Sullivan Fortner, piano, and Kyle Athayde, vibraphone
‘Tea For Two’ (Sullivan Fortner Music)

Just how tall is Sullivan Fortner? It’s difficult to tell with most piano players — you almost never see them fully standing up. Even when Mr. Fortner walks out of the green room and onto the bandstand, he’s slightly hunched over, with the stance of a man much older than 35. At the same time he seems to approach the piano almost as if he’s sneaking up to it, with a mischievous glint in his eye, not appearing to be someone about to go to work but like a kid anticipating playing with a “brand new choo choo toy,” as Nat Cole would have sung.

Sullivan Fortner, who just performed a memorable one-night, two-set stand at Dizzy’s Club, has played on about a dozen albums in the recent pandemic era. Only one of them can be considered his own project, “Tea For Two,” an exceptional set of duets with the vibraphonist Kyle Athayde. The twosome set the tone with the album opener, a highly playful treatment of “The Way You Look Tonight,” a tune normally taken a bit more seriously. In most of these duets, Mr. Fortner lets Mr. Athayde take the lead as far as the melody goes, but still they divide up the fun fairly evenly.  

“The Way You Look Tonight” starts with Jerome Kern’s equally famous countermelody — a series of two-note phrases that rise progressively higher — which Mr. Fortner uses to set up Mr. Athayde’s entrance with the central tune. Then they’re off and running, first skewering the medley this way and that before getting into a harmonic romp that almost seems as much of a dance — the two players create a sensation of movement in physical space — as a purely sonic experience.

Indeed, those notions of playtime and terpsichore are so prevalent that the third number, “I Won’t Dance,” also by Jerome Kern, starts to seem ironic even as they start to play it. Not dance? Ha, too late for that. Two bars into the tune and they’re already dancing all over the floor.

In between, there’s the album’s most satisfying ballad, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which starts with Mr. Athayde’s poignant rendering of the verse in a way that suggests that he learned the song from Tony Bennett.

The sets at Dizzy’s, by Mr. Fortner and his Trio with bassist Tyrone Allen and drummer Kayvon Gordon, were also filled with wit and wonder.  Among other selections, he played a blues medley of “Davidson County Blues” by DeFord Bailey, the African American performer in the Grand Ol’ Opry, and his own “Nine Bar Tune.” Somewhere in the mix, there was also Woody Shaw’s “Organ Grinder,” and he also offered an engaging mid-tempo “Confirmation” in honor of the birthday of a modern jazz piano pioneer, Bud Powell. 

The centerpiece has a French title — one that I shall not attempt to replicate here — inspired, he said, by his half-French girlfriend. Set in 3/4 time, it had the feeling of a 1950s film theme that could have been written by John Lewis and played by the Modern Jazz Quartet.  

The album also includes two less frequently heard slices of Ellingtonia, the upbeat “Jump For Joy” and the tranquil “Warm Valley,” and it gets most serious with highly intimate readings of Guy Woods’s “My One and Only Love” and Jule Styne’s “People.” Each begins as a lovely solo — piano on the first, vibes on the second — before the other joins and transforms each into an even more beautiful duo. 

At Dizzy’s, Mr. Fortner concluded with Arlen’s “My Shining Hour” and Monk’s “Crepuscule with Nellie” before trailing off into a spontaneous mix of blues, boogie, and stride that also segwayed between Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Use to Be” and the Warner Brothers cartoon theme, “Merrily We Roll Along.” Such is the power of Sullivan Fortner that he can make us believe both things at once.