Romping in Louis’ backyard

When most singers revisit Tin Pan Alley tunes, they reject the verse — the rhyming patter that precedes the chorus — as too corny.

Trumpeter and vocalist Bria Skonberg, Friday’s headliner at the East Lansing Summer Solstice Jazz Festival, likes to pull the verse out of the attic and twirl it like grandma’s pearls.

Skonberg, 31, blends a post-jazz, rock-savvy restlessness with her first love — the virtuosic, old-time party jazz most people associate with Louis Armstrong.

Skonberg’s version of “Tea for Two” rescues a brilliant nugget of verse that sums up her musical credo: “I’m discontented/with homes that I rented/so I have invented/my own.” She rolls the words out like candy, a hard-shelled life lesson with a sugary rhyme center.

“That’s an old school sensibility, to learn the verses of songs,” Skonberg said. “They set up the entire story. It can take a song you’ve heard a million times, like ‘Tea for Two,’ and make it new again.”

To give the tune even more of a spin, she bumps the first chorus into an odd seven beats to the bar, nearly spilling the tea in your lap. “It’s a little bit of tension and relief,” she said. “Once we start swinging, it’s back in four, and we’re swinging, and we stay there.”

Skonberg writes her own material, takes a sharp new nutcracker to old chestnuts like “Tea for Two” and “Come On-a My House” and folds rock songs like Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” into the mix. While playing Louis Armstrong’s raucous 1920s-era “King of the Zulus,” she might clip a microphone to the bell of her trumpet, activate a guitar effects pedal and bring Jimi Hendrix to the party.

“Jazz was the rock star music — the really popular music of the 1920s and ‘30s,” Skonberg said. “I’m lucky that I got an early education in that style. People are taking that same sensibility now and bringing that forward.”

All her life, she has associated music, including jazz, with fun. As a young musician, she was caught up in the collective camaraderie of traditional jazz at annual Dixieland jazz festivals in her hometown of Chilliwack, British Columbia.

“We saw professionals playing at high levels and being really engaging and entertaining,” she said. “It was a fun, social atmosphere.”

The festivals introduced her to the music of Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton in living color.

“It wasn’t like I was listening to a scratchy recording of it, which gets lost in translation for young listeners,” she said. “I was able to see it performed live.”

With two ways to express herself, Skonberg can take the music in a lot of directions.

She projects a confident, virtuosic side on trumpet and shows a playful, vulnerable side as a singer.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said. “The challenge is to find the material that supports both of those voices.”

Skonberg has played with many of New York’s top jazz musicians — she also did a turn with Dixieland acolyte Woody Allen at Allen’s weekly Cafe Carlyle jam — but one gig stands out for her. The Louis Armstrong House, where Arm- strong lived from 1943 until his death in 1971 and now a museum, invited Skonberg to play at a summer series of concerts last year.

“One of the biggest thrills I’ve had to date is getting to play a concert in Louis’ back yard,” she said. “It wasn’t intimidating. It was inspiring. People come with lawn chairs, there’s a barbecue.”

Skonberg met MSU Jazz Studies director Rodney Whitaker, who is also artistic director of the Summer Solstice Festival, at Centrum Jazz Festival in Port Townsend, Wash.

“We look to the past, but there are some living legends of today, and he’s one of them,” Skonberg said.

She has also frequently teamed up with trombonist/composer Wycliffe Gordon, who spent several years at MSU in the 2000s.

“There’s a level of musicianship there that is so playful and yet they all have their own strong voices,” Skonberg said. “They’re not trying to emulate the past; they’re just being themselves. Rodney Whitaker is Rodney Whitaker. Wycliffe isn’t anybody else. Those are the people I look up to at this point in the game.”

With role models like those, the weight of jazz tradition doesn’t daunt Skonberg.

“The trick to that is incorporating yourself in the music,” she said. “It’s the same 12 notes we’re all playing, but nobody else knows your story. At this point, as far as I know, I’m the only trumpet player from Chilliwack who’s been playing New Orleans-style jazz in New York City.”

Summer Solstice Jazz Festival

Friday, June 19-Saturday, June 20 FREE Downtown East Lansing eljazzfest.com