Austin Music

ACL FEST

A former Maverick eases into supper-club jazz

Raul Malo is scheduled to play from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. Saturday on the Dell stage.

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Monday, September 10, 2007

Raul Malo has spent his career blending genres, repurposing sounds, and rethinking where one type of songwriting bleeds into another. Singing with roots band the Mavericks, Malo navigated the country of country, figuring out the borders between honky-tonk and Tex-Mex, between the croon and the wail.

His first solo album, "Today," delved into Cuban music. His first covers album, "You're Only Lonely," explored some standards; it was a chance for Malo to flex his pipes on songs by Randy Newman and Etta James.

Jay Janner
AMERICAN-STATESMAN

(enlarge photo)

Raul Malo performs at the ACL Music Festival on Fri. Sept. 19, 2003.

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His newest solo joint, "After Hours," cleans the sawdust out of the kicker bar and turns it into a supper club, morphing country into small combo jazz on tunes from such writers as Hank Williams ("Take These Chains from My Heart," "Cold, Cold Heart"), Kris Kristofferson ("For the Good Times") and Dwight Yoakam ("It Only Hurts Me When I Cry," "Pocket of a Clown").

"When I put my last band together, we started jamming on some of these old country songs," Malo says from his home in Nashville. "We started treating them as if we were a jazz combo band and they were jazz standards."

They liked what they heard.

"I've always thought some of these classic country songs hold up to anything from the pop standard songbook," Malo says. "That's kind of what we wanted to do with this album, show that hey, these songs are as good as songs from Irving Berlin and Cole Porter."

As Malo sees it, composing is composing. "This is a nod to the song-writing craft that these guys and ladies used in these country songs," he says. "I think we've certainly lost that in country music."

At first, Malo wasn't sure how all of the tunes would come together. "The song that surprised me the most was 'Crying Time,'" he says, "It's so different from Buck Owen's version, yet to me it works really well. We changed some chords, but not the melody. Suddenly, it's jazz pop standard."

Perhaps surprisingly, "Today" was the record that inspired this one. "It gave me this 'anything is possible' attitude," Malo says of the Latin-tinged album. "That record was a real eye opener creatively for me in a way that carried over in a philosophical way to this one. We can play a festival and rock out, then play a supper club that night. That's why I'm having so much fun with this album."

Does he expect to get any flack from hard-core honky-tonkers? "I don't think so," Malo says. "These songs are so iconic that you certainly want to pay respects to the versions that have come before. It's a fine line, but hopefully we succeeded taking them somewhere else."

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