Stylish, Theatrical Evening With Brown

When the next group of honorees for Kennedy Center Awards is chosen, singer-composer-poet Oscar Brown Jr. should be near the top of the list of candidates. At 73, he is a national treasure, a compelling entertainer, and a voice of reason in a musical world that vacillates between excess and political correctness.

On Wednesday, in the first set of his five-night run at the Jazz Bakery, Brown opened by strolling through the audience, calling out the sounds of street vendors dating back to pre-World War II Chicago--an effective start for a program he titled “Street Cries.”

He continued with a kind of chanted mantra using the name of the Chicago Defender, the influential African American newspaper that was once the professional home of Langston Hughes. Other vendor voices followed--the produce man, the ice man, segueing into Brown’s own version of a watermelon man song.

Accompanied in truly supportive fashion by pianist Matt Rose, Brown then described the Chicago street life of his youth on the Windy City’s Southside. “We didn’t listen to guitar players then,” he said. “Our instrument was the tenor saxophone. Cats I ran with could play a tenor whether they had a horn in their hands or not.” The line was an appropriate lead-in for Brown’s lyrics to Duke Pearson’s hard bop jazz standard “Jeannine.”

The Chicago scene-setting continued with a marvelously atmospheric story-poem titled “Jitney Jack,” describing, in often hilarious detail, the adventures of both the passengers and the drivers of the freelance jitney taxis that cruised the avenues in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Other fascinating items followed: a blues with lyrics by poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Brown’s own raucous fable “Signifyin’ Monkey,” a poem about Stan, a man with an unfortunate drinking habit, and a hard-driving rendering of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.”

All of it was delivered with style, panache and a superb sense of theater, making amazingly effective use of the relatively stark Bakery stage. Equally important, it was a performance rooted in the city life that has historically been such fertile ground for the growth of jazz, and, for that matter, dance, art, poetry, literature and the blues. It’s a life that Brown understands well, and his efforts to preserve and illuminate it are as entertaining as they are historically essential.

* Oscar Brown Jr. at the Jazz Bakery through Sunday. 3233 Helms Ave., Culver City; (310) 271-9039. $20 admission. Performances tonight and Saturday at 8 and 9:30 p.m. and Sunday at 7 and 8:30 p.m.