Reinventing Jazz
Vocalist and composter Theo Bleckmann defies expectations of the genre Like serious jazz players, vocalist and composer Theo Bleckmann is adept at improvisation, although he does not scat like trad jazz singers; the sonically shape-shifting music created by the onetime art student and his flexible backing combo lives somewhere between vocal jazz, cabaret and ambient pop. His sober reading of Stephen Sondheim’s normally jaunty “Comedy Tonight” (from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”) is an illuminating demonstration of how he upends expectations, as well as his knife-edged skill at extracting complex feeling from a seemingly...
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