The Blue Note Jazz Club, in the Village, is not known for its legroom. But the other afternoon the joint was nearly deserted. A lonely employee was rolling forks into navy-blue napkins by the bar. The thirty-three-year-old pop star Charlie Puth, headlining his first jazz residency, was due for a sound check with his band. Fans had already lined up outside for the 8 P.M. show.
“Hey! Hey! One, two!” a stagehand barked into a mike, maneuvering past a Roland Jupiter-80 synth keyboard. “Guest vocal! One, two!”
Members of the band started taking their spots on the tiny stage. Snare hits rang out like paintball shots and bass riffs bounced off the mirrored walls. An engineer sat down behind a soundboard; suddenly, a few seconds of music burst from the speakers—a new song, “Beat Yourself Up,” from Puth’s upcoming album.
Puth rushed in just after four, wearing AirPods Max headphones over a blue dad cap. As if magnetized, he veered straight for a sparkly red Rhodes keyboard. (“It’s actually a Rhodes shell with a synthesizer,” he said later. “I’m using a Yamaha CP-70 sound.” Ah, of course.)
“Louis, if you can hear me, put the flex up to forty or fifty,” Puth told another engineer. He then launched into a funkified cover of “Love,” by Keyshia Cole. The drummer was still tap-testing his set, but the rest of the group lasered in.
“Let’s go to B major,” Puth, who has wavy brown hair and a crescent-moon scar through one eyebrow (the legacy of a dog bite), urged the band. They moved to B major. “And now B minor.” Aye, aye, captain. After a labyrinth of shifting chords, he concluded, “It could be as simple as that.” He took a sip of water.
Of all the big names to pass through the Blue Note—Dizzy Gillespie, Keith Jarrett—Puth may be the most likely to provoke skeptics. What does he know about jazz, with his Billboard hits? But, at his core, Puth is a Jazz Guy. As a kid, he said, “I just fell in love with the two-five-one chord progression.” He grew up jamming with local cats in his home town of Rumson, New Jersey, and was a regular teen performer at Birdland. He has shiny degrees from Manhattan School of Music and from Berklee.
But in 2015, when Puth signed with Artist Partner Group, a joint venture with Atlantic Records, executives told him to back-seat what he loved most. “ ‘Don’t get too jazzy on ’em,’ ” he recalled them saying. “ ‘You’re gonna look old.’ ” So he bleached his hair and took a teen-idol swerve. “My music on its own was never enough,” he said, ruefully. (Of his 2016 début record, “Nine Track Mind,” Jia Tolentino wrote, “It’s because of Puth’s considerable abilities, and not in spite of them, that the album induces such despair.”)
Once he had a few platinum pop hits—“I recouped, they made their money”—Puth tried to sneak some Bill Evans energy onto his second album, “Voicenotes.” One track, “Boy,” has an electric-piano jazz solo as its bridge. “I thought it was the best song I had ever made,” he said. “I was, like, ‘I want this to be track one.’ And they were, like, ‘No.’ ” It ended up as track eight. Out of spite, Puth made it even jazzier.
Now that his twenty-tens fame spurt has calmed, Puth feels like he can go back to his roots. “It turns out, a decade later, no one cares if something is too jazzy,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It’s almost embarrassing that it took me this long.”
As the sound check continued, Puth goofed with his players. “You guys gonna take a Patrón flight?” he asked. “First class on Loose Airlines?” Preserving his voice for the shows, he played some melodies on the keys instead, adding plenty of licks and flourishes.
On opening night, the club was packed. (The series, called Whatever’s Clever, sold out in just a few minutes; Puth described this as “a pat on the back.”) Waiting-room smooth jazz floated out of the speakers while fans fiddled with the swag pens that were strewn on the tables: a reminder that Puth writes his own songs, and that he partnered with Bic last year.
“This is my fifth time seeing him,” a girl in her twenties said, her hoop earrings jangling. She sipped a Clever Cosmo, one of four special drinks offered for Puth’s run. Two were Jersey-themed (yum?). A dad, sitting with his wife and two sons, called Puth a “real musician,” then ordered a double tequila.
At 8 P.M., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face.
“I’m having too much fun, y’all!” he yelled out, to cheers. Then he started scatting. ♦
