Looking for a Different ‘Side’ of Sondheim

Steven Sondheim and jazz? It’s not a combination that comes to mind as a musical marriage made in heaven. And on Saturday night at UCLA, in a program titled “Sondheim & Jazz: Side by Side,” it felt a lot more like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

It’s hard to argue with the lineup for the concert. With performers such as singers Jackie Cain & Roy Kral, Dianne Reeves and Maureen McGovern, trumpeter Terence Blanchard and clarinetist Eddie Daniels, among others, there was no reason to expect anything other than first-class performances. And each of the artists did the best he or she could--in a few cases superbly--with the material.

Nor can one question the quality of the Sondheim songs, which included material ranging from “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George” to “A Little Night Music” and “Company.” The problem lay in the nature of Sondheim’s music, which tends to be oriented toward lyrics and character, composed in structures that vary considerably from the frameworks of most popular songs, and harmonized for the most part to support the drama of the story rather than the flow of the melody. All of this, of course, works perfectly as musical theater, but it is far less workable as a source for jazz improvisation.

The result was that the performers who remained close to the drama of the Sondheim numbers while investing their interpretations with a touch of jazz rhythms and phrasing were the most successful. Cain was stunning with “Not a Day Goes By.” McGovern found the essence of a rare Sondheim torch-type song, “Sooner or Later,” and combined brilliantly with Daniels on “Anyone Can Whistle.” The versatile Reeves captured “I Remember” but had problems with the wordiness of “Liaisons” (she really should have been allotted “Send in the Clowns” instead of having it presented as an instrumental). Reeves combined with Cain, however, for one of the evening’s highlights, a duo of “Every Day a Little Death.”

The instrumental numbers were similarly uneven. The Terry Trotter Trio, familiar with Sondheim via a number of its recordings of his music, played well in a pair of impressionistically framed renderings, and guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves was similarly effective. Daniels, Blanchard and alto saxophonist Jeff Clayton took more aggressive approaches in efforts to shape pieces such as “Being Alive” and “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” into jazz expressions.

But it was probably significant that two of the best jazz-oriented renderings were offered by pianist Billy Childs, performing “I Have a Love” (music by Leonard Bernstein from “West Side Story”) and a Blanchard-led group doing “Buddy’s Blues” by abandoning the song’s non-blues chords in favor of a more familiar 12-bar blues pattern for the improvisations. Like the balance of the evening, the performances underscored the unintended accuracy of the concert’s title. It was, indeed, a program of Sondheim and jazz--side by side, but only rarely together.