Mother's Day Concert With John Pizzarelli Comes To The Venetian Room This Month

Bay Area Cabaret has announced details of the Pizzarelli Family Reunion concert scheduled for Mother' Day, Sunday, May 14 at 7.30 p.m. This show marks Bay Area Cabaret's 2022-23 Season finale, and features Grammy Award-winning guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli; his wife Broadway singer/actress, Jessica Molaskey; and the San Francisco debut of their daughter, singer/songwriter, Maddie Pizzarelli. This intimate concert will be presented in the elegant Venetian Room, Fairmont San Francisco, atop Nob Hill at 950 Mason Street.

Bay Area Cabaret Founder and Executive Producer Marilyn Levinson said: "Bay Area Cabaret is grateful to the artists and patrons who have made every show this year a sold-out success. It is fitting that John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey will close our first full season in three years. They are artists that share Bay Area Cabaret's dual goals of reinvigorating the Great American Songbook, and of creating community - and family - through music, by their wonderful performances, their pandemic broadcasts "It Must be 5:00 Somewhere," and their long-running radio show, "Radio Deluxe." We are excited to welcome these beloved artists back to the Venetian Room stage and to introduce Maddie, in a very special Mother's Day concert filled with programming that will include music made popular by the late family patriarch, jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli."

Pizzarelli's return to Bay Area Cabaret coincides with the recent release of his new album, Stage & Screen (Palmetto Records), a curated collection of fresh new takes on Broadway and Hollywood classics. In his prolific work, Pizzarelli has dedicated many of his albums to the great songwriters and performers who have helped to establish the Great American Songbook and the pop music canon: Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney, Richard Rodgers, and Duke Ellington, to name a few. With the new album, Pizzarelli casts a wider net to explore other sources for the most immortal songs of the past century: the Broadway stage and the silver screen.

The recording also celebrates the 40th anniversary of Pizzarelli's 1983 debut recording, I'm Hip (Please Don't Tell My Father). John Pizzarelli has been hailed by the Boston Globe for "...re-popularizing jazz." Established as a prime interpreter of the Great American Songbook, Pizzarelli has expanded that repertoire by including the music of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Paul McCartney and The Beatles.

In addition to being a bandleader and solo performer, Pizzarelli has been a special guest on recordings for major pop names including Natalie Cole, Kristin Chenoweth, Tom Wopat, Rickie Lee Jones, and Dave Van Ronk, as well as leading jazz artists such as Rosemary Clooney, Ruby Braff, Johnny Frigo, Buddy DeFranco, Harry Allen, and, of course, his father Bucky Pizzarelli. He won a Grammy Award in the "Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album" category as co-producer of James Taylor's American Standard in 2021. A radio personality who got his start in the medium in 1984, Pizzarelli is co-host, alongside Jessica Molaskey, of "Radio Deluxe with John Pizzarelli."

Jessica Molaskey is a veteran of a dozen Broadway shows: A Man of No Importance at Lincoln Center written by Terrance McNally, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Parade (directed by Hal Prince), Dream, Tommy, Crazy For You, Les Miserables, City of Angels, Chess, Cats, NBC's The Sound of Music, and Oklahoma!. She has since performed off-Broadway and regionally in dozens of productions. Jessica has premiered music written by Ricky Ian Gordon, Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Stephen Sondheim and John Bucchino. She has written songs for almost a dozen recordings including "Greed," part of a commission for Audra McDonald's Seven Deadly Sins at Carnegie Hall and Cradle and all which will be part of Ms. McDonald's newest CD. Other recordings include Fine and Dandy, Myths And Hymns, Parade, Songs For a New World, Weird Romance, Chess, Oklahoma!, Windflowers: The Music of Jerome Moross, Fred Hersch's CD Two Hands, Ten Voices, It's only Life, the songs of John Bucchino, and the cast album of Dream True by Tina Landau and Ricky Ian Gordon.

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