Born in Manhattan, Peter started
tinkering with a toy 10 key piano his grandmother gave him at 3. He started
taking lessons at 4. His mother directed the teacher to allow Peter to
play only what he enjoyed, avoiding
the "drudge effect". Harry Connick
dragged Peter on stage at 7 years old. Peter watching his father
die of a heart attack at 13 perhaps further hastened his maturity. His
Mother Cynthia and sister Pia write some lyrics.
The NY Times: "This Much Talent, Polish and Virtuosity in a Teenager May Not Be Legal!"
Though his looks are smart enough for frontman in a mass-marketed boy band, teenaged Peter Cincotti's musical soul seems wise decades beyond his years. The 19-year-old Columbia University sophomore's debut does more than bristle with promise: it delivers both sprightly performances and some unexpectedly sharp songwriting...Cincotti's voice occasionally shows its tender years, but his shrewd instincts bridge genres and eras with mature, deceptive effortlessness throughout. --Jerry McCulley
This is more advanced than what I
ever thought a young singer could put out. Way beyond the accomplished
jazz piano playing are vocal interpretations that, unlike every young singer
attempting this music, never ripp off or copy in any manor the phrasing
or style of the pros of yesteryear who obviously inspired Peter into this
great music. He delivers a lyric believable beyond reason whitch seems
to be coming from a place of honesty instead of gimmickry.-- S.
Schmoil
=====================================
EVERYTHING
OLD IS NEW AGAIN: PETER CINCOTTI
Brat-pack jazz singer freshens the standards and sets his own
By Porter Anderson
CNN
Thursday,March
13, 2003
NEW YORK (CNN) --Peter Cincotti deals in music three times his age. And he's not half as full of himself as you might expect a 19-year-old to be on his way to a TriBeCa party for the release of his first CD.
If anything, this latest young modern to be shepherded from stage to studio by manager Mary Ann Topper of Jazz Tree is more worried than anybody about trading in what he calls "songs well beyond my years. I'm going to wait for a while before I sing 'The Second Time Around.'
"But the Manhattan-born pianist-singer-composer does chafe a little at the arty ageism he knows awaits him in the industry. "You know, years ago, when some of the all-time greatest jazz singers started out, like Billie Holiday? -- they were young and nobody complained.
"Cincotti – pronounced "Sin-kottee" -- has a voice somewhere between Sinatra and Connick. In fact, Harry Jr. gets unstinting gratitude from this new crooner on the block for helping out when asked. Connick once paraded the 7-year-old prodigy Peter onto the stage with him during an Atlantic City gig.
... Cincotti has the kind of Polo-classic face that keeps black-and-white retro photographers in business. Just when they were running out of ways to throw Bogart-era shadows onto Connick, too. This kid has timing.
Like Monheit and Diana Krall before him, Cincotti appears born to that new brat pack of genuinely gifted jazz younglings beloved of record execs who hear the jazz-is-dying walking bass everywhere they go. Downbeat predictions of jazz's demise may add a haggard charm to the genre but they do little to cheer those devotees who say the form deserves a healthy chunk of space in any intelligent music lover's interests.
Changing the rules
So Cincotti may be the best-looking newbie in the nursery because he's writing music, not just reviving old tunes.
In a gutsy move, he and producer Phil Ramone -- who worked with Streisand, Sinatra, Manilow and Billy Joel -- open the eponymous new CD with a Cincotti original, the swing-sassy "I Changed the Rules.
"Its lyrics are a mother-daughter act, the contribution of Cynthia Cincotti and Peter's sister Pia.
Don't keep me waiting at the door / I'm not some cat that you ignore / Keep on whining, and I'll keep on declining -- baby, I changed the rules.
Mom, sis and brother also collaborated on "Are You the One?" and "Lovers, Secrets, Lies." Cincotti says that by the time his second CD comes out -- and he may be young but he's too smart to say how soon that might be -- he hopes to be writing both his own music and lyrics.
And even when he turns to the standards, he likes coming to them cold.
"I like 'Sway' on the album," he says, "because I didn't know a whole lot of other people's versions before I did mine." That's a Latin-sultry little 1954 number by Norman Gimbel and Pablo Ruiz that you may have heard in the opening of the film soundtrack for "Dark City." When it came time to work on the song, "I just read the sheet music and went in," he says. The result is one of the most atmospheric tracks on the CD.
By contrast, he says, "When I sing 'Ain't Misbehavin',' I can't help but hear Fats Waller.
"In another original turn, Cincotti has worked together the old Beatles stalwart "Fool on the Hill" with Eden Ahbez's haunting "Nature Boy." The merger produces a gracefully meditative moment on the album.
Music as an outlet
That tone is echoed when Cincotti talks about the loss of his father. "It happened when I was 13, and I was between sets at a club here in New York," he says. His dad was the victim of a heart attack and his son saw him die.
"It puts things into perspective," Cincotti says. "The music is an outlet for me. Other people have their outlets -- sports or writing or whatever it may be. But I know now that anything that comes my way, whether it's death or heartbreak, I can use the music as an outlet. My father always made the best of a situation.
"The lesson wasn't lost on Cincotti, who last year became the youngest artist to play a monthlong engagement at the Algonquin's Oak Room in New York. He's just finished a return stint there and is being booked for a tour likely to take him to Europe and Japan. Already , the dates are piling up -- he plays Palm Beach, Florida, later this month, Catalina's in Los Angeles in April, and a performance at Yale.
Speaking of school, he's a sophomore at Columbia University. "Up until now, I've carried a full load of courses. It looks like this is turning into a lot of traveling now, so me and the dean are going to have to sit down and talk. The way it's gone so far, one week I concentrate on my music, the next on schoolwork.
"Will he put off a degree to follow the career? "Well, if I have certain opportunities in life, I have to take them. And college will always be there.
"If the critics are right -- The New York Times' Stephen Holden writes about Cincotti's "youthful fervor and a personality all his own" -- then Cincotti may be major before he even declares one.
He may be working overtime on choosing material appropriate to his age. "The Rainbow Connection" that closes his album probably goes a bit more toward the juvenile than necessary -- but Cincotti does it heartfelt justice.
"I don't feel like I have a mission" to promote jazz to his own generation, he says. "I don't want to shove anything down people's throats. Sure, I'd love people of all ages to be my audience. But I want to do music that's truly representative of where I am in life. So for me, it's about the music and about developing as a musician.
"Peter Cincotti's CD, "Peter Cincotti," has its official release from Concord Records on March 11. Cincotti is joined on the album by bassist David Finck, percussionist Kenny Washington and Scott Kreitzer on tenor sax.
CNN.com
- Everything old is new again: Peter Cincotti - Mar. 13, 2003
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/03/11/peter.cincotti/
========================================================
THOSE LOOKS
.... THAT SOUND?
It's not clear
if jazz 'It Boy' Peter Cincotti's voice merits the hype.
Los Angeles
Times
By Lynell
George
Times Staff
Writer
April 19,
2003
...One look at pianist-singer Peter Cincotti -- jazz's newest "It Boy" -... with a downcast gaze, and..."hot new artist" clearly has varied meanings.
Cincotti rolled out onstage with a quartet -- rounded out by saxophone, drums and upright bass -- and charged into a rouser from "The Wild Party," "Raise the Roof." Then he dipped into "Miss Brown" before sinking into a frilly, self-penned (with the help of his mother, Cynthia) love song -- "Are You the One?," a personals ad set to music about walking hand in hand and sipping pink champagne he's still too young to order at the bar.
The Manhattan-born 19-year-old has already played the Oak Room at the venerable Algonquin, and, since he was 12 or 13, has been working a series of steady gigs at the Knickerbocker and at Feinstein's at the Regency Hotel (where, after a set, he was approached by Grammy-winning producer Phil Ramone). His confidence is evident as he settles comfortably into a set that mixes instrumentals and vocals. However, wading into each song, he enunciates each syllable -- "whis-key, flow-wing" -- in an all-out, wide-eyed, first-blush way, as if he's captured a lead stage role.
By mid-set he looks as if he's just dashed off the lacrosse field -- he's flushed, his dark-blond hair tumbling into his eyes. With his big, winning grin and earnest patter, Cincotti informs the SRO audience that "these tunes may be old to you, but they're new to me."
He pauses for a moment, revealing a picket-fence row of white teeth. "That's not," he says, vamping over the ivories, "meant to be an insult."
A tentative chuckle builds as it rolls across the room. Cincotti leans into another chestnut.
Cincotti is an accomplished, fluid pianist, full of earnestness and enthusiasm and deft passion. You can hear how his influences -- Erroll Garner, Fats Waller -- course through him like a lifeline...
Already there have been the comparisons -- easy and unavoidable -- to the other floppy-forelock poster boy, Harry Connick Jr. (Connick has been a bit of an inspiration-mentor to Cincotti, calling him up onstage way back in the early days -- when he was just a kid -- which would be just eight years ago.)
Cincotti can be the Great Youth Hope to jazz, with Ramone producing this self-titled freshman effort and with all the chatter thus far, Cincotti is certainly getting an early test.
The press has taken the bait and run with it: "echoing the young Sinatra," "a brooding Hoagy Carmichael."
...The album debuted at No. 2 on Billboard's traditional jazz chart...
The pop world has long been all about "the look" -- "artists" cultivated because they fit a look or just might ignite a new one. But it is more surprising when it comes out of the allegedly more sophisticated worlds of jazz or classical music...
Jazz loves its image -- even its cliches and affectations, whether it's smoky and intense... or softly lighted and optimistic...
Chiseled-faced trumpeter Chet Baker... made many a female heart race the moment he put down his aloof horn, scanned a room and locked gaze with coed-turned-ingenue for the evening. And when he started to sing?! There was no limiting his cross-genre possibilities.
But Baker's cover-boy looks, like Cincotti's, stirred up some questions, if not consternation. Was it talent or looks that won him all those Down Beat polls over Miles and Dizzy?
That would be the early worry about Cincotti. Pretty jazz and pretty people playing it dovetail into a well-documented, stylized notion of jazz: city sophistication, the softly lighted room, the love songs. People are pulled in by the spell and the ritual of it. The feel. The image.
Cincotti admits that he too isn't immune to it. He fell in love with the image -- but also with something else, something elusive and un-pinpointable about a music that was the soundtrack for another time, the music that spun on turntables around his home, from Jerry Lee Lewis and Nat King Cole to Oscar Peterson. "I just was extremely attracted to what happened to be a music of another era," Cincotti says a couple of days after the Catalina show. "It's just like taste in people or taste in clothes. You're a product of your influences."
For a moment, Cincotti sounds like a grizzled session man, cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth. "In the past you came across ... lyrics that express something with melodies that are really melodies. Now that's hard to find.... If that happened more today, maybe I'd be playing pop music. A lot of music today isn't about music, it's about all these external things. The right look. Back then some of the songwriters weren't easy to look at ... or the performers, for that matter."
So, then, how does Cincotti feel about this push? After all, the musicality sometimes gets overshadowed by how he looks instead of what he sounds like.
"How do I look?" he asks in a tone that doesn't quite seem like fishing but also isn't exactly innocent. "What do they say I look like?"
Heartthrob. Matinee idol ...
"I don't have any problem with anybody complimenting me on my looks. I'd be lying if I said that. But I don't like the fact that people say that that's the only reason that people buy the record or go to see me," he says. "So much is dependent on looks. I hate that that's the case. But I don't want it to take away from what my goals are."
He knows there is a lot do, a road ahead that might not always be free of impediments. "My goals are to develop as a musician. I'm trying really hard not to get my head wrapped up in all of that ... and I'm practicing less. I know that happens. I would just like to keep writing music, arranging in as many contexts as possible. Eventually play Radio City. It's like, a dream."
Although he may be young, he may be earnest, there is a spirit of an old, been-round-the-block pragmatist wedged down deep in there. "If somebody thinks I'm a heartthrob," he says with a wizened lift in his voice, "well, it can't hurt."
Those
looks ... that sound?
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/printedition/calendar/la-et-george19apr19,1,6598710.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dcalendar
Cincotti Web
Site: Peter
Cincotti
http://www.concordrecords.com/petercincotti/movie.html
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