By Chris Varias
The Cincinnati Enquirer

An armada of Jeep Cherokees, each bearing a Miami University sticker in the rear window, descended upon Corryville Thursday night. It was a sign that there's a new John Mayer on the scene.

Jason Mraz is his name, and like Mayer, he's a rising star thanks to an initial grassroots buzz among college fraternity and sorority types.

Mraz and Mayer share that same original fan base, and there are a couple of other similarities between the two. For instance, they're both singer-songwriters, and the same producer worked on each of their breakout albums.

But during a two-hour set at a sold-out Bogart's, Mraz proved to be of a different style than the bluesy, poppy Mayer.

One of Mraz's rapped-sung lyrics said it best: "It's all about the wordplay, all about the sound in the tone of my voice."

Mraz is all about wordplay, and he's also wordy. He is all about the sound in the tone of his voice, and when he's not rap-singing, he's scatting. Somewhere on the back of the concert ticket, amid all the small-print rules and regulations, it should have stated: "Warning: Rapping Singer-Songwriter Advisory, with a chance of Scatting."

But the biggest problem was neither the rapping nor the scatting. It was the wordiness. As a lyricist, Mraz doesn't know when to cut himself off. Some of the songs might have been OK if 95 percent of the lyrics had been eliminated.

Because of his long-winded ways, there was really no need for Mraz to bring along his four-man band, which provided bland funk-rock backing. The songs Mraz performed alone with his acoustic guitar sounded no different than those done with band. That's because an endless string of singing-rapping-scatting dominated the proceedings. If we must say something nice, Mraz could be commended for not running out of breath.

Mraz played most everything from his album Waiting for My Rocket to Come, and all of those songs were well-received. But there was a spike in the crowd's enthusiasm on those several occasions when he teased a cover song in the middle of a performance of one of his own tunes.

He went to Michael Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" on back-to-back songs, probably for the chance to perform the scat-like chant of "Ma Ma Se, Ma Ma Sa, Ma Ma Coo Sa."

E-mail cvarias@enquirer.com