You Don't Know Jack Jones

The biggest disclosure announced at Apple's press conference on Tuesday had nothing to do with software (the new edition of iTunes) or hardware (the new line of iPods). Rather, it was Steve Jobs's admission that he listens to Dean Martin, even if he seemed somewhat self-conscious about it. "I didn't really want to tell you that I had Dean Martin on my iPod," he told the crowd in San Francisco. Embarrassed or not, it was pleasing to hear that the company that pioneered the modern system of digital music distribution — undoubtedly the wave of the future for the music business — at least acknowledges that the youth-oriented pop of the last few generations isn't the only kind on Apple's mind.

A few hours later, the ghost of Dean Martin was summoned without reservation, thank you very much, when one of the underappreciated Italian crooner's immediate disciples, the singer Jack Jones, opened a two-week run at the Algonquin on Tuesday with a video presentation. For about 10 minutes, the Oak Room became the Plasma Room when the 70-year-old Mr. Jones and Dean Martin were shown in a clip from the mid-'60s doing a swinging treatment of "The Donkey Serenade," the biggest hit for Mr. Jones's father, the singer and actor Allan Jones. What followed was essentially a show and a half, with Mr. Jones performing at least 20 songs, totaling more than 90 minutes.

Putting operetta into swing time is a familiar Jones gambit: He loves to play with time signatures, not just making classic ballads up-tempo, as jazz musicians and singers have traditionally done, but transforming "Just One of Those Things" into a jazz waltz. Familiar also is the way that he opens and closes his show, with two big, dramatic, and autobiographical anthems, "A Song for You" and "Here's to Life," both cast from the same mold as Sinatra's "My Way," not to mention every song ever sung by Barbra Streisand. Yet Mr. Jones delivers them so convincingly and with so much musicality that he made me forget whatever it is I normally find annoying about these odes to oneself. Then, too, he subverts charges of egocentrism with one-liners like "I couldn't be narcissistic — I'm too old for me."

Mr. Jones is the youngest of the great old-time interpreters of the Great American Songbook, and as such he reaped the benefit of prolonged exposure to the iconic masters of the art, absorbing elements from all of them: Sinatra's attention to lyrical detail, Tony Bennett's matchless dynamics, Mel Tormé's harmonic wizardry, Joe Williams's blues-saturated energy. They're all there. He is a singer of amazing vocal power and the intellect to put that power to the best possible use. Like Tormé did, he can also be as playful and jazzy as he wants without sacrificing the integrity of the lyric. He will frequently hammer a familiar sequence of words-and-music into a whole new rhythmic pattern, a device that both Tormé and Mr. Jones could have learned from Ella Fitzgerald. It's almost like he's scatting with the written words.

There are moments when one suspects that Mr. Jones has chosen his approach to a word or a note based on what best showcases his voice, rather than what best serves the song. But they are comparatively rare. Mr. Jones tosses in stratospheric head tones, surprisingly on the blues-inflected "Baby Don't You Quit Now," and it sounds as if he could fill the Hollywood Bowl (not to mention the Oak Room) with sound. But he places equal emphasis on the value of emphasizing an idea by expressing it as quietly as possible. At the end of "What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life," he sings the words "summer/winter/fall" a cappella, as flatly monotonic as possible. This has the effect not only of conveying the passage of the seasons more dramatically, but of heightening the contrast with the ending line, in which he shoots for a stratospheric 747 of a note. His soul and his voice are, for the most part, in perfect sync.

Mr. Jones plays with his own hits, such as "Wives and Lovers," not only by making them sound like polytonal bonus tracks from Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," but by employing his antic wit: He acknowledges that this Burt Bacharach-Hal David waltz has been accused of chauvinism (now, even that term sounds dated), so he knowingly points that out before someone else can bring it up, and adroitly sidesteps the charge by throwing in the aside, "Can you imagine me singing this to Gloria Steinem?" When someone cried out for "The 'Love Boat' Theme," he responded by noting that he's made millions for charity by promising not to sing it — but went ahead and did it anyway in a sophisticated, reharmonized treatment with vocal foghorn effects. This is called having your cake and eating it — telling us you realize it's a piece of junk before confounding our expectations and making it sound great.

Of course, the most moving number of the night was not junk at all; it was Brian Wilson's "God Only Knows." Now, you might think, to paraphrase the title of another "Pet Sounds" classic, that Mr. Jones just wasn't made for these times. But no. He could have easily sounded like an old-timer condescending to a younger audience; instead, he gave Mr. Wilson the respect most Oak Room singers give Jerome Kern. Rather than a sigh of romantic resignation, he made the song a secular prayer, emphasizing "God" rather than "only."

So why is it that Mr. Jones has never recorded this gem? For that matter, why is it that he hasn't made a new album in 10 years? And why is it that most of the classic LPs he made in the 1970s and '80s have never been made available on CD? Maybe it's because the gatekeepers of the media world, the Steve Jobses out there, still don't have enough respect for Mr. Jones and the classic American pop music that he represents. God only knows, he still has chops he hasn't even used yet.

wfriedwald@nysun.com