Jack Sheldon Accents 16-Piece Band With Vocals, Humor

Jazz may be the sound of surprise, but it’s not just the music that grabs one’s attention when Jack Sheldon, the veteran trumpeter-bandleader-actor, makes one of his too-rare appearances. Monday night at Catalina Bar & Grill, he turned up in full regalia, leading his 16-piece big jazz band in a celebration of their eighth anniversary.

And although the music was superb--the heart and soul of the evening--it was Sheldon’s jazz-musician singing and jazz-musician humor that gave the evening its edge of offbeat unpredictability.

The set opened with a slow gathering of musical resources--solos tossed back and forth between pianist Christian Jacob, trumpeters John Daversa and Ron Stout, trombonist Andy Martin and bassist Trey Henry--before the ensemble erupted into a hard-driving blues.

A pair of Sheldon vocal features followed, showcasing his highly personalized renderings of “The Song Is You” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Like Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden, Sheldon’s vocal lines directly reflected the phrasing, even the slippery, sliding sound of his expressive jazz trumpeting.

In between numbers, he was a wry jokester, his humor blissfully unaffected by any sense of political correctness. And he enhanced the program by calling up a pair of strikingly different characters from the celebrity-sprinkled audience. Lyricist Alan Bergman, an attractively idiosyncratic singer in his own right, offered an easy swinging version of his own (with wife Marilyn and composer Lew Spence) “Nice ‘n’ Easy.”

Somewhat more unexpectedly, comedian Jon Lovitz took on “Night and Day.” “Night and Day” lost, but Lovitz compensated with a series of gags proving that he could be even more politically incorrect than Sheldon.

Amid all the fun and games, Sheldon--a sly musical craftsman whose voice is well-known from the ABC “Schoolhouse Rock” series as well as a recent Pepcid AC television commercial--kept the music at a high level of creativity and swing.

Performing first-rate charts, mostly arranged by Tom Kubis, powerfully driven by the drumming of Ray Brinker, the Sheldon Orchestra functioned with a collective character rarely heard in bands that are not together night after night. And the lineup of soloists--especially Martin (who offered an astounding cadenza at the close of “Caravan”), Daversa and Jacob--performed with consistently probing musical adventurousness.

The flaw in the evening was that the appearance was only a one-nighter. Sheldon and his talented aggregation deserve a far wider hearing.