Advertisement
Advertisement

Charlie Puth, now on tour, a teen-pop star who loves sneaking elements of jazz into his songs

Charlie Puth performs on NBC’s Today show at Rockefeller Plaza on Friday, July 20, 2018, in New York.
(Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
Share

It’s been three years since singer-songwriter Charlie Puth rose to prominence with “See You Again,” his 2015 collaboration with hip-hop star Wiz Khalifa from the soundtrack to the hit action movie “Furious 7.”

Since then, Puth has become a pop sensation in his own right with a series of catchy hits that include “Attention,” “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” “Marvin Gaye” and “One Call Away.” Make that, a pop sensation with a large teen-aged audience and an abiding love for jazz.

Or, as the keyboard-playing Puth put it at an April press conference in Los Angeles to promote “Voicenotes,” his second album: “The whole album is jazz disguised as pop music. I’ve established a vibe where my music, it might lean adult in a way, but I still have 12-year-olds, teenagers, pre-teenagers — they are all singing the music. And that makes me the happiest guy ever because I’m secretly ‘edumacating’ them, whether they like it or not.”

A New Jersey native, Puth is a 2013 graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, one of the nation’s top jazz training grounds. One of his dreams, he has said a number of times, is to collaborate with jazz keyboard legends Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea.

There’s little on either of Puth’s two soft-rock and blue-eyed-soul-drenched albums that would captivate Corea, Hancock or anyone who doesn’t consider Babyface and Bruno Mars the qualitative equivalents of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. But if Puth — who performs here Monday at Mattress Firm Amphitheatre — can bring a broader chordal and harmonic range to his sleek pop and blue-eyed soul music, more power to him.

2018 Honda Civic Tour presents Charlie Puth, with Hailee Steinfeld

When: 7:30 p.m. Monday

Where: Mattress Firm Amphitheatre, 2050 Entertainment Circle, Chula Vista

Tickets: $52-$79, plus service charges

Phone: (800) 753-4000

Online: livenation.com

george.varga@sduniontribune.com

Twitter @georgevarga

Advertisement