At Sunday’s Jazz at the Albright-Knox, singer Barbara Jean kept mentioning the heat.
“Good thing we’ve got a breeze,” she said, once.
Once, finishing a song, she said simply: “The heat!”
Actually, it wasn’t that bad.
Over the decades this long-running festival has been rolling, we have enjoyed afternoons far hotter than this one. Kicked back on Shakespeare Hill — the home of the festival this summer — listening to Bobby Jones’ robust piano solos, I found myself thinking the day was downright pleasant.
Barbara Jean has a simple, appealing style that I like. We’ve all heard singers who overengineer things, scatting excessively, making annoying speeches or wigging out. She was not guilty of any of this.
Her no-muss, no-fuss approach gave grace to a delightful series of standards, or close-to- standards: “East of the Sun,” “Midnight Sun,” “One Note Samba,” “Almost Like Being in Love,” the beautiful “Blue Moon,” a straightforward and lovely “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”
Jones filled in with energetic and creative solos. Sometimes his right hand traced single-note runs, sometimes he basked in big chords. I never heard him sound better.
Everyone seemed to be enjoying himself. Cameron Kane, on bass, threw his heart into his solos, and the audience responded with big applause. Danny Hull, on drums, was alert and involved as he always is. (Hull, playing with his shirt open, set new standards for Jazz at the Albright-Knox informality.)
Bruce Johnstone, on sax, was a special treat. His strong, expressive, laid-back style shone in “Three and One” — a sax man’s number, and Johnstone made the most of it. A melodic player, Johnstone gave a great swing to “September in the Rain,” a song associated with Lester Young.
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