Jazz is the kind of music I listen to when I need to get away from the rest of my music collection. I can only listen to so much Icelandic metal, so much Lo-fi indie post-punk rock, so much Cher…I mean, Bob Dylan, before I just get tired.  I go to jazz when I need to close my eyes and quiet the world.  I go to jazz to hear Nina Simone wail while her band hits any note they feel like, or Thelonious Monk to hear the best pianist that ever bebop’d his way out of North Carolina. I listen to it to hear the romance of a good vocalist, whose band are the arms and legs of softly played notes that just breathe.

And now, I listen to John Pizzarelli.

“I think the lucky part is that I learned the repertoire, I worked with a lot of people twenty years older than me. They introduced me to the songs and not just the song writers,” Pizzarelli said.  The Jazz guitarist/vocalist is reflecting on how he learned his trade back in his 20.”

“I found out about the history of the music, I was soaking it all in and not really knowing what it was. Learning all that, [the] information started coming back to me‚” Pizzarelli said.

Striking out on his own at 20, Pizzarelli’s travels over 25 years later will bring him to Stewart Theatre, Wednesday night at 8pm. It’s hard to doubt the man’s massive catalogue, which has seen a new Pizzarelli album every year for the last 20-some years. “Prolific” doesn’t even seem to cover it.

“As a Jazz artist it’s not that hard. I think there’s so much material, mostly as a vocalist,” Pizzarelli said. “It’s a pretty good world to choose material from. There’s so much of it. If you really do your homework, you can find tons of material. If I was writing my own material it’d take longer, but my tours are mostly record generated. When you make another record, you go on tour.”

Pizzarelli is known for using a wealth of material from artists like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and even The Beatles. His latest album, With A Song In My Heart, looks at the body of work of the Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Grammy, Pulitzer Prize winning Richard Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and it’s this album that will make up the second half of his performance here on campus.

“We’ll play pretty much the entire record within the evening,” Pizzarelli said. “We break the evening up into two halves. We play sort of a summation of material of the 18 records from all that time, and then we’ll concentrate on the things from the Rodgers record.”

Part of the love he has for jazz is simply genetics.  His father is Bucky Pizzarelli, the 83 year old jazz guitarist who is still putting out records to this day. I asked how much that had to do with how he got into the industry.

“I think it’s just…for me I was lucky because my father was in the business,” said Pizzarelli. “I was in the family business, but I could still stand on my own feet.”

His talent, more than anything, seems to have gotten him this far. He spent ten years just playing bars, night clubs and anywhere else he could find to get his music out there.

“I think the thing that was most important was the concerts,” Pizzarelli said. “I always treated them importantly, they all had the same significance to me. You try to find your voice, and also realize the value of… knowing your material and trusting it.”

Jazz is not about over thinking things like style and execution. Jazz is all about taking you to a place, a moment in time, where there’s nothing but you and the music. That’s the way it should be with any good music, and that’s the way it is with Pizzarelli.