Likable ‘Jazz’ gets in the swing of things

“Like Jazz,” the suave, supper-club outing of a show that opened Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum, deliberately raises the question: What is jazz like?

There’s no easy way of answering that, of course, though any number of top-drawer writers and critics, from Langston Hughes and Julio Cortazar to Frank O’Hara and Toni Morrison, have tried to put jazz’s ineffable essence into words. By its fluid nature, jazz resists being pinned down, whether by lyric, melody, tempo or emotion. It exists as a kind of perpetual simile, in a state of becoming rather than being, which explains why it has been equally embraced by both hedonists and cynics -- those seeking relief in momentary pleasures and those for whom existential melancholia is a kind of aphrodisiac.

Happily, “Like Jazz” has found a way to translate this relentlessly shape-shifting art form into a warmly memorable entertainment, a hot rum toddy for the soul during December’s dark days. While some of its individual bits and pieces still need buffing, “Like Jazz” gleams with polish and panache.

Presiding over his penultimate season as the Taper’s big kahuna, Gordon Davidson has put together a dream team of veteran collaborators including composer Cy Coleman (“Sweet Charity,” “City of Angels”), lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman (“The Way We Were”) and book writer Larry Gelbart (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “MASH”).

Take note, however, that “Like Jazz” isn’t merely a nostalgic riff on the Good Old Days of American pop culture, filtered through a swingin’ big band sensibility. Instead, Davidson and company have come up with a deft, sophisticated and tuneful tribute to jazz’s enduring influence over whatever it touches or brushes -- including our restlessly introspective national character.

The creative team’s task would’ve been infinitely tougher without a robust quintet of singers to plumb the inner life of the show’s 18 musical numbers. Velvet-timbred Patti Austin, wry, wistful Jack Sheldon and Lillias White -- the most formidable entertainer in a blond buzzcut this side of Eminem -- are simply superb, and their colleagues Jennifer Chada and Cleavant Derricks are only marginally less commanding.

Neither a full-blown musical show nor a cabaret revue, “Like Jazz” fashions a spare but effective narrative through-line on which to hang its insights. Harry Groener, appropriately swathed in beatnik black, serves as a kind of hepcat master of ceremonies, giving voice to Gelbart’s smart, staccato commentary between musical numbers.

Yet in the main, the show’s coherency derives from the practically seamless fit between the Bergmans’ charming, sophisticated lyrics and Coleman’s effortlessly urbane melodies, as well as the consistently fine vocals. Savor, for example, the way that White’s inflection segues from sultry to lascivious to a comic-erotic sob, all in the space of a beat or two, on “He Was Cool,” a smoky paean to a sensuous saxophone player. Or the bittersweet longing that vocalist-trumpeter Sheldon imparts to “A Little Trav’lin’ Music,” which put me in mind of Walter Huston’s rendition of Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s “September Song.”

Or Austin’s dreamy, conversational ode to the rise and fall of a self-destructive trumpet player a la Chet Baker, and to the Apollonian-Dionysiac tensions that make jazz so dangerously addictive. “The beds were hard but the drugs were soft, and the women sure were easy,” Austin sings with the sort of casual authority one might muster to toss a fedora onto a hat rack’s top rung. Warren Luening contributes the torchy trumpet solo, while a giant image of Baker looms dejectedly in the background. (Marc I. Rosenthal is responsible for the terrific projection design.)

“Like Jazz” first drew breath as “Portraits in Jazz: A Gallery of Songs,” performed in May 2002 at the Kennedy Center, and this incarnation has retained the idea of using individual songs to personify the legacy of jazz greats and encompass large swaths of jazz history. It’s a tribute to the show’s high level of craftsmanship that it is achieved without sacrificing emotional precision or a sense of spontaneity.

“Scattitude” leads off Act 2 with a ragtime-y feel before Austin, flexing her amazing vocal instrument, urges would-be Satchmos and Ellas to “throw away your old thesaurus and grab yourself a chorus.” “In Miami” takes a spin through the Latin jazz of the ‘50s and ‘60s with a breezy, bossa nova pulse and a sashaying, Stan Getz-style lyricism so feathery that it occasionally slips away from Derricks’ control.

Midway through Act 2, Chada and baritone sax player Jennifer Hall team up on “The Double Life of Billy T.,” a brassy meditation on the strange career of Dorothy Lucille Tipton, who shielded her true sex from her wives, her children and her colleagues and turned herself into Billy Lee Tipton, a minor mid-century jazz figure. In this clever and well-performed number, the enigmatic Tipton becomes a symbol of the music’s astounding mimetic and improvisational properties.

Without overstating it, “Like Jazz” carries this theme of transformation and reinvention through the show conceptually, not only in the music but in Patricia Birch’s witty, unobtrusive choreography and the versatile set and lighting design created by D Martyn Bookwalter. “Like Jazz” pulls up well short of the 21st century. You won’t find the funky fusions of Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” represented here, let alone the recent mutations that have converted sampled Blue Note snippets into hip-hop sonic collages. And there’s far more Broadway than Bird- land in the show’s anthemic next-to-last number, “Before We Lose the Light.”

But it’s not hard to imagine Diana Krall someday doing a smokin’ cover version of “Music That You Know by Heart,” “He Was Cool” or “A Little Trav’lin’ Music.” While “Like Jazz” goes over smooth, it’s by no means just a musical highball down the hatch. In a seasonal spirit of generosity, the Taper has come up with a show of style and substance about the joys of collaboration, assembled with decades of accumulated craft and wisdom, and no small amount of love.

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‘Like Jazz’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays, 2:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Added performances, 8 p.m. Dec. 22, 29; 2:30 p.m. Dec. 23, Jan. 21. No performances Dec. 24-25, Jan. 1., Jan. 13-16. No evening performance Jan. 25.

Ends: Jan. 25

Price: $45-$65

Contact: (213) 628-2772

Running Time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

Patti Austin

Jennifer Chada

Cleavant Derricks

Jack Sheldon

Lillias White

Harry Groener

Music Cy Coleman. Lyrics Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Book Larry Gelbart. Musical staging and choreography Patricia Birch. Directed by Gordon Davidson. Scenery and lighting design D Martyn Bookwalter. Costumes Judith Dolan. Sound design Jon Gottlieb and Philip G. Allen. Projections design Marc I. Rosenthal. Music direction Tom Kubis. Production stage manager Mary Michele Miner.