At Blue Note Los Angeles on Thursday night, Charlie Puth was a hip daddio with a point to prove: The pop star has a jazz soul to bare, and no one’s going to stop him.
“Can you believe that someone actually muttered the words to me, ‘Don’t ever make it too jazzy?’” he said to a packed house. “Never be afraid to make things too jazzy, especially at the Blue Note.”
Puth took the stage behind a sparkly red custom Rhodes shell with a silver “Charlie” plaque attached to the back. Inside, a synthesizer that recreates the classic Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano sound popular in songs of the ’70s and ’80s ( i.e. Billy Joel’s “My Life” and Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U”). The gear suits the hitmaker’s new single “Changes,” released yesterday alongside the music video and an announcement that his fourth studio album, “Whatever’s Clever!,” would drop March 6.
In the music video, Puth, surrounded by ’80s-era nostalgia including a cassette player and a landline phone in the shape of a piano, dances around in vintage-style jeans and a button-up with a tie à la Steve Winwood in “Higher Love.” The track itself also nods to Winwood-esque pop of the decade. Toward the end of the video, Puth’s wife, Brooke Sansone, joins the popstar and they place their hands over her tummy, signaling the pair would soon be three — a hip daddio, indeed.
On stage, Puth wore a similar outfit, matching his band and backing vocalists: a white button-down with jeans and black shoes. Before he opened the set with “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” the third single from his debut album “Nine Track Mind,” released in 2016, he welcomed the crowd.
“We’re so happy you could be here on this Thursday night in celebration of jazz. This place has only been open, what? Nine weeks? This is a good trend for L.A.,” he said. “L.A. needed something like this. It’s an honor to be here with you tonight, playing some of my favorite songs and playing them in the way that I had originally dreamt them to be. Ten years ago, I would never have imagined that I’d be able to do this in this way; this is how I’ve always wanted to do it.”
He turned to the band and backing vocalists and said they were probably sick of hearing it, but he felt so fortunate to be up on “this tiny little red stage” with them. And then Puth was off and running, one-handed piano solos, lengthy jazz interludes and Professor Puth still in producer mode, pausing to explain the value of a jazz chord change, signaling note progressions to backup vocalists and playing the air drum mid-song. And yes, there was scatting.
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The world may have best known Puth as the youngster Ellen DeGeneres discovered on YouTube. Or maybe the songwriter who shot to stardom after penning and producing the “Furious 7” tribute to the late-Paul Walker, “See You Again,” with Wiz Khalifa when he was 23 years old. It’s been a decade since the megahit changed Puth’s life, and now 33, Puth is rejecting the industry-imposed teen idol identity and embracing his elite music nerd roots (he went to the pre-college program at the Manhattan School of Music at 13, and then graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2013 with a degree in music production and engineering.)
The four-time Grammy nominee with nine multi-platinum singles has always been a musician’s musician — he could learn and play back records by ear by the time he was 8. He’s demonstrated his perfect pitch on the late-night circuit, breaks down his songs online with a technicality that would soar over the heads of the layman, and yet for years, his virtuoso capabilities flew under the radar and hid behind singles he’s admitted he wasn’t especially proud of. Now, Puth says he is on a mission to tell the truth.
“Let’s keep the dream going,” he said to the crowd after blowing a kiss to the room. He introduced the second song of the night, “BOY,” a song off his second album, “Voicenotes,” which he described as a jazzy album, and “BOY” as an especially jazzy song. The third song of the night was a new track that hasn’t been released, “Beat Yourself Up.” He said he’d never written something like this before, and it was intended as a message to himself. The song is a funky anthem to letting past mistakes go and giving yourself grace as you grow.
At this point in the show, Puth had mentioned (more than once), how hot it was inside the club, and yes, the jazz was hoppin’ and nasty, but Puth meant the temperature. “I’m going to unbutton one button, because it is actually very hot in here,” he said as “Woohs!” could be heard from the audience. “All right, don’t get too carried away,” he joked to the audience as he started to play and then pause again, loosening his tie. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore: “Would you guys mind if I ran backstage and changed?” The Blue Note patrons acquiesced, and Puth ran off stage and reemerged a moment later in a white tank to a room full of cheers. He started the song back up as a stage tech crawled below him to plug fans into the power strip under his piano, and ever the gentleman, he paused midsong to thank him, “Everyone give it up for Ed!”
Puth brought the room up with a jazzed-up version of “Attention,” and then slowed it down with a swanky love-makin’ tune, “Suffer.” The room, filled with Angelenos of the listening variety (versus the cuttin’ a rug), couldn’t contain their chill when Puth’s Blue Note rendition of “How Long” bopped and grooved. It was Puth’s best performance of the night.
And then, naturally, Puth brought it back to the song that made him famous. He’d moved to Los Angeles to become a songwriter just two days before he heard the “Fast & Furious” franchise was looking for an homage to end the film with.
“I wrote this next one at 7950 W Sunset Boulevard, aka my first home in Los Angeles,” he said. “Los Angeles, one of the greatest cities ever that changed my life, I moved here 11 years ago and I made a lot of memories here and a lot of those memories have melodies attached to them and this is one of them.”
After closing the set with “Changes,” a song untangling shifting relationships and major life transitions, Puth received a standing ovation.