Revelry with Glenn Crytzer’s Savoy 7 at Symphony Space

This past evening. even though Symphony Space seemed to be sold out, it was a little strange not to to see the usual Thursday night crowd of dancers who pack the floor in front of the stage.

That’s right: dancing at Symphony Space. It’s a thing.

Serenaded by the period-prefect early 40s-style originals of guitarist Glenn Crytzer’s Savoy 7, a lone young woman in a red dress twirled, schooling everybody in the house: she really knew her  moves. A middle-aged guy, who obviously didn’t, joined her, but he was game, and he hung in there and got a personal swing dance lesson for nothing. A few other couples went out onto the floor, but it was clear that nobody was going to be able to keep up with the vermilion vixen.

And the music was just as good. Beyond being a rare jazz guitarist who doesn’t waste notes, Crytzer is very funny. Throughout over an hour and a half onstage, the band romped through one trick ending after another, along with innumerable, coy, vaudevillian exchanges that only once in awhile went completely over the top.

Crytzer explained that the model for this band was Benny Goodman’s 1940-41 Septet with Charlie Christian on guitar. True to form, Crytzer was especially chill throughout the show, limiting his solos to maybe a couple of bars at the most. Likewise, the horns followed a dixieland-inspired pattern, with brisk handoffs where everybody was practically stepping on the next guy, like the dialogue in an early MGM talkie. Echoes of Cab Calloway, John Kirby and Louis Jordan also bounced through the songs from time to time.

Guest singer Barbara Rosene brought an understated brassiness to the vocal numbers, which were the night’s funniest songs. The best of these was a midtempo tune with a chorus of “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” With its droll stoner call-and-response, When I Get Low I Get High – sung by Crytzer – was pretty self-explanatory. There was also a number about a melody that bedeviled him so much that he ended turning it into a meta-song, pondering that if he could have come up with a lyric as catchy as the hook, he’d be more famous than Rodgers and Hart.

Who Needs Spring, Crytzer explained, was a tune with a very short shelf life; he breaks it out right about now, then retires it until winter comes around again. The instrumentals had plenty of humor as well, from the wry, folksy travelogue Not Far to Fargo, to a sleepy Florida-Georgia highway tune, Road to Tallahassee. Crytzer explained that he wasn’t thrilled with the title of the jaunty Live to Swing until the German superfan who came up with the idea threw big bucks into the crowdsourcing campaign for the guitarist’s most recent, lavish big band double album…money changes everything, doesn’t it?

The best song of the night was I Get Ideas, an uncharacteristically brooding mashup of hi-de-ho swing and distant hints of the music’s klezmer roots, featuring the most biting solos of the night, around the horn from Rich Alexander’s tenor sax to Mike Davis’ muted trumpet, Matt Koza’s clarinet and finally the bandleader himself. The rest of the band – Bob Reich on piano, Ian Hutchison on bass and Andrew Millar on drums – chose their spots for clever cameos throughout the set

Next week’s installment of Symphony Space’s Thursday night Revelry series, as they call it, is on Feb 28 at 7:30 PM with a special intimate duo set from the core of edgy Israeli dance band Yemen Blues; you can get in for $20 if you’re thirty and under, and there are drink specials from the bar all night. Crytzer plays with his quartet at 7 PM on Feb 24 at Peppi’s Cellar at 406 Broome St. in SoHo.

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