Customer Reviews

Classics

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sure, the guy's got a whole bunch of albums out, covering all different parts of his career, all kinds of collaborators, but this is the gold mine, the lodestar. This is what you're looking for - it's all the best songs (up to when the album was recorded, of course, so missing a few nuggets like "Quality Time" and "Catbird Seat"), performed with great elan and style by Dave and a solid bass and drums. The focus is on the wonderful songs and Dave's unmatchable piano playing, and of course there's that fabulous Frishberg croak to navigate you through this fanciful and festive effluvia. Sure, the songs are unclassifiable, the language is some sort of strange post-bop hipster jive, but there's so much heart and talent and prodigious prestidigitation and simple love for the art of songwriting and music that the work easily transcends the "jazz" and "cabaret" labels that get affixed to it. But I'm not telling you what you don't already know - the guy's one of a kind, and the kind is not likely to reproduce, so pick this up and dig it. He is hip, he's no square.

I discovered David Frishberg by sheer accident, and he's become one of my favorite jazz vocalists. His music will crack you up, make you cry or just mellow you out, depending on where you are. As a transplanted New Yorker living in LA, his songs have a special meaning for me. If I ever met him, I'd thank him for writing music that makes life a little bit more tolerable.

Dave Frishberg is a quirky genius who seems to fall somewhere between Eddie Jefferson, Mose Allison and Mark Murphy...

His lyrics entertain, his songs swing with a cool bop sensibility, and as the critics rightfully say, he can raise a whole gamut of emotions.

The song that won me over to him was "I'm Hip".... click on the sample and dig it, and I think you'll instantly be won over, because as the lyrics go, "he's hip, he's no square, he's alert, he's awake, he's aware..."

If you enjoy his works, be sure to check out a bit of Eddie Jefferson (Check out his "Things Are Getting Better" CD) and Lambert Hendrix and Ross (anything with Twisted), and if you're in the mood for beat 101, check out the RHINO Beat Generation boxed set... Frishberg will probably put you in the mood.

There are some semi-recondite performers whose work is so influential that hearing them brings a thousand other sounds and performers suddenly into better focus--Mose Allison, obviously--and Frishberg is a part of that pantheon. This is exactly the collection we're promised--no mischievous surprises among the titles, and with the unfortunate omission of songs like "Peel Me A Grape," which has been done widely but never as simply or dryly as its composer knows to deliver it--so the listener should be either a newcomer or (like me) just changing formats. May someone carry the torch of making this quiet, concentrated music heard after Jonathan Schwartz is gone....

he's in a class all by himself. Nobody writes songs like him, but I bet Randy Newman wishes he could! And his piano playing is sublime................