Contrasts

John Pizzarelli is more than just an uncannily charming singer. He also plays a hard-charging brand of jazz guitar learned from his father Bucky, a veteran of the Big Band era. On Contrasts, dad and son team up for a dapper program of seven-string-guitar duets (the added bass strings make for an orchestral richness of texture). The bill of fare ranges from high-class standards like The Bad and the Beautiful to such sophisticated novelties as Joe Mooney's Phantasmagoria; the playing is crisp, witty and swings like mad.