. Lennie always had enormous rhythmic propulsion in his music, and I think the thing about ‘West Side Story’ was not so much jazz as it was rhythmic propulsion.”

Asked if the sense of “rhythmic propulsion,” or what Bernstein might have described as “swing,” had any effect on the way he approached the lyrics, Sondheim grunted an immediate “no.”

“But there was a self-consciousness to the lyric writing in ‘West Side Story’ which was not of my choosing,” he continued. “Simply that Lennie pushed me to it. His idea of poetry and mine were just different. He encouraged the kind of purple writing that you find in ‘Tonight’ and things like that.

“Usually what I do is, if I find myself writing purple, I try to tone it down. Because music is so rich it just empurples. On paper a line like ‘Today the world was just an address, a place for me to live in’ looks pretty good. But you put it to music and suddenly you think, ‘Wait a minute, this is from a street gang member?’ And there’s a lot of that. ‘West Side’ is full of kind of empurpled lyrics, I think. To me, they don’t sound like people talking.”

I ts jazz associations aside, “Color and Light” is receiving some of the best reviews Sondheim has seen since “West Side Story.” They come as a pleasant surprise to a composer who has suffered decades of critical slings and arrows.

“Everybody wants to have good reviews,” he said. “But it seems to me that I not only polarize people, but I bring out a kind of hostile meanness in their writing that I’m slightly baffled by. Theater criticism is for the most part ignorant and bitchy, unlike the New York Times’ book reviews, which--with notable exceptions--tend to lean kindly toward the work under discussion. Perhaps it’s because most book reviewers are writers, whereas theater critics are paid journalists, just trying to make their own mark for themselves, and the only way they can do it is by taking attitudes.”

“And it’s nothing new,” Sondheim added with a sardonic chuckle. “ ‘Carmen’ was blasted by all the critics when it came out, and Bizet died without knowing it was a success. Critics are generally frightened by anything new, and they respond with poison, because they’re so scared.

“I gave up reading reviews a long time ago, except for the New York Times on opening night. But people tell me things, and I actually read one review of the album, and I’m delighted with what I’m hearing.”

Goodman and Castro-Neves are equally delighted.

“I knew, the first time I heard the music from ‘Into the Woods,’ that Sondheim’s music was right for jazz,” Castro-Neves said. “In fact, I told Miles, ‘Man, jazz musicians will go nuts with this stuff. And no matter what Sondheim says about being a formalist, he was wide open to the idea of letting us do it in a way which was true to jazz.”

Sondheim, clearly savoring the experience, and perhaps a bit swayed by the unexpected connections between his music and jazz, agreed.

“I just told them,” he said, “ ‘I’d love to hear the melody once, but other than that, the farther you take it away, the better.’ ”