E-Mail This Article to a Friend Man out of time Dave Frishberg’s deep nostalgia, plus Branford Marsalis BY JON GARELICK

It’s difficult to come up with apt contemporary comparisons to describe the 70-year-old songwriter, singer, and pianist Dave Frishberg, who’ll be coming to the Jewish Theatre of New England next weekend. Among living songwriters, the closest analogues to his mix of satiric humor and personal reflection would be Randy Newman and Loudon Wainwright III. You could also stretch back to the ’60s social satire of Tom Lehrer. But that’s about it. Frishberg’s musical lineage isn’t out of folk and rock; it’s a direct descendant of the Great American Songbook tradition of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, the Gershwins, and Jerome Kern. He’s also an unfailingly hip jazz pianist (among his more notable gigs, he played in the early-’60s band of Al Cohn and Zoot Sims). My favorite story about his sui generis status comes from a local club booker. After weak receipts for a Frishberg show, the booker’s clueless boss complained, "We’ll never have anyone like him again." To which the booker replied, "There is no one like him."

"I feel pretty alienated," the soft-spoken Frishberg allows when I reach him at his home in Portland, Oregon. "I think I’m alone in this little musical world that I made up myself." That world includes songs like "I’m Hip," "My Attorney Bernie," and "Peel Me a Grape," some of which have been recorded by the likes of old-school artists Blossom Dearie, Anita O’Day, Cleo Laine, Jackie Cain, Roy Kral, and, of more recent vintage, Al Jarreau and Diana Krall. Frishberg also wrote the Schoolhouse Rock favorite "I’m Just a Bill." His most recent CD — Do You Miss New York? (Arbors), recorded in December 2002 at the Penthouse at Jazz at Lincoln Center, with Frishberg singing to his own piano accompaniment, offers a good selection of old and new — including the fax-frazzled relationship song "Quality Time," the movie-music satire "Jaws," the harassed-neurotic anthem "I Was Ready," the political satire "My Country Used To Be," and more-tender humorous nostalgic evocations like the title track and the openly wistful Frishberg standard (with music by Alan Broadbent) "My Heart’s Desire."

The newish "The Hopi Way" lays out the Frishberg ethos. Over what he calls a "college fight song 6/8" march, he sings the introductory verse in his gravelly tenor: "I’m from the old school/The proper and the prude school/Where it’s stiff upper lip/stay quietly hip/And never reveal what you feel/As opposed to the new school/The recently tattoo’d school/Where it’s in your face/And crank up the bass/And climb to the top of the pile/I prefer a much lower profile." He runs through a litany of new-generation affectations ("I could wear one small gold earring/Make phone calls while steering") and a small encyclopædia of songwriting and pianistic devices before concluding with mock exasperation, "I could succinctly say it/Two short words convey it/But clearly I can not okay it/That’s vulgarity . . . and it wouldn’t be the Hopi way." The latter comes replete with a four-square pow-wow of "Indian" open chords and, in the finale, percussion on a Quaker Oats container tom-tom. It’s the kind of witty musical and lyric surprise that Frishberg excels at.

"The Hopi Way" came from a recurring joke of Frishberg’s. "Things like, ‘Would you like some mint jelly for that lamb chop?’, and I’d say, ‘That’s not the Hopi way.’ " Frishberg doesn’t know where the phrase comes from — "As far as I know, I invented it" — though he imagines an old Western with someone like Anthony Quinn playing an Indian chief, "stiff with integrity, and they propose something to this Indian chief that’s a little off color and he replies, ‘That’s not Hopi way.’ "

A Frishberg song tends to go through constant revision, even after it’s been recorded. He began singing "The Hopi Way" a couple of years ago at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, where, he says, "it received what I call ‘puzzled applause.’ " He narrowed the focus. "The second verse was very personal. It was a different person talking. So my lyric revisions were of that realm — of trying to make sure the second and first verse sound like they’re the same person." There were similar musical revisions as well, including the Quaker Oats box. "I found that really clarified it more, instead of rapping on the piano, like I used to do."

The political "My Country Used To Be" was written 10 years ago as an assignment for public radio about the economic straits the country was in; it has since been updated to reflect the war in Iraq, with references to "weapons of mass distraction." "I liked the idea so much of ‘My Country Used To Be,’ and I was so upset about this war thing going on, that I just kind of revamped the song so that it would deal with this instead." He calls it "controversial in a lightweight way," though he says that some people have written complaining letters to Arbors, including one person who returned the CD saying, "I won’t have it in my home." Frishberg allows, "I used to deny that it was political and say it was just ‘the blues.’ But after a few months of reflection about the song, there’s no sense in being coy about it: it is political. I think the war in Iraq is a disaster, and it gives me the blues."

"Heart’s Desire" is another matter. The most covered of Frishberg’s songs, the ballad was written as advice to his young sons after his divorce from their mother. After the opening light-hearted encouragement comes a qualifying verse: "But if you seek your heart’s desire/Your heart may break/That’s the risk your dreams require/The chance you take/The choice you make." That and the following-up "Soon enough/The seasons start to slip away/So seize the day" ground the song in autobiographical truth that dispels easy sentiment or "follow your bliss" clichés.

"Alan Broadbent gave me the melody, and he gave me the title, too. I loved it, and I liked the title, and I liked the concept that I was trying to do — talk to my children. But to fit it into Alan’s melody was very tough. I had a two-week gig at a ski resort in Colorado, and I took Alan’s music up there with me, and I worked every day on it. It took me the whole two weeks. I really put in a lot of hours on that one."

In a 1998 Atlantic profile, Francis Davis touched on Frishberg’s "The Dear Departed Past" (available on the 1984 Fantasy release Live at Vine Street) to suggest that, as Frishberg had put it, he was "pathologically hung up" on the old ways. "Three cheers for the champs of yesterday!", goes the song. "Jack Dempsey, John McGraw,/Joe Louis, Sammy Baugh/. . . Here’s to teams that moved away/from disenfranchised towns/the old St. Louis Browns/the Minneapolis Lakers/that’s when basketballs had laces." The thing is, much of the sports trivia that Frishberg cites comes from a time before even he was born, and the song asks, "Can one feel a real nostalgia for a time and place one never even knew?"

Frishberg tells me that he wishes he "were back writing in the ’30s and ’40s for the movies . . . That’s where my talent lies, in that kind of material, the pop songs of those days." If he’s so pathologically nostalgic, then, and he were writing in the ’30s and ’40s, mightn’t he be nostalgic for . . . "Victor Herbert? . . . That’s probably true, but I do have my standards of what’s really good. And I think that it all took place in the days of Johnny Mercer and Jerome Kern and the great Broadway composers. I think that’s when it all took place for me."

IN THE ’70s AND ’80s, jazz composers like David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Oliver Lake, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Roscoe Mitchell were building on the ’60s free-jazz revolution and changing the music’s vocabulary. That explains part of the heat the Marsalis brothers took as they came to dominate jazz with a sound that consolidated past achievements rather than extending them. You could say that Branford Marsalis, who played an extended gig with his band at the Regattabar after Christmas, is the new face of the mainstream. If so, the mainstream couldn’t be in better hands.

Marsalis avoids the extremes of abstraction favored by more out players. He likes blues and song forms and clearly articulated rhythms. His latest CD on Marsalis Music, Romare Bearden Revealed, extends from his own compositions to his brother Wynton’s "J Mood" to Jelly Roll Morton’s "Jungle Blues" and James P. Johnson’s "Carolina Shout." But that was a special project, with guest stars including Wynton. These days, when he plays live with his own band, his passion seems to be the Coltrane of A Love Supreme, which he has recorded in its entirety and which just goes to show how far left the mainstream has moved.

He introduced drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts’s "The Impaler" by saying, "We’ve been playing it for five years and have never played it right yet." Sure enough, Marsalis himself triggered a false start, cracked up the whole band, and then flew into the angular, boppish tune with up-tempo ferocity, playing repeated mantra-like huffing phrases that preached and wailed, bending at the knees and dipping his tenor sax, then sending it shooting up in the air for blues cries. At times, the brilliant Watts overwhelmed the details in Branford’s playing, but this is a great band. Joey Calderazzo is as adept as his boss at creating drama with rhythmically varied lines that sustain narrative tension, and bassist Eric Revis holds a firm center and plays tasteful, melodic solos.

This was the 7 p.m. Sunday show (there had been a previous one at 3), and it was sold out. In a jazz world where the passing of the old guard is increasingly lamented in the search for new headliners, it was encouraging to find a healthy, all-ages crowd drawn to such uncompromising, passionate music — and cheering for it.

Dave Frishberg plays the Jewish Theatre of New England, 333 Nahanton Street in Newton, next Saturday, January 17, at 8 p.m. and next Sunday, January 18, at 3 p.m., with comedian Joel Chasnoff opening; call (617) 965-5226.