"The Jackie Wilson Story," GypsySoul, Uptown Vocal Jazz Quartet and more...

Alan Greenblatt

First off, I want to note that "The Jackie Wilson Story," which I highly touted in this space a couple of months ago, has returned to the Lincoln Theater on U Street NW, through this weekend. It's a remarkable, high-energy show with excellent dancing and fun impersonations of Wilson, Sam Cooke, Etta James and other 1950s r&b personalities. The dramatic arc is thin but who cares, it's great fun.

Meanwhile, there are free shows to be heard each Saturday night out in Reston, Virginia. Yes, Reston Town Center, that overplanned, chain-store heavy, mixed-use development has been putting on a pretty good concert series this year. Coming up this Saturday are harmonica whiz Fredric Yonnet and the honey-voiced local singer Patrick De Santos for an evening of light Brazilian music, 7:30-10pm.

We went out last weekend to hear some jazz played by Chuck Redd, Frank Vignola, Joe Byrd and a drummer whose name has escaped me. Since these guys play around here fairly regularly, the attraction that made it worth the drive, I thought, was the great swing clarinetist Ken Peplowski. Naturally, he was a no-show.

But it was a pleasant evening of music nonetheless. Vignola is a superb guitar player, steeped in the Django Reinhardt "Gypsy soul" tradition. He is one of those masters who makes it seem easy. Like Bucky Pizzarelli, his solos are not so much flights of melodic invention as variations on the written theme. In other words, he plays the same tune several times through but embellishes it, changing the tempo, rhythm and shading until, at the point when he returns to the original theme as he first stated it, you realize you've been taken on a wonderful voyage.

Vignola really pushed Redd, who is a light, swinging player but on this night played with a little more spunk than usual. They were burning on "Avalon," played some nice slow ballads and also, because the performance was nominally a tribute to Redd's deceased boss Charlie Byrd, several bossa nova numbers.

A group called the Uptown Vocal Jazz Quartet opened up the proceedings. They were intensely slick running through old tunes such as "Birth of the Blues" and "Cloudburst," a close-harmony group much in the style of Manhattan Transfer. I didn't care for them much but they were pleasant enough as background music as you watched the small children dance and the teenagers lick their ice cream cones. That concrete and brick plaza seemed like a pleasant pastoral scene on such a lovely warm night.