Styles: Saxophone Jazz
Year: 2019
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 65:33
Size: 151,9 MB
Art: Front
(4:48) 1. Rhode Island Is Famous for You
(5:33) 2. Ev'rything I Love
(6:11) 3. Swingin' Down the Lane
(3:16) 4. The Last Dance
(4:37) 5. Walk It Like You Talk It
(5:18) 6. Who Can I Turn To
(5:01) 7. The Last Best Year
(5:32) 8. I Know Your Heart (Like the Back of My Hand)
(4:16) 9. Poor Little Rhode Island
(5:46) 10. Happy You Happened to Me
(7:07) 11. There's a Rainbow 'round My Shoulder
(4:22) 12. Out of Rangoon
(3:40) 13. Where Do You Start?
There was a moment a few years ago, when the late Jim Czak, recording engineer supreme and, quite literally, the best friend of everybody who ever played or even listened to jazz in New York, passed along to me some interesting news regarding The Children’s Television Workshop and Sesame Street. The long-running children’s series had, for most of its run, employed a regular staff of studio musicians who were also outstanding jazz players. Chief among these was Mike Renzi, one of the most prodigiously gifted pianists anyone has ever heard, and an outstanding jazz improviser, in spite of how throughout his considerable career, he has played comparatively little instrumental jazz. Famously, he accompanied nearly all of the top singers of all time, and when he wasn’t accompanying Mel Torme, he was playing, arranging, and composing for Big Bird. But the word was that PBS, after many decades, was, as is often put rather euphemistically, “going in a different direction,” music-wise. In other words, the staff of all-star jazz musicians, led by Mr. Renzi, essentially lost their leases on Sesame Street and were importuned to pack up and move to other pastures. But the Cookie Monster’s loss was bound to be a major gain for the rest of us who love good music. It was regrettable that Mike was losing his “day job,” but we knew that we could look forward to seeing his bearded face (unlike myself, he doesn’t seem to have aged a day since I first started hearing him in the 1970s) and hear his remarkable, distinctive keyboard touch in the jazz clubs and cabaret rooms of Manhattan again. We were right. Mike then spent several years on the road with Tony Bennett (that’s him on the mega-platinum team up with Lady Gaga), recalling the period when he seemed to be working with Torme, Lena Horne, and Peggy Lee all virtually simultaneously, and has also been heard with some of the newer classier singers, such as Lisa Remick and his protegee, Nicolas King. Still, there are barely a handful of purely instrumental jazz albums that spotlight Mike Renzi, like the 1986 Soft Lights & Sweet Music : Gerry Mulligan Meets Scott Hamilton and his own A Beautiful Friendship (1987) both of which feature the great rhythm section of their age: Mr. Renzi, bassist Jay Leonhart, and drummer Grady Tate. Kudos then, to Harry Allen, the tenor saxophone savant, who exhibits as much taste in his musical collaborators as he does in selecting songs, for teaming up with Mr. Renzi on a recording that at once re-establishes Mr. Renzi’s bonafides as a swing player, and, at the same time, gives us some of the best playing ever documented by Mr. Allen, whose recorded output is long and filled with treasures.
The net result of Harry Allen’s decision to work with Mike Renzi is that Mr. Allen sounds better than ever; I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for him to rise any higher in my estimation, but somehow he has. Too often when we talk about Mr. Allen’s playing, we tend to pigeonhole him as a “swing tenor,” and while that is, admittedly, a rather cozy pigeonhole to be stuck in, he’s actually so much more than that. Among other things, Mr. Allen has developed an entire side career in working with Brazilian groups, and when he gets anywhere near a samba beat (as in here in Cole Porter’s “Everything I Love”), the foundations are much more rooted in the 1960s than the 1940s, more Stan Getz than Ben Webster, though it should be stressed that both of those jazz icons are primarily points of comparison rather than imitation. Here, more than ever, Mr. Allen’s sound is too timeless and too universal to be hitched to any one particular style or musical point-of-departure. That feeling is underscored by the presence of five new and original songs, more than usual for one of his albums, including two of his own, “The Last Best Year” and “Happy You Happened To Me.” The former is a slow ballad, and though I haven’t heard the words (by singer Hilary Gardner, she of the Duchess vocal trio), but Allen plays it so expressively, and with such a great sense of narrative, that you feel like you’ve absorbed the entire story even without them. The other new numbers, by Bruce Brown and Roger Frankham (both individually and as a team) include a jazz waltz (“Out of Rangoon”) and a funk number (“Walk It Like You Talk It”) both of which, I hasten to add, are well outside of the realm of 1940s-style 4/4 swing. The remaining tunes, are, in Mr. Allen’s best tradition, a thoughtful mix of jazz standards and show tunes, including two songs about Rhode Island, one (“Rhode Island is Famous for You” by Schwartz & Dietz, from the revue Inside U.S.A.) rarely heard in an instrumental jazz context and the other (“Poor Little Rhode Island” by Cahn & Styne, from the 1945 film Carolina Blues) rare in any context. (This is, in fact, only the second recording of the song that I have, the other being by Guy Lombardo. This one is better.) The two Rhode Island songs, one of which gives the album its title, and the recording location (at Stable Sound, located in the Vanderbilt Stables in Portsmouth, RI, a short drive from Newport) are included in honor of Mr. Renzi’s background in that state.
Mr. Allen also “sings” two classic melodies in the shadow of his predecessors, not saxophonists this time, but outstanding popular singers, Al Jolson (who introduced “There’s a Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder,” and got his name on it) and Frank Sinatra (who commissioned and published “The Last Dance”), which is a slow and romantic dance indeed. “Who Can I Turn To” is also associated with male singers, including Anthony Newley (who composed and introduced it), Sammy Davis, Jr., and most of all, Tony Bennett; Mr. Allen’s treatment is exuberant, as well as probingly emotional. Even as Mr. Allen surprises us by moving forward into whole new areas for him, he continues to confirm his place as one of the great interpreters of the classic songbook - and his place as a singer, in the purest sense of the word, is underscored by the presence of the same brilliant collaborator who did so much for Mel, Lena, and Peggy not to mention Mr. Bennett and even Sinatra himself. The set ends with “Where Do You Start,” simply because nothing could follow it; this may be the most perfect, moving performance of the Mandel-Bergman song - a contemporary classic if ever there was one - that I’ve ever heard. Done strictly as a tenor-and-piano duet, the song almost works better without actually hearing the words again, especially since we already all know them so well. Of all the times I’ve heard this song, I never noticed the central irony of the title before, that one of the best-known statements ever about the end of a relationship uses the word “start” in the title, reminding us that, in its own way, an ending is also a beginning. Here’s hoping that the “beautiful friendship,” to quote the title of virtually the only album so far under Mr. Renzi’s name, of Harry Allen and Mike Renzi is just beginning. ~ Will Friedwald Will Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, VANITY FAIR & PLAYBOY magazine, and is the author of nine books including the award-winning A BIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE TO THE GREAT JAZZ AND POP SINGERS, SINATRA: THE SONG IS YOU, STARDUST MELODIES, TONY BENNETT: THE GOOD LIFE, LOONEY TUNES & MERRIE MELODIES, and JAZZ SINGING. He has written over 600 liner notes for compact discs and received ten Grammy nominations.
Personnel: Harry Hallen - Saxophone; Paul Del Nero - Bass; Rodney Green - Drums
Rhode Island Is Famous for You
