Peter Cincotti plays the standards, but gets his biggest kick out of performing his own material, he tells Ray Comiskey
Nowadays there's a bunch of hyphenates - singer-pianists - around, all busily doing some high-profile, concert-hall chewing away at the dog-eared pages of the Great American Song Book. It wasn't always so. Time was when the hyphenate's natural habitat was more obscure; sometimes a special hyphenate talent such as Shirley Horn could be found in jazz clubs, but that's another story. Mostly it was upmarket restaurants and swish hotels, enough for a cult following and maybe the indifferent patronage of the well-heeled, a nostalgia niche for the middle-aged. And there, for years, arch-hyphenates such as Bobby Short kept the flag flying for an endangered species. Hardly the basis for the current crossover and concert hall popularity, you would think. Wrong.
The first stirrings came about a decade ago, when singer-pianist Harry Connick Jnr - a true hyphenate if ever there was one - popped up, freshly scrubbed, ingratiatingly wholesome and young, and staked a claim to the repertoire of Ol' Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra. All of a sudden standards and singer-pianists seemed like the coming thing again.
It didn't last. Connick jumped back into his time machine, put it in forward gear and reinvented himself with more contemporary material for that perennially bigger part of the music market that was just beginning to grope its way into sexual experience. As far as standards and hyphenates were concerned, there matters rested until a few more emerged to thumb the pages of the Great American Song Book. Whether it was the grey dollar or the kids' cash was beside the point, though it was probably more of the former than the latter; what mattered was that suddenly it had big punter appeal.
Naturally, the ones who have made the biggest impact emerged from jazz. First came Diana Kraal, trained as a jazz pianist but with a throwaway, slurred vocal delivery, glamorous good looks and youth. It's taken only a year or so for a couple more to appear. Britain's Jamie Cullum and Manhattan's Peter Cincotti share a similar combination of attributes to garnish their appeal, enough for a trend, if hardly a phenomenon yet.
And they're so young. Cullum is in his 20s. Cincotti got there only last year. But why they would go for the music of a generation that reached its interpretive apogee a half-century ago with the likes of Billie Holiday, Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald seems a mite perverse, until you remember Kraal, Cullum and Cincotti come from a jazz idiom to which the work of Porter, Kern, Arlen, Gershwin and the rest is meat and drink. It doesn't explain it all, but it helps.
Sinatra and the rest were older when they established themselves as the yardstick by which any subsequent interpreters of this music are measured. They had lived and brought a lifetime of experience to the lyrics they sang, which is something Cullum and Cincotti, in particular, have to acquire - and, despite their undoubted talent, it shows.
But of the three, the almost indecently unflappable, level-headed and ineffably courteous Cincotti may prove to be the most talented. His vocal equipment and piano playing are arguably better than the others. He also seems more ambivalent about being seen just as a singer of standards.
"Even though to many that's how it may appear," he says, "I don't look at it like that at all. It's interesting, because my first record" [Peter Cincotti, issued on Concord last year, topped the Billboard jazz charts] "is the only thing that's really out there for people to judge me, which is fine, because that's how it is. I was just starting. But throughout my whole life I was always changing and a lot of the people who buy the record aren't aware of what happened before it.
"Being born and raised in Manhattan, I grew up going to rock concerts at the Garden, going to jazz clubs, to Broadway shows. It wasn't always standards or anything. It wasn't always jazz." He adds that if he'd made his first record two years earlier it would have been very different and that everyone's opinion of him would probably have been equally different.
This, frankly, is a bit disingenuous. At 18 he was the youngest headliner ever at the Oak Room in the Big Apple's Algonquin, the famed oak-panelled, Victorian-chaired hotel that was the watering hole for the Round Table set 80 years ago - writers such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S Kaufman, Edna Ferber and the rest.
The century-old Algonquin is still the resort of choice for the New Yorker magazine set and the name resonates with the sophistication and tastes of another age. So the mostly over-60 clientele Cincotti played to in the Oak Room got the Great American Song Book from him. It hardly seems likely, then, that his first recording might have differed greatly from the mostly standards repertoire on Peter Cincotti. His teachers, too, have included such fine jazz pianists as Fred Hersch, James Williams and Lee Anne Ledgerwood, and he went to New Orleans to study with Ellis Marsalis, pianist father of trumpeter Wynton and saxophonist Branford. So there's no denying his focus on mainstream jazz piano.
"Oh, for sure," he responds. "There's no question. The thing about jazz music is that there's so much vocabulary to explore within that segment alone. And why I've studied with so many is because when you absorb that kind of vocabulary you can apply it to anything you want." He's had plenty of opportunity to apply it to other things in the last few months. A biopic of singer Bobby Darin, Beyond The Sea, with Kevin Spacey in the leading role, saw him play Darin's best friend and accompanist/arranger, fitting bouts of filming in Berlin - Berlin! - into a touring and performing schedule that is the nearest thing to perpetual motion.
Rather endearingly, he sounds just like any other 21-year-old when he talks about the experience. "It was awesome to work with Kevin Spacey and all these other amazing actors. I couldn't believe I was sitting at the same table. I mean, what am I doing here?" He's more embarrassed than impressed with People magazine featuring him in its Sexiest Men issue; Teen Vogue had something similar and he's a pin-up in the magazine's calendar for this year. "It's ridiculous," he laughs. "I never - I dunno how to react to that sort of thing." At least, he acknowledges, it can't be bad for business.
But it doesn't distract him from his main focus, the piano. "Right now, for me - and it wasn't the case a year ago, and it might not be the case a year from now - but right now composing is a huge part of what's giving me satisfaction. Next year it might be arranging for strings, or something. I don't know.
"Performing on stage is a different kind of satisfaction," he adds. "And then, also, to be performing your own original songs on stage is different than when you perform standards. To hear people applaud when you start a song that you wrote, and they recognise it, I mean, that's an indescribable feeling.
"Whenever I do that, I always remember the moment when I was sitting at home, alone at the piano, starting to create it, and now people are recognising it. That's, like, amazing and that's, that's - it's ridiculous, the best thing in the world."
It would be nice to think he will still feel like that in 10 years' time.
• Peter Cincotti plays Vicar Street on Tuesday, March 2nd, at 8 p.m.