Metro Pulse/Music/Rachel Z

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What:
Rachel Z Trio

When:
Tuesday, March 2, 8 p.m.

Where:
4620

Cost:
$5

Rachel Z puts a classic jazz spin on modern pop

by Jonathan B. Frey

A sobering thought for the 40-something set: the 1940s tunes we smirked at our parents for listening to are akin to the 1970s ones we listen to now. “Free Man in Paris” equivalent to “I’ll Be Seeing You”? Joni Mitchell analogous to Kahal and Fain? Improbable perhaps, but it’s one contrast among many not lost on pianist/keyboardist Rachel Z. That and the fact that somewhere along the line jazz took as its “book,” its essential material, popular tunes of the middle 20th century and has resisted moving forward in time. It’s a situation Z would like redress, “doin’ songs from when we were kids, you know, done like jazz. What we’ve found is that we can really reach the people that way. People really enjoy the humor in it, you know? Songs they might know from growing up and stuff, done jazz, you know? It’s not like a new concept, ‘cause that’s really what jazz always was, but the new song of that day was like ‘All of You’ by Cole Porter.”

Z (nee Nicolazzo) talks from her cell phone while negotiating traffic in search of a sound check in Puerto Rico, peppering her sentences with “you know” and “I don’t know” and often ending statements with an inquiring lilt. There are several disconnects as she moves in and out of signal range, resulting in some confused banter about Donald Brown (finally recollecting that “Donald knew me from Boston, but I was pretty much a little kid, you know? Yeah, a totally nice guy”), her past visits to Knoxville in the late ’90s while touring with guitarist Al DiMeola, and the bunny theme evident on her website, her production company Bad Bunny Music, etc. (‘pears to be a nickname of some sort, all other detail withheld).

A veteran of Steps Ahead and Wayne Shorter collaborations in the ’90s, Z’s last 12 months have been busy. While combining theory and performance teaching duties at the New School in New York, she’s been on the road with Peter Gabriel’s Growing Up Live Tour (aka Shock the Bunny) and now with her trio, which includes Bobbie Rae on drums and Chris Luard on bass. The trio’s travels began 2004 in Santiago, Chile, and have proceeded to New York, Milan (where she also performed at a Gabriel/Genesis tribute festival), Cincinnati, Louisville and Knoxville, following on to Boston and ultimately Tokyo in July.

Despite the enormous contrast between performing for tens of thousands accompanying a rock icon versus leading a jazz trio for audiences typically two orders of magnitude fewer, Z’s unfazed: “It’s really the same. When you’re playing in a stadium, you tend to focus on whoever’s near you. There may be 10 people in front of you. So, you can’t see the rest of them anyway. So, I try to develop a kind of working relationship with them. Like when I’m on stage, I focus on the first 10 rows really. Even if it’s 50 or 80,000 people. A lot of people, I think, get addicted to crowds, and when their career is going down, which they all will and do, I know some people who feel really offended. I really don’t because I like to keep a balance anyway. I honestly think that a 100-seat jazz club, compared to an 80,000-seat stadium, you ought to put on the same show.”

A similar insouciance is reflected in Z’s attitude toward notorious sacred cows of the jazz literati, including the purity of acoustic jazz (in addition to the jazz trio, she has electronica and lounge bands and has played with smooth jazz icons) and the synthesizer/piano dichotomy. “Not to dis anybody really, but the truth of the matter is the piano is really complex, and a lot of people don’t know how to get all the colors out of a piano... If you really deal with the colorations of the piano, then you really would be interested in the synthesizer ‘cause you’d realize the colors of the synth' ... There’s a lot of subtlety to the touch on a synthesizer especially these days.”

In keeping with her most recent recording from 2003 Moon at the Window (a collection of jazz interpretations of Joni Mitchell tunes) and a new CD presently in preparation and tentatively entitled Kiss of Life (both on Tone Center), Z’s trio draws from the recently as well as the presently contemporary, including Mitchell, Sound Garden, Nirvana, Sade, Steely Dan, Smashing Pumpkins, Seal, Peter Gabriel, and Johnny Cash. Additionally, originals and the occasional jazz standard can be expected to season the performance on Tuesday night.