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A Crooner Who Woos With Modesty, Humor and More Than a Little Swing

Michael Bublé wants the world to know that just because he is a swinging crooner from the old school, he is not a good little mama’s boy looking to please the grown-ups by singing their music. That’s why he called his third studio album “Call Me Irresponsible,” he joked from the stage of Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday evening.

“Call Me Irresponsible” is also the title of the standard by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen that was a hit for Frank Sinatra and Jack Jones in 1963. And on Tuesday Mr. Bublé, accompanied by a 14-piece band, punched it out with a buoyant good cheer that turned it into a personal declaration of independence by a guy’s guy with few axes to grind.

A 31-year-old Canadian who is a protégé of the producer David Foster and of Paul Anka, Mr. Bublé, now a major pop star, is no hothouse flower who as a boy locked himself in a music room with a Victrola and a stack of sheet music. His suit and tie on Tuesday evening didn’t prevent him from playing the cutup. He may be catnip to women, but he also connects to men in a buddy-buddy sort of way.

He did an extended riff on manliness that included an affectionate, dead-on imitation of the early Elvis singing, “That’s All Right.” Horsing around with his musicians, he picked up a trombone and tooted out some phrases of “Try a Little Tenderness.” It all led to a musical joke about masculinity, as Mr. Bublé sang the Village People anthem “Y.M.C.A.” The audience didn’t seem to get it.

It didn’t matter much, because Mr. Bublé, like Harry Connick Jr., is a natural entertainer. Unlike Mr. Connick, who has a less musical vocal timbre and much deeper jazz roots, Mr. Bublé is not inclined to wow an audience; he’d rather befriend it. Near the end of the concert, he talked about his relatively humble background as the son of a salmon fisherman in a close-knit family.

No less a personage than Tony Bennett, the unofficial chairman of the board since Sinatra’s death, has already hailed Mr. Bublé as the best young male singer carrying on the pre-rock tradition. I agree. Mr. Connick may be a phenomenal musical talent, but he spreads himself too thin across the show business spectrum, and on his spotty albums wears too many hats. Mr. Bublé is sensible enough not to squander his gifts by trying to be all things to all people all the time; his ego is in check.

Although the bulk of his repertory consists of standards, his approach to pop is distinctly contemporary in attitude. He slides comfortably from classic swing standards to pop-country to Latin American pop to pop-soul without indulging in stylistic contortions. His current hit, “Everything,” which he wrote with Alan Chang (his musical director) and Amy Foster-Gillies, may not be a pop classic, but it is breezy and tuneful.

The concert’s outstanding number (and also a high point of Mr. Bublé’s album) was his passionate pop-swing version of “Me and Mrs. Jones,” the 1972 Billy Paul megahit celebrating the joys of an adulterous affair. Without bending its phrases badly out of shape, Mr. Bublé built it to a peak of crowing delight, his soulful melismas riding on blasts of punctuation from the band’s powerful horn section. He mischievously dedicated the number to the young women in the audience who cheated on their husbands.

The one questionable number was “Try a Little Tenderness,” the early-’30s standard that Otis Redding gave an undeserved second life in 1966 with a burning soul version so fervent and abject that its sheer passion obscured its sexist lyric. The song has a pretty tune. If its image of a wife “weary” from “wearing the same shabby dress” made sense during the Depression, the blanket assertion about women that “love is their whole happiness” is condescending.

When sung without irony the song reads like cynical advice whispered by one man to another about how to keep a woman in her place. You can be pretty certain that there wasn’t a woman in the well-dressed upscale audience who would be caught dead wearing anything shabby.