John Pizzarelli & Jessica Molaskey@Catalina’s 08.07.11
By George W. Harris

Sure, there have been other husband and wife teams in jazz (we won’t get into Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme), but none do it better than the Rob and Laura Petrie of swing, John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey, as they displayed the joys of marital bliss to a perfect high C on Sunday night.

Opening the show with a classic “bad” medley (consisting of “It’s Bad For Me/I Wanna Be Bad”) John and Jessica bantered back and forth like a musical scene from the Honeymooners, as they traded lyrics like a couple over the dinner table. The juxtaposition of songs such as Sondheim’s “If You Met My Wife” and Joni Mitchell’s “Conversation” was overwhelmingly clever, and if you weren’t on your sides laughing at the humor in the torrid “Co-dependent medley” of “I Want To Be Happy/Sometimes I’m Happy,” you might overlook the fact that not only do the spouses sing better than anything this side of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, but Pizzarelli, along with Larry Fuller/p, Martin Pizzarelli/b and Tommy Tedesco/dr play some of the hardest biting jazz this side of 52nd St.
Pizzarelli himself dazzled the crowd with some lightning like work on his 7-string on “Lady Be Good” as well as some intricate fret work on Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” while his de-rigueur opus of “I Like Jersey Best” mixed side splitting campfire humor with head bopping blues. Closing with a rousing Western Swing version of “The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise” Pizzarelli and Molaskey showed the enraptured cloud this night that the family that sings together, swings together. Check out the photo on facebook.