Chris Botti News

Pop-jazz trumpeter Chris Botti finally made it to Carnegie Hall as a headliner, keeping a promise he made to himself the first time he appeared on the famed concert stage almost 30 years ago.

"I actually played here when I was 14 with the McDonald's All-American High School Band. They force fed us with McDonald's cheeseburgers and somewhere in the middle of the torture ... I told myself I had to make it back here," the 44-year-old trumpeter joked with the audience Saturday night at a JVC Jazz Festival concert.

Botti, who recently starred in a PBS concert special featuring tunes from his chart-topping trumpet-and-vocals album "To Love Again," made it back to Carnegie with his own all-star band featuring recent double Grammy-winner Billy Childs, who switched between acoustic piano and synthesizer, guitarist Marc Whitfield, drummer Billy Kilson and bassist Tim Lefebvre.

Botti acknowledged his debt to pre-fusion Miles Davis, playing a muted trumpet on "Flamenco Sketches" from Davis' classic "Kind of Blue" album and "My Funny Valentine," a tune he heard at age 12 that he said "represents the beginning of my musical path." In a nod to his Italian roots, Botti played Ennio Morricone's romantic love theme to the film "Cinema Paradiso."

In a touching moment, Botti had the 87-year-old songwriter Ervin Drake and his wife, Edith, take a bow from the audience just before inviting singer Jeanne Jolly onto the stage to perform the unofficial Billie Holiday signature song, "Good Morning Heartache."

Botti told the tale of how Drake, as a struggling young songwriter, fell head over heels for Edith, a Broadway chorus girl, in 1945, only to get dumped. Despondent, he sat at home and wrote the lyrics to "Good Morning Heartache," launching a career that included such hits as "It Was a Very Good Year" made famous by Frank Sinatra. In the 1970s, Drake and Edith, both widowed, hooked up again and got married.

Botti put a contemporary spin on other standards from the Great American Songbook in a set bookended by George Gershwin's "Embraceable You" and Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do." Botti said it's unfortunate that too many young people know these songs today as "Rod Stewart's greatest hits," especially after the British rocker guested on a recent Great American Songbook-themed episode of "American Idol."

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