Remembering Red

If anyone bridged the gap between traditional jazz-influenced pop and early rock & roll, it was Bobby Darin. Some of his work appealed to the Frank Sinatra/Tony Bennett/Sammy Davis, Jr./Dean Martin crowd, while some of it appealed to the Elvis Presley/Chuck Berry/Jerry Lee Lewis crowd — and that is in addition to the singer's folk-rock output. Stylistically, Darin was not easy artist to pin down, which means that anyone providing a Darin tribute has a wide variety of things to choose from. Roger Kellaway, much to his credit, acknowledges different sides of Darin's artistry on Remembering Bobby Darin. Recorded in 2004, Remembering Bobby Darin is a companion to the veteran pianist's other Darin tribute, I Was There: Roger Kellaway Plays from the Bobby Darin Songbook. But while I Was There is an album of unaccompanied solo piano performances, Remembering Bobby Darin finds Kellaway forming a cohesive, intimate trio with guitarist Bruce Forman and bassist Dan Lutz. If you're seriously into Nat King Cole, that drumless combination of instrumentals should sound familiar; Cole favored a piano/guitar/bass format when he led the legendary Nat King Cole Trio in the '30s and '40s. And that format serves Kellaway pleasingly well on this far-reaching CD, which ranges from the Darin smash "Beyond the Sea" to older standards like Duke Ellington's "I'm Beginning to See the Light" and "I've Found a New Baby." Kellaway celebrates Darin's swing side with an intriguing version of "Mack the Knife" (also known as "Moritat" or "Three Penny Opera") but savors Darin's rock & roll side on "Splish Splash," which the lyrical pianist performs in a Gene Harris-like fashion. I Was There and Remembering Bobby Darin are both excellent and well worth owning, but this release has a slight edge in the diversity department and reminds you just how impressively versatile Darin was.