Well-Seasoned Jazz From Two of Its Masters

Watching George Shearing and Joe Williams in action is a bit like experiencing the mature work of Pablo Picasso. Their playing and singing, like Picasso’s paintings, drawings and ceramics, represent mature art at its finest, a form of expression that has been refined to its essence.

On Saturday night at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Shearing and Williams were in particularly fine form. Shearing’s long-term partnership with bassist Neil Swainson has allowed his piano work to blossom in a number of different directions. Always a harmonically imaginative player, he now can move easily from big, lush, two-handed chording to a spare approach filled with suggestion and implication rather than outright statement.

In “Speak Low,” for example, with an arrangement by Swainson, piano and bass moved through the melody via a dark, bi-tonal harmonization that perfectly characterized both the subject matter and the musical content of the song. Leonard Bernstein’s lovely “Some Other Time” received similarly thoughtful treatment, and--in a brief solo piano segment--Shearing found an insightful passageway through the familiar chord pattern of “I Can’t Get Started.”

Which is not to minimize Shearing’s up-tempo numbers, which were executed with a brisk, swinging drive and underscored with the veteran pianist’s offbeat sense of humor. When an overly loud request for “East of the Sun” came bursting out of the overflow crowd, Shearing cracked an elfin smile and replied, “OK, but I’ll do it in the style of Errol Garner.” And he promptly proceeded to do so, via a rendition complete with Garner’s trademark lag-along style and accompanying grunts.

Williams, seeming fully recovered from the maladies that caused the cancellation of several dates last year, sang with brilliant, self-assured musicality. His presence, his incomparable ability to swing, his capacity to invest everything from the blues to standard ballads with a powerful jazz quality, brought to mind the question of why he (rather than the far less jazz-skilled Tony Bennett) has not received more public recognition as the premier male jazz vocalist of his generation.

Appropriately, Williams sang a fair number of blues--”Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Alright, Okay, You Win” and “The Comeback” among them--with the mixture of humor, swing and sheer power that have been his stock in trade for decades. But he was every bit as good with such lovely standards as “There Goes My Heart” and “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart.” On “Have You Met Miss Jones,” for example, he moved across the melody in an improvisational fashion that would have pleased Sarah Vaughan.

Shearing, Swainson and drummer Paul Humphrey supported and interacted with Williams superbly. The reluctance of the audience to let them leave was more than justified. This was a rare example of musical maturity at its finest.