Swing it like Anka

As a jazz geek who has paid zero attention to pop music since, oh, about 1985, I can’t judge how closely Anka’s songs follow the originals. But with Anka’s old-school, nightclub voice front and center, it’s as if a lost Sinatra recording had been retrieved from some forgotten vault. Anka, who will turn 64 this month, even recorded it at the Capitol studio in LA where Sinatra did much of his greatest work in the 1950s.

The result is so fresh and different — simultaneously old-fashioned and daringly new — that you can’t help marveling at the talent and chutzpah that made it happen.

The album has a nice mix of ballads and up-tempo swingers that might scarcely be recognizable to people who know the originals by the Pet Shop Boys, Spandau Ballet, Soundgarden and the rest. There are no electric guitars or keyboards powering Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel, Oasis Wonderwall or Van Halen’s exhilarating Jump. Instead, the sensibility here is big-band swing, with jazz rhythms ringing off the high-hat, a fat-sounding acoustic bass, textured sax sections purring out countermelodies and brash trumpets and trombones spiking the harmonic punch.

The two most surprising tracks are probably Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Blackhole Sun by Soundgarden. Despite Teen Spirit’s weird stream-of-consciousness lyrics (“a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido”), Anka and arranger John Clayton transform the grunge anthem into a jaunty finger-snapper. And after a moody intro, Blackhole Sun seems to be channeling Count Basie.

Anka performs R.E.M.’s ballad Everybody Hurts as the voice of experience, reimagines Billy Idol’s Eyes Without a Face with a lush, almost overripe beauty, and invigorates Lionel Richie’s Hello with an insinuating mystery that almost makes it sound like a James Bond theme. About the only thing that doesn’t work is Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven, which is too close to the original.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Rock Swings became a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s smart, serious, inspired and, in its way, fearlessly hip.

LAT-WP