I’m honoring singer and songwriter Boz Scaggs when I say he’s one of the great yacht rockers. Much like Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Scaggs comes from a place where sophistication and R&B coexist naturally, which means yacht rock explains only part of Scaggs’ mastery.
His 1976 breakthrough album Silk Degrees is as slick as the title implies, but it’s also tough — doing the real lido shuffle can get kind of low down, to reference two of the record’s big hits. The yacht-rock moment began to pass in the early ’80s, but Scaggs tunes like 1980’s “Jojo” and “Breakdown Dead Ahead” are brilliant slices of pop R&B. Scaggs, who is 81, is in fine form on his new release Detour, on which he takes a side road to essay standards from the Great American Songbook. The route includes walking in the voiceprints of singers as varied as Frank Sinatra, Cleo Laine and João Gilberto, all of whom have recorded versions of the songs Scaggs covers on Detour. He nails Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Once I Loved” — his singing exudes cool, bittersweet regret. He also nails his own “I’ll Be Long Gone,” which he first recorded way back in 1969.
7 p.m. at The Pinnacle
910 Exchange Lane
