Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 70

TIIE SWING OF THINGS -V-' immy Sapienza is irrepressible. He's the singer and leader of a jump blues band called Five Guys Named Moe and he's a fireplug with a grin. He caps his direct, articulate sentences with bursts of laughter the same way he punctuates the line in a song with the blunt paws that terminate the ends of his thick arms. He calls his hands "mittens" and says they're the reason he remains "just adequate" on piano. Then he nearly guffaws at his own joke and continues on his way.

Apart from his role as also an actor. He gets called when people are looking for short, Italian guys that we think of the "Head Moe," Jimmy Sapienza is in a variety of petty "goodfella" roles. thing and remembering my old man chasing me around the kitchen table." Then he really OS if 'St 1 '7. 7v 7' Hi! i 'W, rr'; V'A i -'v 7 'r? 1 i' 17 7 77v ''T "A V. 'i i 1 7 fr vruu mu into his "Robert DeNiro-type method actor has trouble keeping it together, he's making lad numbers.

Sometimes we do a job where they want Gershwin, not 'baby, baby it looks like it gonna The thing I like to do is read the crowd and if I see that's the way to go with it, we'll be there in a heartbeat. You have to be a chameleon and adjust yourself to the situation." Jimmy Sapienza is a bit of the chameleon everywhere in his life. He's a big-voiced blues shouter who loves to croon. He's also a-47-year-old husband and father with two daughters, one seven months and the other nearly 2. He's aware of his split image and is thoughtful and reflective about his career choices.

"Some people see me as a Sinatra-type and a lot see me as a shouter-type. If they really saw me, they would see it's all of those things. I try to incorporate it all. I'm influenced by more than one thing, so I don't like to keep myself limited to one thing. Maybe that's hurt me a bit.

Maybe I should have limited myself as a blues shouter and then I'd have a national career and be going to Japan twice a year." "In my age group, I probably should have been more influenced by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. I always kid about it, but I say you can't grow up Italian and not have a Frank Sinatra record, a Louis Prima record, a Dean Martin record and a Tony Bennett record in the house. My uncles were all musicians and they would come over and throw a party and be playing Louis Prima records." Louis Jordan's extraordinary showmanship and warmth on stage earned him the nickname "Mr. Personality." Sapienza has made an effort to acquire as much Jordan performance footage as possible and notes the band leader's influence when he remembers how Jordan was so "very, very expressive. I loved the way he pulled the audience in.

I've watched the great entertainers closely and borrow, if you will, from them," Sapienza says. Adamant that if you are going to have any lasting success "you have to include the audience," there will be a whole other avenue for the inclusion of the audience when Five Guys Nained Moe release their CD tomorrow. The disc is a collection of Sapienza originals and songs popularized by Louis Jordan and was produced in Pittsburgh. Sapienza has been steadily acquiring recording equipment for years and now has a professional-quality studio system in his house. The record features the current line-up of Moes, augmented by Pittsburgh's Ken Karsh and Kenny Blake.

Sapienza is sending the disc to an eclectic selection of stations across the country and making the disc available through mail order, at performances and local independent record retailers. Sapienza knows he probably could have hit it bigger if he had left, but loves living and working in Pittsburgh. Jimmy Sapienza knows that performing, specifically performing the music of Louis Jordan, is why he's still going and is refreshingly frank about his endurance and motivation. "I started late. I didn't realize I wanted to do this until I was 25.

I've had a great 20 years. I like to give the audience what they want. I love to perform. I've been a ham all my life. I can't imagine doing anything else for a living." Mikel Elcessor is a freelance writer who covers jazz for the Post-Gazette.

He says he' does the "Mad Sicilian" by getting material and even named the band Five Guys Named Moe after a Jordan classic. Sapienza's performing style also draws heavily from fellow Italian vocalists like Frank Sinatra and the New Orleans shouter Louis Prima. Sinatra was an early, outspoken critic of rock 'n' roll and Prima never cut a true rock record, but Sapienza maintains that "before rock 'n' roll, they were the rock 'n' rollers because they violated the line. They were the people the sophisticated people went to see to have a good time. They were up there really cookin'." Five Guys Named Moe can cook.

A night out usually has five or six players on the bandstand, but the "In my age group, I probably should have been more influenced by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones." Jimmy Sapienza extended roster of the band has swelled to eight. As some of the area's best musicians, the Moes are also in steady demand in a variety of competing settings. The band hinges around Lou Schreiber and Eddie Freidenberger, who Sapienza considers so talented that they are "interchangeable on horns and piano," keys player Keith Steblcr, the percussionist Rodney "Bongo Ron" Dyer and drummer Steve Trettle. The drummer's seat rotates a fair bit. based on Trettle's availability, so Brian Edwards, Sylvester Goshay and Jimmy Pugliano from the Jaggerz are part of the Moes.

Sapienza knows that each of the players are very gifted and peppers his conversations about the band with descriptions like, "as a reed player, Louie Schreiber is probably the best 'round and as a piano player he's in a league with Johnny Costa or any other top piano man." Keith Steblcr is "an amazing musician. He's really an organ player. Not a lot of people know that. He can rock a room with a B3." Five Guys Named Moe have a rare quality in that they present a punchy, bluesy repertoire, but handle the material with all the Hair and elan of a tight, polished jazz combo. Their cohesion is strengthened, no doubt, by the fact that three of the band's members, Schreiber, Freidenberger and Steblcr, are blind.

Five Guys Named Moe are deep and soulful live in a way that you have to appreciate musicianship, but they avoid flash so their expertise never gets in the way of the beauty of their material. They can do the hot, rocking jump blues, Sapienza recounts, but "we can do a whole night of stringy bal himself laugh so hard. While he works very hard, doing voiceover work and even substituting occasionally on local radio shows, Wilkinsburg's Jimmy Sapienza is, first and foremost, the guy that loves to sing and perform. His band, Five Guys Named Moe, is releasing its first CD tomorrow. They're celebrating by throwing a party at James Street Tavern on the North Side and Sapienza is absolutely ebullient about this milestone and his band.

Five Guys Named Moe have been pulling a steady string of one-nighters at places like the Balcony, Penn Brewery, Dockers in Bridgewater, and Foster's since the band formed in 1988. They keep a regular Wednesday night slot at the James Street Tavern and lately added the Sunday night Swing Dances at the Edgewood Club to their circuit. The band works a lot and they've had some hefty engagements, like opening for James Brown at Three Rivers Stadium before a crowd of almost 70,000 and performing for President Clinton at a Pittsburgh rally for Harris Wofford's 1994 senatorial bid. The genesis of the band lies in a gift that Sapienza received more than 10 years ago. A friend passed along a tape of the mid-century band leader Louis Jordan and Sapienza's life, by his own admission, has never been the same since.

Louis Jordan was a singer, arranger and band leader who was also a wild, raucous alto sax player. A legendary showman, Jordan developed his craft first as part of the Southern minstrelry circuit and in the 1930s with Chick Webb's big band. The Second World War brought the draft and travel restrictions and, as a result, the end of the big band era. Jordan took the changing conditions in stride. He stripped down the size of his group and rearranged the numbers so they could be handled by six to eight pieces.

The introduction of Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five" was the birth of the danceable, small band that would become rhythm and blues and, later, rock n' roll. Sapienza has become a Louis Jordan expert and sums up tlie leader's contribution this way: "It really is the earliest form of rock n' roll, that driving, shuffle-beat boogie with that backbeat that makes you want to dance. From when he broke away from Chick Webb, to the original, early boogie woogie stuff to when he tried to blend in with the new sound of the '50s he was the innovator that brought that sound in. "That shuffling, train-type rhythm. He understood the need to simplify the music for the masses.

If yoii listen to his early records, he had every series of chord changes that every jazz man worth his salt could do. He's one of the earliest guys that pared down the rhythm changes to that three chord turnaround." Jordan's influence was so large that when he left his original label, Decca, the company brought in Bill Haley and his Comets, who presented a note-for-nole, but ultimately inferior, version of Jordan's act. While he had been familiar with Louis Jordan's work for years, Sapienza admits that he "hadn't really connected with him. Then I got this tape and when I heard all these funny songs with all these great lyrics like 'Ain't Nobody Here But Us and the way it sold them vocally I was convinced. I had the performance goosebumps you gel when someone has really touched you." Sapienza soon put together a band that would feature a great deal of Jordan's best 7- Vince Vaugn and John Favreau in "Swingers." How we got lost in the '50s nostalgia loop The Cocktail Nation is here and you are invited! The press fetish surrounding the resurgence in Lounge music's popularity is just one aspect of a growing national scene.

Whether you call it the Cocktail Nation or the Lounge scene, it hasn't materialized in a big way here in Pittsburgh, but there's enough action so you can play, too. Attention for the Cocktail Nation has centered around the martinis and cigars phenomenon, but it runs much deeper than the latest lifestyle accessories for the club crowd. Cocktail Nation is another aspect of the ever-quickening nostalgia loop that runs through our society. The past is re-assimilated over and over again. The separation between the past and the present grows shorter and shorter.

It took us a decade to work through the Eisenhower-era, bobbysoxer craze that grew up around the TV show "Happy Days." In half that time we saw the '60s revival come and go as grist for the retro mill. Cheap polyester and the 70s are the epoch of the moment and there are rumblings of the need for a revival of New Wave and the '80s. The Cocktail Nation draws much of its enthusiasm from an appreciation of the style and demeanor of the late '50s and early '60s. Championed primarily by people in their 20s and immortalized in the indie film "Swingers," participants in the Cocktail Nation enjoy values that run right in the face of the slacker ethic. Dressing well, having a job and a reasonable grasp of basic social skills are essentially the polar opposite of every Gen stereotype.

With the Cocktail Nation, it's OK to go out, dance and have fun. Jimmy Sapienza has seen the audience for Five Guys Named Moe grow from its original base of rhythm and blues fans and "anyone who ever loved Sinatra" to people that are "college age and anyone who's exploring the alternatives and who consider themselves hip enough to be opened minded." Eric Kayser of Rhino Records has seen this same audience step forth in support of Cocktail Mix, a four-CD set SEE SWING, PAGE 25 July 25, mi, Weekend 17 MiVUTr 1 7 "msm ULMMIi jimifAvww liffiigrii'MW".