PERFORMING ARTS

-- Tricia Olszewski

Cyrus Chestnut

Cyrus Chestnut's brand of jazz has always been strongly influenced by blues and gospel music. So when the pianist performed a program titled "Sanctified Swing" at the Kennedy Center Family Theater on Saturday night, no doubt some listeners were eager to hear him emphasize the spiritual side of his repertoire.

They didn't go home disappointed. But the concert proved uplifting in more than ways than one, enlivened by Chestnut's engaging personality and genial spirit. After playfully introducing his bandmates to each other, he took his seat at the piano for the opening selection, Cedar Walton's "Holy Land." It was first of several arrangements that revealed the complementary gifts of tenor saxophonist Jimmy Greene and trumpeter Curtis Taylor, a muscular frontline that often evoked the glory days of hard-bop and soul jazz.

As the concert unfolded, Chestnut's grounding in church music became more apparent via tremolo passages, hammered chords, ringing gospel cadences and dramatic shifts in tempo and dynamics. While "How Great Thou Art" served as a soulfully yearning, unaccompanied piano interlude, the pianist spent most of the concert nimbly interacting with his band-mates, including bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Neal Smith.

Unfortunately, Chestnut didn't play the Hammond B-3 organ as much as one would have liked. He moved to the instrument in time, though, to accompany vocalist Cynthia Scott, who hails from a family of preachers, and sounded like it. Scott helped cap the concert with a potent mix of Pentecostal fervor and contemporary inspirational themes.

-- Mike Joyce

Vinicio Capossela

Italy didn't become a unified country until 1861; before that, its various regions shared some commonalities but had distinct and independent cultures. Italian singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela evokes pre-Risorgimento Italy in at least one way: His compositions consist of a collection of seemingly unrelated music -- from cha-cha-cha to polka -- that become consolidated through the commanding force of a singular personality.

Capossela brought his cabaret-cum-rock act to the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage on Friday and a large number of Italians showed up to see the man who won their country's 2006 Tenco Prize for album of the year. English-only speakers didn't get the benefit of understanding Capossela's witty lyrics, but his winking music and playful persona conveyed cleverness without translations.

The Millennium Stage's dreadful sound layered distortion on Capossela's voice for the first quarter of the concert -- although it kind of fit his gruff singing style, especially when he was sporting a Minotaur mask while crooning the clanging, rough-hewn "Brucia Troia" ("Burn Troy"). That song was the most reminiscent of Tom Waits, the artist whose name keeps popping up in relation to Capossela, but it also evoked the filthy punk-blues of Jon Spencer, as well as Tuvan throat singers.

The 10 other tunes did their best to stay away from easy labels, too, with the seven musicians evoking sounds from Europe (Eastern and Western), Cuba and Africa. "Non Trattare" ("Do Not Bargain") was a modal Arabic blues; "Medusa Cha Cha Cha" was just what its title indicates, which Capossela drove home by dancing around in a golden snake-hair mask; and "Maharajah" was political satire mixed with Marx Brothers Mexicana.

In the kingdom of Capossela, eclecticism reigns.

-- Christopher Porter