\n<\/p>\n
\n\tShortly after Charlie Puth took the stage for the first of his four-night residency at Los Angeles\u2019 freshly-opened Blue Note, he shared his intentions with those in attendance and the thousands watching on a TikTok livestream. \u201cWe\u2019re going to play these songs in the original way that I concocted them in my head,\u201d he said. \u201cWhenever I write anything, it comes from a jazz perspective, because I love jazz so much.\u201d (He accented those last words with chameleonic jazz chords to drive the point.) \u201cYou can only put so much into a pop song, but you can trick the listener into appreciating jazz-isms in your pop music, which is something I\u2019ve always taken pride in doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFor the casual listener, Puth has established himself as the sort of outr\u00e9 pop savant whose songs are too meticulously structured to dismiss. Since the release of his 2016 debut album \u201cNine Track Mind,\u201d he\u2019s consistently shaved down the edges of pop convention to approach an idealized version of the earworm, creating tracks so immediate that in one way or another, they thrust their way into mainstream consciousness, trends be damned. It\u2019s happened regularly over the past decade, from the love-it-or-often-hate-it \u201cMarvin Gaye\u201d to the funk-snapped \u201cHow Long\u201d and \u201cAttention\u201d to the TikTokian \u201cLight Switch,\u201d a song that he materialized in real time on social media to the delight of fans yearning for connection to the outside world amid Covid lockdowns.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut none to the surprise of Puthers, at the heart of his discography is a fundamental understanding of music theory, more specifically jazz composition. One of Puth\u2019s greatest talents is constructing songs that sound simple but are powered by dynamic chord switches and deceptively complicated harmonies. It\u2019s no secret that he has perfect pitch \u2014 it\u2019s become a running gag at this point \u2014\u00a0but it\u2019s his fundamental understanding of subtle tonal shifts and modulation that deepens his music, creating a sense of propulsion that rooms of songwriters regularly attempt to chase.<\/p>\n
\n\tPuth often does this all on his own, lifting the curtain on his process on social media and, more recently, becoming pop\u2019s artist-in-residence with his Professor Puth series. (His latest manifesto on how AI could never replace the elasticity of human creativity is worth a watch.) He is, quite frankly, a music nerd. His latest single \u201cChanges,\u201d which he released yesterday and honored with a coronation as the Blue Note set\u2019s closer, is yet another foray into pop\u2019s wilderness, this time landing somewhere between Toto, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. It reveals another color in his crayon box, adapting tropes of 1980s pop to modern times.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd so Puth gave the Blue Note audience a glimpse into the recesses of his mind across his 75-minute set on Thursday night (the first of two performances that evening), transforming his hits and deep cuts into the alternative versions he initially envisioned. \u201cAttention\u201d was presented as a jazz lounge floater, all plucky guitar strings and wobbly bass notes, ultimately concluding with a cappella harmonies alongside his trio of backup singers. Near the end of \u201cBoy,\u201d perhaps his greatest song, he transitioned into the loose, jazz improv groove of Erykah Badu\u2019s \u201cBack in the Day (Puff).\u201d He introduced a breathable cover of New Edition\u2019s \u201cCan You Stand the Rain\u201d as \u201cthe song we wish we all wrote,\u201d Puth-ifying it with his trembling falsetto.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs a showman, he has had extensive practice. He\u2019s played New York City\u2019s Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles\u2019 Greek Theatre, and last year set sail for his \u201cSomething New\u201d tour in Asia. On stage, he\u2019s an adorable ham, so galvanized by the music that he\u2019ll stomp his feet like he\u2019s running in place as a song like \u201cHow Long\u201d segues from the bridge to its explosive chorus. Yet his Blue Note show was a return to form, at least by his account, and he admitted that the tiny club setting made him nervous. \u201cI\u2019m not a new artist anymore, y\u2019all are still with me,\u201d he said. He prefaced a fleshier version of \u201cSuffer\u201d by detailing how he wrote it when he first moved to Los Angeles at an apartment building less than a mile from the venue. \u201cBut I feel like a new artist. These are the stages that I would play in the beginning of my career. I always knew I would do a show like this, it just happened 10 years later.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tMuch has changed for Puth in the past decade. He\u2019s leagues removed from his 2010 EP \u201cOtto Tunes,\u201d a very rough draft of the type of artist he would inevitably become. Yet he\u2019s continuously refined his sound and style to put his years of training into practice. So when Taylor Swift sang that \u201cCharlie Puth should be a bigger artist\u201d on last year\u2019s \u201cThe Tortured Poets Department,\u201d she had a point \u2014 the venues may change, and the sound may evolve, but the one constant is that Puth remains singular in his pursuit of pop excellence.<\/p>\n