The Golden Age Of Pop

It seems a shame Tony DeSare is performing with the Fort Smith Symphony in April, not December. His version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" -- with the roles altered enough to make it politically acceptable -- just might be the sexiest thing on YouTube.

DeSare, whose piano and vocals have earned him three top 10 Billboard jazz albums and guest spots on "The CBS Early Show," NPR, "A Prairie Home Companion" and "The Today Show," gives credit to the music he chooses to perform -- songs from the "golden age" of pop as defined by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole.

"What we do isn't really jazz," he says of the music he plays with his trio and will perform April 13 with the Fort Smith Symphony. "It's pop music when jazz was the vocabulary. What I do comes from the era of three-minute songs that are highly arranged, much more like pop music, but the structure of it and harmonics of it tend to pull more from the world of jazz. I call what I do 'classic pop'."

His program with the symphony includes songs by Irving Berlin, John Lennon, the BeeGees, Ray Charles and Billy Joel, along with a piece or two he's written. Often, DeSare has reinterpreted the music -- turning "How Deep Is Your Love?" into a "beautiful, lush bossa nova," he says by way of example -- just as did the musicians in whose footsteps he follows. "Frank (Sinatra) and his peers were song interpreters, an artform mostly gone by the wayside now," he says. "I enjoy taking what I think is a really nice song and reinterpreting it."

DeSare's earliest musical influence was his father, who "would come home from work pretty much every day and play guitar for hours." That was the life that DeSare expected for himself, too, as he pursued pre-med studies in college. "But music just kept pulling me in its direction," and he decided to try his luck in New York City for a couple of years after he got his undergraduate degree, thinking he could go back to school if he failed. "I think that ship has pretty much sailed now," he says with a laugh.

In fact, his course was set shortly after he moved to New York in 1999, when he was cast as the star of a long-running Broadway tribute, "Our Sinatra." Since then, he's composed for film and television in addition to playing with his quartet in "major jazz rooms," with his big band in concert halls like Jazz at Lincoln Center and with orchestras across the country, which he says are the best gigs of all. "Having live strings to back you up? That's my favorite."

"Tony is a respected name in the symphonic concert world, so booking him was only a matter of when," says John Jeter, music director of the Fort Smith Symphony. "He is highly regarded in the field and is known for his wonderful performances."

And since "Tony is performing some of the most well-known pieces of pop music that feature piano and vocals, we thought we would do the same on the first half, performing some of the most popular orchestral pieces in the repertoire," Jeter adds: Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture; Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 1; Berlioz's Hungarian March; Offenbach's Barcarolle from "The Tales of Hoffman"; and Tchaikovsky's March Slave.

"The concert really does have something for everyone," Jeter enthuses.

NAN What's Up on 04/07/2019