By ANDREW MCKIE

When Curtis Stigers came on stage on Wednesday night it felt as if someone had upped the wattage in the bulbs. It ought to have been no surprise that Mr. Stigers is a competent turn on stage—this is, after all, a man whose first album sold more than 1.5 million copies. But I hadn’t quite been prepared for the sheer brio with which he tears into a crowd. The course of his career, and the chat I had had with him that morning, had given me the impression that this was a man backing away from the limelight.

And Ronnie Scott’s in Soho in central London, while the city’s best-known jazz club, and a place which has attracted the most stellar figures in the genre, holds no more than 250 people. Though they are jam-packed into the place, it’s hardly stadium rock. Yet, waving his saxophone in front of his body as if he were the lead guitarist in a 1980s hair metal band, Mr. Stigers is somehow contriving to suggest that this tiny venue is built along the lines of Madison Square Gardens.

Of course, Mr. Stigers used to have a lot of hair, and give concerts of that sort. Those who are only familiar with his hits “I Wonder Why” and “You’re All That Matters to Me,” from 1991, probably associate him with middle of the road soft rock ballads of the sort that Michael Bolton made his stock-in-trade. But over a pot of tea at a hotel around the corner from the club where he would be performing later, with his saxophone in a bag beside him, he is a more thoughtful, reserved-looking figure, who looks what he is these days—a classy purveyor of the staples of the Great American Songbook.

He seems slightly sheepish, but only slightly, at the reminder of his enormous earlier pop success. “What that period did, and I’m grateful for,” he says, “was give me a career. It allows me to tour—almost always over here, rather than in America—and work on songs. The older I get as a singer the less interested in being impressive I am and the more interested I am in the song and the story. I mean, I can scat sing and I studied music and there were times in my life when I definitely oversang, but now I want to do less, to serve the song.”

By accident, Mr. Stigers has managed to construct for himself the kind of career that many musicians would envy. As album sales have been hit by downloads and the growth in internet file-sharing, most artists now rely on touring for an income. “I know, I look kind of a genius now, because I decided quite early that I would rather not worry about selling albums but concentrate on selling tickets for shows,” he says. “I don’t like to do too much, though. If I do 100 dates, that would be a big year for me these days. I’ve got an 11-year-old daughter and I hate being away from her. I’m kind of a homebody.”

This decision—which in retrospect looks like a remarkably canny move—may have been partly prompted by his early disagreements with his record label which, after the chart success of his first record (to say nothing of his appearance on the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard,” an album which sold 17 million copies in the U.S. alone), was understandably keen to promote him as a rock/soul singer. But Mr. Stigers’ musical tastes have always been more catholic than those early recordings suggested.

“I love pop music,” he says. “I grew up listening to it on the radio in Idaho and I loved Elton John, Stevie Wonder, all that stuff. I learned to harmonize by the time I was five, but I listened to everything. As a teenager I discovered punk—about three years after the Sex Pistols had already split—and I was mainly a punk rock drummer then. But I’d learned clarinet and saxophone at school, so there was always jazz, because that’s the music for those instruments. I had broad tastes.”

He is cagey, though, about the temptation jazz offers for musicians to sacrifice the audience’s pleasure to virtuosity. “Jazz is a language that’s a little more challenging to learn than pop music or even the blues. All music takes a moment for your ear to turn to, but jazz especially, because there’s that bit more to navigate and know about it,” he says. “I think a great jazz musician, no matter how complicated the music he’s playing is, communicates with an audience. I think if you’d been lucky enough to see someone like John Coltrane, even if what he was doing was technically very challenging, and you didn’t get all of it—not to get all metaphysical about it, but the transcendence of what he did—it’s going to knock you out.”

In concert, Mr. Stigers concentrates on the jazz standards—there is, indeed, some scat, admirably spot on in tone and pitch, during his rendition of “Bye Bye Blackbird”—but what sets him apart is his readiness to expand the repertoire. The wide musical hinterland of his upbringing and his excursions into the world of pop make unexpected appearances; there is a brilliant cover of a Randy Newman number, and while performing his own song “You’ve Got the Fever,” co-written with a bass player from his home town of Boise, there are sly nods not only to Peggy Lee, but even Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears.

“For a long time jazz musicians just didn’t cover popular songs from about the 50s on,” he says. “Because, I guess, rock and roll killed the ability to make a living playing jazz, and they just shunned that whole body of work for decades. Every so often someone would cover ‘Michelle’ by the Beatles or something, because it has jazz chords anyway, but the view was rock music sucked.”

Before that, as he points out, jazz did reinterpret popular songs—particularly show tunes. “Something like ‘My Favorite Things’ or ‘How High the Moon’— they weren’t jazz standards until they became jazz standards,” he says. “When I write, actually, I tend to concentrate on melody and I write on the guitar because I’m not that great of a guitarist; though in Boise, there are great players near where I work, so I just knock on the wall and get them over.”

Mr. Stigers then reimagines these songs, and others by popular songwriters, for a jazz band.

“I have tried many times to write songs with jazz musicians and they always sound like ‘Ba-ba-do-ba-do-ba-doobie-do’; some really angular instrumental thing that you could never write a lyric to. But because my playing on harmonic instruments is pretty basic, it suits me to write something much simpler.

“I’ll write a song that sounds like Neil Young or Loudon Wainwright or Al Green or something and then take it to bits with the band and put it back together as a jazz tune. You’ve got to put yourself out there and make those mistakes, and sometimes it doesn’t work.”

And sometimes, as on Wednesday night, it works very well indeed.

Curtis Stigers plays Ronnie Scott’s tonight and the Edinburgh Jazz Festival on Sunday.

4 out of 5 Stars
* John L Walters (guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 August 2010)

Middle age suits Curtis Stigers better than his long-haired youth. Immaculate in tie, suit and breast-pocket handkerchief, he is smack bang in fashion, making the kind of Blue Note post-bop to which 1960s ad executives sipped martinis. He comes across like an amalgam of Mad Men characters Roger Sterling and Jimmy Barrett.

His band hits its stride immediately with Arthur Crudup’s That’s All Right Mama. John “Scrapper” Sneider’s cool, poised trumpet solo (quoting Gil Evans) is the perfect foil to Stigers’s dry vocal. But Stigers is not a rock singer attempting maturity through jazz. He’s a jazzer who lucked into pop stardom. Which is why he can get under the skin of standards such as The Meaning of the Blues, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning and All the Things You Are, which he dedicates to his wife.

He follows this classy interpretation with Jealous Guy, a moving reinvention sung over swirling trio accompaniment by Matthew Fries (piano), Cliff Schmitt (bass) and drummer Keith Hall doing convincingly Elvin Joneslike “circles of sound” – John Lennon meets John Coltrane. Other postmodern touches include the clever San Diego Serenade (by Tom Waits), a jazzy version of Stigers’s hit You’re All That Matters to Me and the Beatles’ I Feel Fine – a version so “jazz casual” we should be watching it in black and white.

This is vocal jazz as smart and knowing as the best American TV, as Stigers integrates 50 years of jazz modernism in a way that avoids histrionics and supper-club populism. He has a likable authenticity that makes Michael Bublé look like Mad Men’s Pete Campbell. After the encore, Stigers thanks us with a chiselled grin: “You’re the best Monday night audience we’ve ever had!”

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

June 11, 2009

MUSIC REVIEW | CURTIS STIGERS

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

A lean, pop-jazz hipster whose buzz-saw voice, much like that of Tom Waits, slices away glib sentimentality, Curtis Stigers is not the usual sort of act one finds at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, although he has played there before. (The last time was five years ago.) Depending on your definition he is either a rock ’n’ roll jazz man who plays a honking saxophone that echoes his raw, craggy singing or a jazz-influenced rocker.

Either way his renditions of standards by Mr. Waits, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman, to name three songwriters whose work he sang at Tuesday’s opening-night show of a two-week engagement, were tough, rhythmically sneaky reinventions to which his voice imparted an intensely personal stamp.

He got to the slippery bottom of Mr. Newman’s “Real Emotional Girl,” whose narrator, in a tone of wonderment tinged with contempt and guilt, describes the behavior of a girlfriend who cries in her sleep and who

turns on easy

it’s like a hurricane

you would not believe it

you have to hold on tight.

The storyteller knows full well that such intimate details should be kept private, but he can’t help himself.

The angular version Mr. Stigers offered of Elvis Presley’s Sun Records classic “That’s All Right” illustrated the stylistic proximity of rockabilly and cool jazz; the difference is largely a matter of instrumentation and phrasing. Mr. Stigers’s saxophone and John Sneider’s trumpet in a band that included Rick Germanson’s modified bebop piano and Cliff Schmitt on bass took the song into an imaginary jazz cellar of the 1950s.

There is another element in Mr. Stigers’s music about which he clearly harbors some ambivalence and perhaps even embarrassment. “I have a previous life as a pop sensation,” he joked. “But it was the 1840s, and I had a hit record.” That song, “I Wonder Why,” a collaboration with Glen Ballard, which he dutifully tossed off, was a Top 10 single in 1991.

The more recent original songs Mr. Stigers performed — “You’ve Got the Fever” (written with Tom Jensen) and two collaborations with Larry Goldings, “The Dreams of Yesterday” and “I Need You,” discard commercial formulas to explore abject passion, regret and marital ambivalence in stripped-down directness. The self-portrait they evoke is of a restless, thin-skinned dreamer perched on the edge of an emotional volcano.

Curtis Stigers performs through June 20 at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street, Manhattan, (212) 419-9331, algonquinhotel.com.

From The Times

November 7, 2008

Curtis Stigers at Ronnie Scott’s, W1

Clive Davis

His visits to Frith Street are becoming something of an institution, and it is easy to understand why. Of all the singers jostling for attention at the moment, Curtis Stigers possesses by far the most winning stage manner.

If some critics still seem reluctant to forgive him his Nineties pop star past (or for those duets with Penny Smith on the reality TV show Just the Two of Us), the American jazz-blues vocalist simply goes about the business of winning converts among listeners who are not weighed down by preconceptions.

Being an Obama fan (even though he lives in resolutely red-state territory in Idaho) Stigers was in particularly cheerful form on his opening night. The jokes flowed easily, the conversation was relaxed — he seldom misses a chance to praise the virtues of British ale — and his trio was as electrifying as ever.

Although Cliff Schmitt has replaced the long-serving Phil Palombi on the double-bass, the group has lost none of its dynamism. Matthew Fries is one of the most unfussy pianists you are likely to hear, and the drummer Keith Hall’s ability to switch back and forth between bop figures, New Orleans funk and soft soul is little short of remarkable.

Stigers’s knack of unearthing distinguished contemporary material remains one of his main assets. He has an aficionado’s love of jazz, yet his tastes are anything but purist. While he can swing Bye Bye Blackbird as neatly as anyone, within minutes he will be charting an intelligent course through Ron Sexsmith’s Reason for Our Love or turning up the heat on Emmylou Harris’s sultry I Don’t Want to Talk about It Now.

The Nick Lowe song You Inspire Me remains a particular favourite, the trio rerouting the tune down a sensual Poinciana-style pulse. Amid all the joshing about the American election — Stigers exhibited the unrestrained joy of a prisoner who has emerged blinking into the sunlight — the air suddenly grew chilly as he slowed the tempo on Paul Simon’s meditative American Tune. Another world, another era.

Box office: 020-7439 0747, until tomorrow

PARIS — Most Boiseans know Curtis Stigers as a jazz singer, songwriter and community activist who supports environmental and social causes.

He’s been a hometown hero since a string of pop hits took him to national fame in the 1990s. His spotlight in the jazz world shines brighter with each concert and album release.

His latest CD, “Real Emotional,” (Concord, $14.99) took him this week to Paris, where he is a respected jazz artist with a growing international reputation.

Stigers opened the JVC Jazz Festival Paris with a show at New Morning, one of the hottest jazz clubs in the city.

The doors stayed closed past the announced 8 p.m. opening while French radio and television interviewed Stigers and the line outside the club grew.

This was in some ways Stigers’ debut in Paris. He made a successful appearance at the outdoor Paris Jazz Festival in 2006, but this is New Morning. A good performance at this intimate jazz venue carries weight in the music business.

Stigers walked onstage with his trio, who are familiar to Boise residents — Mathew Fries on piano, Phil Palombi on bass and Keith Hall on drums — to polite applause and a few cheers.

The first set started cool but finished hot and sweaty. After a timid merci (”That’s all the French I know,” he said), Stigers spoke less than usual. “I didn’t know what to expect. I tend to talk a lot during a show. That first set just flew by.”

After his first saxophone solo in the opening “That’s Alright Mama,” the audience began to groove with him. By “Fool in Love,” a Joe Jackson tune Stigers arranged with a jazz swing, they were hooked into his rich, smokey, soulful voice.

Few people in Paris knew Stigers’ music before this show, according to French freelance jazz writer and critic Christian Ducasse.

“Now, that will change. I tried to get many of my colleagues to come, but Parisians are very slow to accept. They missed out,” Ducasse said.

It’s been a long road from pop star to jazz artist for Stigers. It’s considered a handicap in the jazz world to have swum in the pop seas, Ducasse said.

“They forget that many others have done the same, Frank Sinatra, for example,” he said.

Stigers has a knack for turning pop songs into jazz gems. It’s ruffled a few critics but has largely won him praise throughout the jazz world. He builds a musical bridge between the pop and jazz genres.

On his set list are songs by singer-songwriters not usually associated with jazz, such as Emmylou Harris, Tom Waits, The Beatles, Paul Simon, Randy Newman and Bob Dylan.

Stigers’ performance in Paris was filled with humor and emotion, especially on the carefully placed and thoughtful jazz ballads.

Stigers and the guys came back for the second set unleashed. The walls had tumbled. Stigers talked freely, receiving laughs and applause for his efforts. The audience understood enough.

Fries’ fingers flew over the keys of the Yamaha piano. Palombi romanced deep tones from his bass all night. Hall’s beats were supple and driving.

Stigers continued to show himself a stylish singer, with the ability to wring pathos, joy and emotional sweep from any ballad or smoky blues tune. For this concert he showed his stuff with a knockout rendition of Harris’ “I Don’t Want to Talk About It Now,” and Newman’s “Real Emotional Girl.”

A near show-stopping moment came with Stigers’ heart-wrenching interpretation of Paul Simon’s politically charged ballad “American Tune.”

In the end, exuberant clapping, whistles and shouts brought him out for an encore. One man shouted out a request for “Crazy Moon” and Stigers obliged.

Then he launched into one of the rare jazz standards of the night, “My Foolish Heart,” which seemed to cast a spell on the room.

Stigers will play in Denmark and Germany this week, then head to Britain before returning home to Boise at the end of October.

Well, there are only two solutions for such wilful blindness. Either you get hold of his most recent albums or you must catch his seven-night residency. Yes, it really is possible to make jazz entertaining without resorting to FM radio Muzak or glib theatrics. Stigers can switch on the bebop pulse as easily as many more fashionable names. What he also possesses, unlike many of his peers, is the rare knack of turning high-class pop material into first-rate vehicles for improvisation.

His cleverly re-harmonised cover of the Beatles I Feel Fine is the obvious example. But there were countless others, fromThats All Right, Mama to the Polices early hit I Cant Stand Losing You. Stigers choreographs everything in ultra-precise fashion, almost down to the last ad lib, yet the arrangements are supple and inventive enough to keep déja vu at bay even when you have heard the material performed live three or four times.

Perhaps the last third of this long, uninterrupted set could have been pared down slightly. But there was genuine anger in Mose Allisons Vietnam-era anthem Everybody Cryin Mercy, while his treatment of Willie Dixons My Babewas irresistibly funky. Stigers possesses the crispest rhythm section imaginable in the pianist Matthew Fries, bassist Phil Palombi and drummer Keith Hall. His concise but pungent saxophone playing is growing in authority too.

As for his own stage manner, he is languid, intelligent and the complete antithesis of a prepackaged, oven-ready pop wannabe. If it all sounds too good be true, lay your prejudices aside and listen for yourself.

- Clive Davis

NEARLY 30 years ago (yes, it is almost that long) the Police began smuggling reggae into the charts with I Can’t Stand Losing You. Curtis Stigers, who has embarked on a lengthy run in Soho, takes the same song and turns it into a jazz number without sacrificing any of its vitality. Only the most assured singers could make that transition.

Slowly but surely, the American singer is beginning to receive the attention he deserves. Old habits die hard, and an awful lot of people still tend to think of him as the shaggy-haired purveyor of platinum-selling blue-eyed soul. That was another era, another universe. The modern-day Stigers is sharper and leaner and bears more than a passing resemblance to Morrissey, while his music has evolved on to another plane altogether.

I cannot think of another vocalist who creates such an exuberant combination of bebop artistry and raw emotion. Chicago’s poet-in-residence, Kurt Elling, has more cachet among purists, perhaps, but he lacks the range and extrovert charm. Stigers, on the other hand, has the potential and charisma to become, well, the thinking person’s Michael Buble.

A fair segment of his audience still expects him to sing the old hits, and he duly obliges with I Wonder Why and You’re All That Matters To Me. Otherwise this was another of his uncompromisingly robust straight-ahead sets, with the pianist Matthew Fries, drummer Keith Hall and bassist Phil Palombi supplying immaculate accompaniment. The trio are as smooth and sleek as you could ask, but when grit and grease and a little R&B are required, the musicians are never at a loss. Stigers also adds some suitably punchy saxophone solos.

The programme hurtled in all directions. Willie Dixon’s My Babe shuffled and danced; Arthur Crudup’s That’s All Right sneaked in a few Elvis-isms. The lovelorn Elvis Costello-Cait O’Riordan ballad, Baby Plays Around, has been a fixture in his repertoire for some years now, and shows no signs of losing its edge. Even so, it was overshadowed by the delicate, moonstruck emotions of Columbus Avenue, one of the original tunes on the new album, I Think it’s Going to Rain Today. Stigers wears his heart on his sleeve without slipping into sentimentality.

Crazy supplied a winning detour into country and western nostalgia. Mose Allison’s Everybody Cryin’ Mercy, written in the Vietnam era, remains as urgent and compelling as ever. Something for everyone, in other words.

On Tuesday at the Jazz Bakery, Stigers, who was accompanied by pianist Matthew Fries, drummer Keith Hall and bassist Phil Palombi, sang an opening set that did not include a single so-called standard, not a single note from Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and the Gershwins. Instead, he turned to songwriters such as Joe Jackson (”Fools in Love”), Elvis Costello (”Baby Plays Around”), Arthur Crudup (”That’s All Right”), Willie Nelson (”Crazy”) and Mose Allison (”Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy”) and added a few of his own numbers (”Columbus Avenue” and “Lullaby on the Hudson”) written with keyboardist Larry Goldings.

It was an intriguing program for a jazz singer, and one that worked as well as it did primarily because Stigers is that and more. With a solid pop-music background, an affinity for the blues and a voice with a buzz-saw cutting edge, he brought vitality to everything he sang.

Stigers topped off an impressive evening with a high-gear rendering of “Billie’s Bounce,” tossing in several great scat passages, including a spot-on impression of a hard-swinging bass solo.

Stigers has been through many musical phases throughout his long career, but has now cast aside his rock ballads for a return to his jazz roots. Matthew Fries (piano), Phil Palombi (double bass), Keith Hall (drums) and Stigers himself strolled onstage besuited in grey pin stripes, as though about to entertain a Las Vegas cocktail party crowd with some Rat Pack numbers, and then kicked off the set with Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I Feel Fine’.

Stigers’ latest album You Inspire Me, (voted Jazz Album of 2003 by the Sunday Times), is a compilation of covers blending jazz with an array of related styles. As the evening progressed we were treated to songs by such diverse artists as Joe Jackson, Nick Lowe, Willie Dixon and “famous jazz band” The Kinks.

In between songs, Stigers regaled the audience with lengthy, humorous anecdotes on the background of the numbers, and he explained that his ‘Swinging Down on 10th and Main’ was a tribute to his early days jamming with legendary pianist Gene Harris in the 1970s. “He taught Boise, Idaho to swing… and that wasn’t easy, believe me.”

As promised, the band came back after the interval fortified with a drink and “playing even better”. The solos became more frequent and intense, and the tempo slowed with a moving rendition of the love song, ‘I Wonder Why’.

Stigers himself was happy, when not singing or playing saxophone, to leave the limelight to his band, before rounding the evening off with an outstanding passage of scat singing and an air double bass solo that no one in the house will forget in a hurry.

All in all it was an exciting, enjoyable and very diverse evening of swinging jazz, performed by consummate masters of the art.”

These are not the best of times for jazz snobs. How are they supposed to cope with the spectacle of Jamie Cullum being nominated for the Brits, or Diana Krall filling the Royal Albert Hall? For cult members, who want to preserve jazz as a beleaguered minority art form, accessible only to the anointed few, all this sudden popularity is a little bewildering. And now there is even worse news for them: Curtis Stigers is making a comeback.

The singer-saxophonist, whose boyish good looks and airbrushed songs once made him an MOR rival to Michael Bolton, has reinvented himself as a bona fide jazz artist. In the early 1990s, Stigers enjoyed astonishing success with the sort of songs people listen to in stadiums while waving cigarette lighters in the air. So there was a certain amount of bemusement when his new record, You Inspire Me, was chosen as this paper’s jazz album of 2003. It was no mirage, no sudden attack of acute 1990s nostalgia. You Inspire Me is a superb record, and Curtis Stigers is a marvellous jazz singer.

Suspicious as ever, the jazz world has not exactly rushed to embrace him. He is, however, slowly building a new following. On New Year’s Eve, he took another step forward when he appeared at one of New York’s premier jazz clubs, the Blue Note. True, he was only in the support slot: most of the crowd queuing on the pavement outside had come to hear the headliner, the pianist Herbie Hancock. Is this another case of a fading musician spotting a bandwagon and hauling himself aboard? Not at all. The truth is that Stigers is returning to his roots. A long time ago, he started out as jazz singer before fate turned him into a pop idol and then dumped him back to earth again. As a teenager in Boise, Idaho, he played all sorts of music, from R&B to punk, but his great passion was jazz and he had the good fortune to be taken under the wing of Gene Harris, the extrovert, blues-tinged pianist who had made his name with the veteran band, the Three Sounds. The youngster eventually set his sights on New York, playing saxophone in blues clubs and paying his dues as a singer with a trio.

After he came to the attention of Arista – the label that gave the world Whitney Houston – he entered the realms of the fairy tale. His debut, self-titled album, released in 1991, became an enormous bestseller. Yet success came at what proved to be a crippling price. Arista, understandably enough, wanted him to continue in the same vein. Stigers, always restless, wanted to try something new. The result was that his next album, Time Was, did not appear for another four years. Stigers found himself locked into a battle of wills with the founder of Arista, Clive Davis – a man who is not used to losing arguments. “It got pretty rough,” Stigers recalls, sitting in a cafe just before his Blue Note soundcheck. “Every song I came in with, the response was: ‘This is all wrong, you’ve got to re-record it.’ It was agony. I’d had this success with my first album, choosing the songs and so on, so I thought he was going to trust me. We went toe-to-toe. I never called him any nasty names, but there were six or seven months where we didn’t meet, and we’ d just send these letters back and forth. He finally realised that I was as stubborn as him.”

The falling-out caused Stigers’s career to stall. For months on end, he sat at home, strumming a guitar and mulling over the impasse. Eventually he left Arista to join Columbia, but it was not until 1999 that he released another album, suitably entitled Brighter Days. By then, however, his initial momentum had fizzled out. He was close to being a has-been. Luckily, he managed to turn the situation to his own advantage. Free of corporate pressures, he was able to consider fulfilling his dream of making a jazz album. Finally, he agreed a deal with an independent company, Concord, home to the saxophonist Scott Hamilton.

Stigers’s first release, Baby Plays Around, duly arrived in 2001, cleverly mixing standards with unorthodox material, including Elvis Costello’s title tune and Randy Newman’s Marie. A club date at Soho’s Pizza Express Jazz Club followed soon afterwards. On what was, as I recall, a fairly quiet night, Stigers delivered a devastating set in front of a modest audience that was a mixture of jazzers, the merely curious and a smattering of diehard fans. The last of these tended to be women, sitting in pairs, staring up at him in silent rapture. It was the first time I had heard him. I was a convert from then on. Elsewhere, he faced rather more resistance. In jazz, singers have usually struggled to be taken seriously by instrumentalists. For a former pop star, the problems were even greater. Stigers grew used to having to fight his corner. “The singer is sort of the red-headed step-child of the jazz world,” he explains. “I can remember one night, years ago, just after I’d first come to New York, I was sitting in the Blue Note with Gene after he’d played a set. They have a late-night jam session there. Gene said: ‘Get up there and sing, Curtis!’ So I went up and gave my name and an alto player who will remain nameless – he was a contemporary of the Marsalis brothers – just looked at me, shook his head and walked off the stage. That’s when I learned. ‘Okay, this is what a singer deals with.’ There is no place for a singer to go. You just have to make your own road.”

Secret Heart, the follow-up to Baby Plays Around, was released two years ago. But You Inspire Me marked the real breakthrough, supplying varied arrangements of the kind of songs most jazz singers would never dream of touching. Joe Jackson’s Fools in Love and Merle Haggard’s Crazy Moon were two of the highlights, while Stigers signed off with a rapt treatment of the Irving Berlin staple, Blue Skies. If the first two albums had generally played safe, You Inspire Me went for broke. Helped by musicians as assured as pianist Larry Goldings, Stigers pulled all the diverse elements together. “It was liberating to get get into the room with musicians who weren’t just jazz heads,” Stigers says. “At one point, when I wanted to use slide guitar, I caught myself asking (drummer) Matt Wilson: ‘Is that still jazz?’ He said: ‘What is jazz anyway?’ Of course, he was right. Jazz is changing every second. One person says it’s this, another says it’s that and it’s totally different. Maybe they’re both right. Or maybe they’re both wrong. Maybe jazz is dead, or maybe it’s as alive as ever.”

After the turmoil of the past 10 years, he exudes a quiet contentment, wryly joking about how he has made the transition “from show business to the music business”. He may no longer have the rock-star trappings, but he never much cared for them anyway, and the important thing is that he is free to sing whatever he wants to sing. This is an artist who, when he played the cabaret room last year at that dowager of Manhattan hotels, the Algonquin, psyched himself up in his dressing room with BB King’s album Live at the Regal. As he ponders his next album, he is sifting through another batch of tunes from way beyond the mainstream. Having fallen in love, long ago, with Al Green’s version of To Sir with Love, he is eager to learn more about the songwriter Don Black. He can even make a convincing case for Paul McCartney’s Silly Love Songs: “You can’t just do Tom Waits and Elvis Costello covers, because everyone else is going to be doing them. You can find the greatest songs just by taking them out of their pop context. By being really corny, you can sometimes be cooler than anything just by finding the beauty in a simple melody. You can find the greatest songs in the strangest places. You’ve just got to turn over the right rock.”

- Clive Davis

Vocally, Mr. Stigers, who is appearing at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street) through Feb. 8, suggests an emotionally chafed hybrid of Elvis Costello and the bebopper Mark Murphy. If his voice is heftier and his phrasing more fluent than Mr. Costello’s, it has the same acidic quiver.

Mr. Stigers also likes to weave Murphyesque scat solos into his performances, but he never carries them to the fantastic outer reaches of expression visited by his prototype. While his backup trio — the pianist Matthew Fries, the bassist Gregory Ryan and the drummer Keith Hall —play muscular straight-ahead jazz, his own tenor saxophone solos spice up the arrangements with a raw rock ‘n’ roll honk.

A native of Boise, Idaho, who bears a striking physical resemblance to the actor Bill Pullman, Mr. Stigers achieved prominence more than a decade ago when he was marketed by Arista Records as a jazzier Billy Joel. Since then he has developed a leaner, edgier style, moved to Concord Records and established a reputation as a connoisseur of songs.

The catholicity of his taste and the refinement of his ear were evident at Tuesday’s opening-night show, which segued from a jumping “You’re Driving Me Crazy” into a hard-swinging “Centerpiece,” then into a hypnotic, tortured rendition of Mr. Costello’s “Baby Plays Around.” On the rockier side of the fence was a hot, punchy rendition of the country-rocker Steve Earle’s “Hometown Blues.” Randy Newman’s bleak “Living With You” made an offbeat but affecting choice as a stunned personal response to 9/11. In almost every instance, Mr. Stigers made a compelling case for the song as a candidate for inclusion in an expanding canon of popular standards.”

- Stephen Holden

“On a lighter note, the famous Oak Room at the Algonquin, usually reserved for literary homages and Cole Porter songs, is playing host to a fresh new face in the contemporary jazz firmament named Curtis Stigers.

Mr. Stigers, who hails from Boise, Idaho, is the musical equivalent of Mr. Deeds on his way to town or Mr. Smith on his way to Washington—a lanky, swinging Jimmy Stewart type headed for stardom. Accompanied by a trio of clean-cut, all-American jazzbos—Matthew Fries on piano, Keith Hall on drums and Gregory Ryan on bass—the saxophone-playing singer looks ready to heat up another Saturday-night dance at Dartmouth. But the music these guys play is a joyful, sophisticated mix of jazz, rock and blues that reaches farther in its roots than any easy-to-peg genre and stretches more horizons than any frat house.

On a standard like “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” Mr. Stigers finds eight new notes to every bar, and scats gently with a keen sense of time before launching into an even hipper rendition of the Jon Hendricks–Harry (Sweets) Edison classic, “Centerpiece.” Honoring Nashville steel guitarist Steve Earle, he swings into a funky “Home Town Blues,” giving it a Tin Pan Alley spin in a style he calls “Irving Berlin meets Hank Williams.” “Swingin’ Down at Tenth and Main” is a country-and-western tribute to one of his early idols, the driving pianist Gene Harris. He can also handle an indigo-tinged ballad like “My Foolish Heart” with a heartbreaking, understated vibrato, and turn Randy Newman’s “Living Without You” into a surprising anthem for a wounded post-9/11 New York. Although he looks like he was born with a straw in his mouth, he brings a unique and definitive sensibility to everything he sings that often melds two or three styles together simultaneously.

Although his movie-star good looks and sweet crooning style may be the stuff bobby-soxers drool over, his horn playing is less impressive. There’s some alarming evidence that he’s been unwisely influenced more by the nasty honking of Acker Bilk and Kenny G. than by the gorgeous obligatos of Stan Getz and Scott Hamilton. His sax is perfunctory, not warm or misty. Still, there’s a lot to admire in a cool cat so lacking in pretense that he can interrupt a particularly passionate drum solo to exclaim, “Good gracious!” Because he’s handsome and hip in the spotlight, staring dreamily into space while clutching his horn and projecting the image of a lonely little boy lost, romantic comparisons to the young Chet Baker are tempting, but flawed.

It’s doubtful that Curtis Stigers has ever ingested anything stronger than rhubarb pie.”

“In his Oak Room debut, Curtis Stigers blends old standards, dating back to the ’30s and ’40s, with “new” standards by such contemporary composers as Steve Earle, Randy Newman and Barry Mann. After more than a decade as a busy pop performer, the singer-musician-composer is crossing over to the elusive terrain of jazz vocalist. A singer with the kind of rusty twang associated with Hoagy Carmichael, Stigers hits the songbook trail with an amiable approach and puts his aud into a pleasurable, finger-snapping groove.

Stigers picks up the tenor sax to accent some of his gritty excursions into jazz and blues. He plays with earthy vigor and a biting tone. “Centerpiece” is a classic Basie romp by Harry “Sweets” Edison and Jon Hendricks, and Stigers lays it in a romping frame.

There is an appreciative nod to pianist Gene Harris, Stigers’ mentor, who died two years ago. As a young clarinet player, Stigers hooked up with Harris in Boise, Idaho, jazz haunts. An original, dedicated to Harris, “Swinging Down at Tenth and Main,” is a flavorful salute to backroom jam sessions. Piano support from Matthew Fries is a distinct asset.

Victor Young’s “My Foolish Heart” is given a sensitive interpretation, with the verse neatly tacked on to the closing refrain. The reverse works as a poignant postscript to a classic torch song. The film theme is featured on his new Concord CD, “Secret Heart.” Newman’s “So Hard Livin’ Without You” is crooned with whispering melancholy.

The evening’s closer found Stigers hitting the hip Nat King Cole trail with “I Keep Going Back to Joe’s,” another torcher about an empty table in the corner. The slate is a carefully spaced program of blues and ballads, and Stigers’ entry into Harry Connick/John Pizzarelli terrain is most welcome.

Reed instruments and drums are becoming frequent sounds in the intimate environs of the Algonquin Hotel, with recent appearances by Stacey Kent and tenorist Jim Tomlinson, and a forthcoming run by Peter Cincotti and his swinging sidemen. For wintry nights, the Oak Room is offering a heady menu of warm jazz.”