Playing along with America's jazz legends

Trumpeter and vocalist Johnny Souza says his first love is jazz.

Improvising to find an audience as well as entertain one, Plymouth jazz musician Johnny Souza plays around. He plays for audiences who don't go to nightclubs, such as the crowd who packed a recent concert at the Plymouth Library, and for those who do, with gigs at local and Providence hot spots.

He plays his trumpet and sings at the head of combos of various sizes, a trio, a quartet, a quintet, or even larger ensembles for special dates. He plays in his daughter's trio. He plays weddings. He has played in the studio at WGBH and performed guest spots for jazz shows in other cities. He even performed in local venues as a one-man band, playing a keyboard to back his singing and using a recorded backup for his trumpet.

A professional musician since graduating from Berklee School of Music, he led his own popular dance band through the '80s in clubs and concerts along the East Coast before deciding, he said, "to plant my stake in the ground and play jazz" - his first love.

"You have to be creative to reach audiences and get people to come out," Souza says.

Souza's "core competency," as he puts it, is a classic repertoire of great jazz and popular music standards from what is called the Great American Songbook - songs by such composers as George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and interpreted by vocal artists like Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole, and Tony Bennett.

A Plymouth native, Souza grew up in North Plymouth, the center of the town's 20th-century immigrant community, where Portuguese and Italian family names still predominate. His two children took to music as well, working with him on songs in the family home's basement and making annual Christmas season tapes that reached a family and friend distribution list of 60. Daughter Leah sings and heads the Leah Souza Trio. His son, Johnny Souza III, plays trumpet with a popular club band called "3rd Left."

Although Johnny Souza's two CDs have received national air play and his skills as both a trumpet player and vocalist have been praised by critics, turning from the commercial mainstream has its price. Souza has also been an information technology consultant for more than 20 years.

"I burn the candle at both ends," he said. "And they are very different." He leaves the musician's persona behind when he enters the corporate world, Souza said, but the swing returns to his step when he leaves it.

His first CD, "My Shining Hour," was played in 40 radio markets and still sells copies and songs from online download sites. ("Fly Me to the Moon," one of the standards on the disc, "is very popular in Japan," Souza observes.) Both reviewers and fans embraced Souza's easy delivery as a singer and command of melody on trumpet and flugelhorn. As an instrumentalist "he employs smooth, legato lines," wrote Boston Globe jazz critic Ernie Santosuosso, who commended an improvisational style that avoids "clichés and excessive loquaciousness."

Souza's quartet concert at the Plymouth Library last month was an example of his Great American Songbook program. The "songbook" refers to the golden age of American popular song, from the 1920s to the 1950s, beginning with Tin Pan Alley songwriters turning out songs for Broadway. If you had a hit play with a star attraction, chances are your song would become popular and you would make money from it, Souza said. George Gershwin was the greatest of these early Broadway composers. "These songs became jazz standards because they were wonderful melodies and jazz musicians adopted them as repertoire."

Souza introduces each song with a little musical history - who composed it, who wrote the lyrics, when it was written and why. Designing a concert program around an "August moon" theme, he included songs such as "Paper Moon," "Old Devil Moon," "Fly Me to the Moon," "Moonglow," and "Moonlight in Vermont." "Paper Moon," he tells audiences, was written by Harold Arlen (who also wrote "Somewhere Over the Rainbow") for a show that flopped. "But the song was great," Souza said. Nat Cole, Paul Whiteman, and Ella Fitzgerald took it up and it became a widely played standard. "Moonlight in Vermont" was composed by a songwriter traveling with a puppet show. Breaking the rules, the song's lyrics don't rhyme. Instead, each verse is a haiku consisting of lyrical nature and landscape imagery.

The quality of Souza's music has attracted top-flight side players such as Paul Schmeling of Easton, a Berklee piano chair emeritus; bass player Marshall Wood of Norwell, who tours regularly with Tony Bennett; and drummer Steve Silverstein, who has played in groups headed by jazz headliners Max Roach and Archie Shepp.

Souza backed up daughter Leah's trio last week at Providence's Hi-Hat club and led his own combo at the Radisson hotel in Plymouth.

Other dates are more unusual. He recalls a wedding on the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where his band began with "Fanfare for the Common Man" (an Aaron Copland favorite with a great trumpet part) and then led a procession into the reception site playing "When the Saints Go Marching In." "It was great," Souza said.

His CDs, appearance schedule, and other information are available on his website, johnnysouza.com.

Robert Knox can be contacted rc.knox@gmail.com.