Rock and pop singers have wildly different reasons for tackling the great American songbook: irony (Bryan Ferry); homage (Joni Mitchell); over-confidence (Robbie Williams); affection (Linda Ronstadt); sheer desperation (Rod Stewart). Boz Scaggs, the great singer best known for 1970s hits such as Lowdown and Lido Shuffle, seems to have turned to standards - songs such as Sophisticated Lady and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered - with a mix of admiration and humility.
Dressed, like half his audience, in an open-necked shirt and jeans, he commands the tiny stage accompanied by double bass, drums, saxophone and piano. He kicks off with a brisk version of I Didn't Know What Time It Was, followed by It Could Happen to You. Then backing singer Monet walks on, Scaggs straps on a guitar and pianist Paul Nagel switches to Rhodes for a version of Lowdown. We haven't exactly switched dimensions, but we're a long way from Tin Pan Alley. Then it's back to songs such as But Beautiful, the title track of his new album of jazz standards, and But Not For Me, where Monet shows she can sing jazz, too.
This is pretty much the pattern for the whole show: a couple of jazz songs and then a blues or rock-based song from the Scaggs back catalogue, given a fresh acoustic spin by the talented band. Monet takes the lead for What's New. Eric Crystal's alto adds a nice timbre to a creative arrangement of All or Nothing at All.
Scaggs's blues-rock repertoire demonstrates his way of wrapping his voice around a melody to ensure that it is relaxed, rhythmically sure and highly musical: what you might call "jazzy". But jazz standards - many of them show tunes from the 1930s and 1940s - inhabit the harmonic language of a different time; their cyclical verse structures and broader melodic shapes require a different kind of freedom. So Scaggs can sound a little inhibited or over-awed: on Bewitched, he seems to be holding each line with tweezers, as if it were the delicate component of a pocket watch.
He sounds more comfortable on originals such as I Just Go, with its ambient haze of acoustic guitar and piano, and the closing number, Call That Love, where the groove between Jason Lewis's drums and John Shifflett's bass provides a spacious platform for Scaggs's vocals and some tasty, to-the-point guitar licks. Scaggs approaches the idiom with a generous spirit, but I suspect that jazz has more to offer his music than the other way around.
