Honoring the Buoyant Stallings and Southland Jazz Vocalists

Musical award ceremonies aren’t always as entertaining as one might expect. Too often the rhetoric, praise and accolades take precedence over the simple acknowledgement of the honoree’s talents.

“A Salute to the West Coast Jazz Singer” fortunately took a different tack Sunday evening at the Hollywood Park Casino. The program, both a tribute to veteran artist Mary Stallings and an opportunity to honor and acknowledge dozens of Southland jazz vocalists, placed the music front and center, with hosts Willard Jenkins and James Janisse gracefully deferring to the evening’s large array of gifted performers.

It was appropriate that the brightest musical moments were provided by Stallings and “Salute” organizer Barbara Morrison.

Although Stallings, a slender, elegant woman, has only returned to performing over the past decade after spending years raising a family, she still possesses the buoyant sense of rhythm and musician’s ear for harmony that characterized her early work with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Ben Webster and Cal Tjader. And she now supplements it with focused phrasing and a mature understanding of the storytelling aspects of jazz singing. All these talents were displayed in a gorgeous rendering of “Ghost of a Chance.”

Morrison delivered “What a Wonderful World” with the joie de vivre that is intrinsic to her art. Her performance, with its inner sense of joy, expressed the evening’s fundamental qualities: a feeling of camaraderie and respect between artists, a deep love of the music and an effort to affirm the communicative qualities of jazz singing.

Further enhancing an already flowing cornucopia of talent, the Frank Capp Juggernaut offered a collection of stirring big band jazz repertory pieces.