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Rev. Billy C. Wirtz
So the guy sitting at the electric piano -- the guy who looks like Nick Nolte's wild-haired, goateed, deranged brother -- shoves piece after piece of a sub roll into his mouth and continues to sing, the words growing more and more garbled until eventually they take on a resonance that seems bizarrely authentic to the idiom. It's the singer's way of demonstrating how he had an epiphany as a young man about how blues singers achieved their soulful intonations.

In fact, the song is called "How I Learned to Sing the Blues (The Wonder Bread of You)."

It was just another one of the zany music lessons imparted Friday night at Jammin' Java by the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz, arguably the best rhythm and blues comic working today. In a Wirtz show the puns fly as fast as the notes from the piano as the former Washington resident (now based in Florida) plays masterly boogie-woogie and barrelhouse riffs while making social commentary with trenchant lyrics.

An alarming number of verbally dexterous one-liners punctuated "Mennonite Surf Party," "What I Used to Do All Night" and "I Got Female Problems," a new one he read from a notebook to try out on the venue's audience (verdict: it's a keeper). Wirtz's throwaway gags would be show-stopping punch lines in anyone else's act, but Wirtz glides right over them like a revved-up Robin Williams at a Steinway.

The lyrics may be for laughs, but the music is serious business, and Wirtz, a music journalist who also teaches children about blues history in a school program, pays his respects to the genre with impressively deft playing.

-- Buzz McClain