Stigers Returns to His First Love: Jazz

Imagine a voice that manages to combine elements of Al Jarreau, Bob Dorough and Willie Nelson. Toss in a trace of squeaky falsetto and a sprinkling of Jon Hendricks’ rapid-fire scatting and the result still doesn’t quite add up to the performance by Curtis Stigers at Catalina Bar & Grill on Wednesday night.

Stigers has moved from the blue-eyed soul style of his early ‘90s hit, “I Wonder Why,” through a flirtation with the singer-songwriter genre and, most recently, back to what he describes as his first love: jazz. If his performance here was any indication, he is at least as comfortable in the jazz arena as he was with pop and rhythm & blues.

His program of material generally remained in the center of the jazz mainstream: standards such as “But Not for Me,” “Body and Soul” and “My One and Only Love,” a Charlie Parker line and the somewhat more obscure “I Keep Going Back to Joe’s” from his latest album, “Baby Plays Around.” For the most part, that appeared to be a reasonable area for Stigers, especially in the more up-tempo numbers.

An occasional, modestly skilled saxophonist, he brought an instrumentalist’s sense of phrasing and harmonic understanding to his scat singing, with particularly effective results in a cranked-up rendering of “You’re Driving Me Crazy.”

Stigers’ ballad work, however, was far less convincing. His raspy sound, combined with a tendency toward truncated phrasing, undercut the effectiveness of his interpretations. The inherent romantic flow of “My One and Only Love,” for example, was dissipated by his choppy, idiosyncratic journey through the lyrics.

There are other singers, of course--Jarreau is one--who can twist and turn the phrases of a ballad into a highly personal statement. But Stigers--whose work on the new album is superior to the performance he brought to Catalina’s--still hasn’t fully moved beyond the stylistic distractions of his earlier career into a fully realized jazz vision.