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 Adair 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. Adair 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 /TiVo