Mary Cleere Haran, Richard Rodney Bennett - The Memory Of All That: Gershwin On Broadway & In Hollywood

Styles: Vocal, Cabaret
Year: 1999
File: MP3@256K/s
Time: 49:42
Size: 91,1 MB
Art: Front

(2:39)  1. The Real American Folk Song
(2:55)  2. 'S Wonderful
(4:05)  3. Do It Again
(2:35)  4. Nashville Nightingale
(4:07)  5. The Man I Love
(2:16)  6. I'll Build A Stairway To Paradise
(2:00)  7. I'd Rather Charleston
(3:08)  8. Funny Face
(4:03)  9. Sweet & Low Down / Fidgety Feet / Fascinatin' Rhythm
(5:34) 10. Someone To Watch Over Me
(4:06) 11. Boy, What Love Has Done To Me
(2:15) 12. They All Laughed
(3:28) 13. Love Walked In
(3:35) 14. Who Cares?
(2:49) 15. Lady, Be Good / Somebody Loves Me

The Memory of All That: Gershwin on Broadways and in Hollywood showcases timeless Gershwin classics such as 'S Wonderful, Funny Face, Fascinatin'Rhythm, and Lady, Be Good, as well as rarely performed material from the rich Gershwin songbook. The result is pure Gershwin and it's Haran and Bennett at their best, from their saucy rendition of I'd Rather Charleston and the delightfully whimsical They All Laughed to the soulful yearning of The Man I Love and the ragtime-inspired The Real American Folk Song. This studio recording captures the magic of Mary Cleere Haran and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett's critically acclaimed Gershwin Centenary Celebration performance at New York's legendary Algonquin Hotel.

Mary Cleere Haran has built a well-deserved reputation as a top-notch interpreter of the classic American songbook, a minimalist stylist wonderfully in tune with her material. On this Gershwin collection, she and pianist Bennett balance classics ("The Man I Love", "Someone to Watch over Me") and obscure nuggets such as "Nashville Nightingale" and especially "I'd Rather Charleston," on which Haran wickedly mimicks Adele Astaire's no-nonsense nasal tones. While it's hard to single out any particular number, "Funny Face" might represent the singer at her best, her voice a silken thread delicately, lovingly wrapped around each word. Unfortunately the recording doesn't include Haran's funny, erudite between-songs patter, which those lucky enough to attend one of her shows delight in almost as much as in her flawless interpretations. ~ Elisabeth Vincentelli -  Editorial Reviews http://www.amazon.com/The-Memory-All-That-Hollywood/dp/B00000JI71

Personnel: Mary Cleere Haran (vocals); Richard Rodney Bennett (vocals, piano); Linc Milliman (bass).

The Memory Of All That: Gershwin On Broadway...

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Mary Cleere Haran - This Funny World: Sings Lyrics By Hart

Styles: Vocal, Cabaret
Year: 1995
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 61:58
Size: 142,2 MB
Art: Front

(4:18)  1. Manhattan
(3:06)  2. I Married An Angel
(3:32)  3. I'll Tell The Man In The Street
(2:30)  4. Way Out West
(5:06)  5. Everybody Loves You - Sleepyhead
(3:51)  6. With A Song In My Heart
(3:06)  7. Chicago
(5:04)  8. A Tree In The Park
(4:20)  9. Falling In Love With Love
(4:09) 10. Easy To Remember
(3:11) 11. A Lady Must Live
(3:56) 12. This Funny World
(3:45) 13. Wait Till You See Him
(3:10) 14. Everything I've Got
(4:36) 15. My Friend The Night
(4:12) 16. The Blue Room

Mary Cleere Haran emerged in the 1980s' revival of interest in classic pop and cabaret singing. The second of eight children in an Irish Catholic family, she was the daughter of a professor of theater and film at San Francisco City College and grew up immersed in the music and movies of the 1930s and '40s, forming a permanent attachment to the songs of the classic pop songwriters of that era. She began singing as a teenager and moved to New York in the late '70s, where she made her Broadway debut playing a band singer in The 1940s Radio Hour in 1979. 

She toured with the show, then settled in New Jersey and began performing the club circuit. She made her official cabaret debut at the Ballroom in New York in 1988, where she was acclaimed by critics. She began to appear in other prestigious clubs in major cities, and made her recording debut in 1992 with the album There's a Small Hotel (Live at the Algonquin) on Columbia Records. Also busy as a researcher and television producer for PBS, Haran continued her live performance career while making regular recordings This Heart of Mine: Classic Movie Songs of the Forties (1994), This Funny World: The Songs of Lorenz Hart (1995), Pennies from Heaven (1998), and The Memory of All That: Gershwin on Broadway. Crazy Rhythm was issued in fall 2000. ~ William Ruhlmann http://www.allmusic.com/artist/mary-cleere-haran-mn0000859476/biography

Personnel: Mary Cleere Haran (vocals); Richard Rodney Bennett (arranger, piano); Fred Sherry (cello); Ted Nash (tenor saxophone); Bill Charlap (piano); David Finck (bass); Tim Horner (drums).

This Funny World

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Mary Cleere Haran - Crazy Rhythm

Styles: Vocal, Cabaret
Year: 2002
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 56:05
Size: 128,8 MB
Art: Front

(4:56)  1. Medley: Sidewalks of New York/Manhattan
(3:23)  2. Medley - Crazy Rythm, Runnin' Wild
(4:30)  3. Tree In The Park
(1:54) 4. When The Midnight Choo Choo Leaves For Alabam
(2:28)  5. Pack Up Your Sinners And Go To The Devil
(3:28)  6. What'll I Do
(2:15)  7. They're Blaming The Charlston
(4:00)  8. The Half Of It Dearie Blues
(4:25)  9. It Had To Be You
(2:02) 10. Monkey Doodle Doo
(4:10) 11. Harlem On My Mind
(3:26) 12. Poor Little Rich Girl
(2:24) 13. There'll Be Some Changes Made
(4:55) 14. Moanin'Low
(2:50) 15. Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone
(4:51) 16. Lullaby of Broadway

Early in Mary Cleere Haran's dazzling new cabaret show, ''Crazy Rhythm: Manhattan in the 20's,'' at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, she assures us that the distant decade of jazz, flappers and speakeasies was not a dream. Moments later, as she and her invaluable accompanist and vocal partner, Richard Rodney Bennett, sail into ''Crazy Rhythm,'' a frantically upbeat Charleston by Joseph Meyer, Roger Wolfe Kahn and Irving Caesar, from the 1928 show ''Here's How,'' the essence of what we call the Roaring 20's is revealed to have been a beat. Buoyant and high-stepping, it was a rhythm propelled by a hysterical urge to throw off the chains of the past, live for the moment and if possible become airborne. As she has done in earlier cabaret shows, especially last year's brilliant and moving evocation of the flaming talent that was George Gershwin, Ms. Haran has created an impressionistic mosaic of an era by blending songs, witty quotations and show business lore with funny self-explanatory asides. Among the personalities she sketches are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and the brassy speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan.

Leading ''Crazy Rhythm's'' list of musical revelations are its numbers that reveal the friskier, racier side of the young Irving Berlin. ''Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil,'' a comic gem from the 1922 edition of his ''Music Box Revue,'' is a hilarious pitch for the superior life style of the netherworld, a place awash with jazz and where no ''old reformers in heaven'' are making you ''go to bed at 11.'' It is matched in lighthearted subversion by ''The Monkey Doodle-Doo,'' from the 1925 Marx Brothers show ''The Cocoanuts,'' in which Berlin gleefully alludes to the Scopes trial and the fad for injecting monkey glands to restore flagging virility. The song caps a smart monologue in which Ms. Haran suggests how deeply the writings of Freud and Darwin influenced the era's erotic climate. Anyone who thinks that the denunciation of contemporary pop by finger-pointing moralists is a relatively recent phenomenon should appreciate Berlin's ''They're Blaming the Charleston,'' an irresistible upbeat retort to 1920's cultural alarmists.

Grounding this merriment are classic ballads that Ms. Haran delivers in her signature style, stripping away the sentimentality to uncover the lyrics' private, heartfelt truths with an unadorned simplicity. ''It Had to Be You,'' a number most singers breeze through without much thought is slowed down and delivered as a pensive reflection on romantic destiny. Berlin's ''Harlem on My Mind,'' inflected with a period nasality, is a tour de force of restrained belting. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/10/arts/cabaret-review-mary-cleere-haran-jazz-baby-roaring-through-the-20-s.html

Personnel: Mary Cleere Haran (vocals); Richard Rodney Bennett (arranger, piano, background vocals); Linc Milliman (bass).

Crazy Rhythm

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Mary Cleere Haran - There's A Small Hotel

Bitrate: 320K/s
Time: 64:43
Size: 148.2 MB
Styles: Cabaret
Year: 1992
Art: Front

[0:48] 1. Introduction
[3:50] 2. Let's Do It
[2:48] 3. Interlude: Algonquin/Cole Porter
[3:17] 4. I Concentrate On You
[3:08] 5. Interlude: Regarding Rodgers & Hart
[4:23] 6. There's A Small Hotel
[4:35] 7. Personality
[7:30] 8. Interlude: Band Introduction Charles Boyer And Casbah
[4:50] 9. It Was Written In The Stars
[3:15] 10. Waters Of March (Aguas De Marzo)
[4:08] 11. Fine Romance Interlude: Dick Cavett/Dorothy Fields
[3:41] 12. I Won't Dance
[4:09] 13. Remind Me
[3:26] 14. (I'll See You In) Cuba
[0:53] 15. Interlude: Maurice Chevalier/Jeanette MacDonald
[5:02] 16. Lover
[1:27] 17. Interlude: Dressing Up
[3:24] 18. The Way You Look Tonight

An entertaining cabaret singer who swings when it fits the song, Mary Cleere Haran is heard in fine form on this live set from the Algonquin Hotel in 1992. Her talking between songs is entertaining, and, even though her repertoire is full of war-horses, her enthusiasm and appealing voice makes most of the material sound fairly fresh. This CD will probably be difficult to locate but cabaret collectors will want it. ~ Scott Yanow

Recorded live at the Algonquin Hotel, New York City, New York.

Mary Cleere Haran (vocals); Lee Musiker (piano); David Finck (bass); Dave Ratajczak (drums).

There's A Small Hotel

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