Legendary Jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis is teaming up with Joe Pizzarelli for "Straighten Up and Fly Right: A Nat King Cole Tribute." The show takes place on Saturday, January 21 at GA State's Rialto Center for the Arts. Dr. Gordon Vernick will do a Pre-Show Talk about the piano stylings of 1950’s pop icon, Nat King Cole.
Cole broke the pop barrier with his smoky, smooth vocals, amassing a huge number of solid hits right after his first “Straighten Up and Fly Right” soared up the charts in 1943. As a singer, he was called “the best friend a song ever had,” but he was essentially a jazz performer at heart. Even those later tracks crafted for pop charts belie a piano technique, vocal phrasings and on-the-mark orchestration that are indebted to his early roots in jazz. Lewis and Pizzarelli have crafted a tribute to the titan of fifties vocal pop, from his hits along with those singular tracks of sophisticated cool jazz that have influenced their own careers.
Dr. Vernick is an accomplished author, musician and head of Georgia State University’s Jazz Studies program and the Rialto Jazz for Kids education program for elementary and middle-school-aged students throughout metro Atlanta. The pre-show talk is free and open to the public.
Check out Lewis's interview with Jamal Ahmad below:
