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

San Diego Union-Tribune

Aug. 15, 2018 3 PM PT

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

Music

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a double first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”