Moments to Remember in Bloomington, MN

Jazz pianist
Beegie Adair
's
Moments to Remember
is her version of what
Barry Manilow
did on his CD
The Greatest Songs of the Fifties
. Like
Manilow
,
Adair
is a stylist who applies her musical approach to different sorts of thematic collections of familiar pop tunes, whether the songs of
George Gershwin
or
Elvis Presley
. Here, she has chosen 13 pop hits from the '50s for her usual treatment, which is to say, piano trio performances on which she improvises on and embellishes the well-recognized melodies, but never veers away from those tunes very far. What distinguishes this from the kind of cocktail jazz one would hear in a lounge is simply that
has a stronger musical personality than those anonymous tinklers. Still, jazz fans should realize that the approach is much closer to, say,
Marian McPartland
than it is to any real jazz innovator such as
Bud Powell
.
is not using the songs as platforms for her own excursions; like the pop singers such as
Johnny Mathis
Tony Bennett
, and
Rosemary Clooney
who made them hits, she is applying her style while largely coloring within the lines of the songwriters' intentions. ~ William Ruhlmann