Jazz Reviews : A Spirited Hendricks Goes It Alone at St. Mark’s

The name of Jon Hendricks has been associated so long with vocal groups of various sizes and shapes that it comes as a surprise to find him, at St. Mark’s in Venice (where he opened Wednesday and closes Saturday), doing much of the show as a solo singer.

That he is able to pull it off, sans quartet, attests to the power of his personality. Technically he is no virtuoso, but then neither was Louis Armstrong; like Satchmo, he has a rare combination of personal timbre, a natural beat, and a strong undercurrent of humor, often reflected in his scatting.

Opening with a blues based on age-old lyrics, he switched to an affecting ballad mood on “Everything Happens to Me,” then traded fours with his able saxophonist Noel Jewkes in a wordless workout on “Get Me to the Church on Time.”

The backup group seems oddly assorted: Jewkes looks like a maitre d’; the brilliant pianist, 27-year-old Benny Green, still resembles a high school junior; the drummer, Eddie Moore, looks like everybody’s grandpa, and only Larry Gales is your prototypal musician, bowing the bass with his usual flair. Collectively this disparate characters keep the bandstand jumping, except on the ballads, when Jewkes switches to flute to support Hendricks’ fittingly tender mood on such songs as “September of My Years.”

Patrick Tuzzolino, the room’s dinner-hour pianist, jumped on the bandstand to show his scat credentials as he and Hendricks swapped riffs on a Thelonious Monk line. For the last three numbers, Hendricks’ charming, longtime partner Judith joined her husband for three of their familiar hits, while Jewkes helpfully played one of the missing vocal parts on tenor sax.

The show is worth catching if only for those amazing two-handed, parallel-line solos by Benny Green and for the overall spirit we have learned always to expect from Hendricks. He has been offering variations on some of these themes since Dave Lambert and Annie Ross flanked him and America still liked Ike, yet somehow they never grow stale.