Varieties of Vuckovich

A showcase of the veteran pianist's seven decades of music-making

The Larry Vuckovich All-Stars

Yoshi's

510 Embarcadero West, Oakland

December 21st, 2025

I last interviewed Larry Vuckovich when we’d just passed the old millennium and the Yugoslavian-born jazz pianist’s sixty-sixth birthday. In perspective of his performance at Jack London Square last month, you do the math. 

Vuckovich and his sextet were doing the time quite well at Yoshi's, in a sure-footed and audience-engaging variety show of jazz styles, worth taking a break from wrapping holiday presents and facilitating extended family banter. For a switch to informational elocution, rare these days at a jazz gig, Vuckovich provided extended introductions and reflections on the nine numbers in his program. 

His group’s first two offerings — “Jumping With Symphony Sid” (by Lester Young) and “Last Train From Overbrook” (by James Moody) — prompted the pianist to talk to the audience about Young and Moody as well as legendary musicians Charlie “Bird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and singer/lyricist Jon Hendricks. In keeping with his long engagement in the music business, dating back to his family’s immigration to San Francisco in the 1950s, Vuckovich had augured his Yoshi’s gig as a “tenor battle” showcasing saxophonists Steve Heckman and Craig Handy. To my way of listening, it was less a battle than a display of differing styles, Handy honing his improvisations more obviously around each song’s melody and chord structure, Heckman more rough-hewn and outside harmonic convention. 

The original lyrics for “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” (translated as “Perhaps” in Desi Armaz’s 1948 version) were intoned by Puerto Rican percussionist Héctor Lugo, who will rejoin Vuckovich on January 10^th at Keys Jazz Bistro. At Yoshi’s, he  romanced this ballad on his keyboard, partnered by Handy on flute and Heckman on suave sax. To make it even more agradable, Lugo enjoined the audience to serve as coro with the refrain, “¡Quizás, solamente quizás!” By contrast, Cedar Walton’s “Midnight Waltz” seemed harmonically barren, but Handy and drummer Jeff Minnieweather found a way to blow some life into it. 

From the first time I heard Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady”, scores of years ago, I found myself underimpressed and annoyed, as if both the Duke and lyricist Irving Mills were trying too hard. But at Yoshi’s, veteran big band vocalist Jamie Davis showed yet again that he can enhance any song, any ensemble, and the response of any audience with his luscious bass-baritone voice and theatrical performance style. He got help from prettily ornamented solos by Handy and Vuckovich. More inherently appealing was Horace Silver’s Latinized “Señor Blues”, which had Heckman doing some of his best work and Davis evoking such sonorous spirits-in-song as the late Gil Scott-Heron, Lou Rawls, and Oscar Brown, Jr. 

After a brief break, Lugo shared a charming Mexican bolero, “La barca”, and Davis sang “Why Not”, composed by Neal Hefti, who’d worked with the Count Basie Orchestra a half-century before Davis did. This arrangement cleaved closer to swing than anything else on the program, with Vuckovich channeling the Count’s skippity keyboard style and fellow Serbian Buca Necak pulsing powerfully on bass. The two tenors sounded out in unison and later traded eights, just before the trademark three-chord Basie finish.

The program reached its own finish with Vuckovich validating his impressive eclecticism via Thelonious Monk’s quirky “Well You Needn’t”, showing he could stretch outside the melody line to good effect, with good-natured support from Heckman and Handy (who interjected a cute quote from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue). Davis’s artful phrasing enhanced his delivery of the words  superfluously added to this tune in the 1970s by Mike Ferro. Monk was well-met with this ensemble at Yoshi’s, but for lyrics he should have stuck to his collaboration with the crafty Jon Hendricks,  aboard a houseboat in Sausalito, back in the day.