Customer Reviews

Glory of Gershwin

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The year after this album was released, Larry Adler came to Australia, and I was privileged to hear him perform these songs with Issy Van Randwyck and a great Aussie jazz band to about 300 people in a small hall in Penrith. It was a wonderful afternoon of music-making, complemented by Larry's atrocious jokes! He began the program playing Summertime with left hand on the piano and right hand holding his harmonica. Fantastic!

Soon after the album was released, I discovered that veteran jazz lovers may not enjoy it as much as I do. I am not sure if it is the shock of hearing rock singers performing in a different genre, or if the performances really are unstylistic and unfaithful to the original ideas of Gershwin. But to this ignorant Aussie, the album is very enjoyable.

Some of the best performances on the album are:
Peter Gabriel's Summertime
Elton John's Someone to Watch Over Me/Our Love Is Here to Stay
Elvis Costello singing But Not For Me
Issy Van Randwyck's delicious version of I'll Build A Stairway to Paradise

I like Larry's performance of Rhapsody in Blue, but at times the harmonica sounds a little thin. But it is pretty good for an 80 year old!

If the names of the performers are more familiar to you than the names of the tunes, this could be a great introduction to some wonderful songs.

One of my favourite CDs.

This is one of my all-time favorites, blending classical Gershwin (my opinion, right up there with Bar-B-Q and freedom as one of America's best exports)with contemporary voices and updated arrangements. For parents of young adults, this is a wonderful introduction CD for expanding the range of music your children might listen to...the artists in many cases are recognisable to them and if they listen to it once, they might get hooked on something beyond 'Top 10' hits! Not the album to buy if interested in just harmonica music, and the Elton John pieces are very weak (but hey, he helped pay for it so he has to be on the album) but very worth the money.

I bought this CD back in 1995 and have been enjoying it ever since. For those of us who grew up with the classics (and by such I do mean Ella and Frank besides Bach and Beethoven) this will be a nice update. Sting's rendition is clever, Elvis Costello's But Not For Me is superb, Peter Gabriel's Summertime is outstanding and when it comes time for the girls every single one shines: Oleta Adams, Kate Bush, Lisa Stansfield (specially Lisa), Cher, Sinead O'Connor and Carly Simon. Courtney Pine's rendition of Summertime, though nice, tends to be repetitive and eventhough I take pride in stating that I am not a Meatloaf fan I can honestly say that he does justice to his somewhat subdued piece. All and all this is a CD that you can rely on to soothe, background and even stress-out a hard days night. Good purchase and nice work if you can get it...

This CD has hits and misses. Fortunately, the hits are so good that they overwhelm the ones that don't make the grade, such as Elton John's numbers. His selections are not only soulless, they go on for way too long. On the bright side, Sinead O'Connor does a fantastic version of "My Man's Gone Now", and that is not easy to admit since I find her to be an extremely unlikeable person. Meat Loaf does a very admirable job at interpreting Gershwin, but by far the best is Oleta Adams's version of "Embraceable You." What a voice!! She is a tremendous vocalist, and it's too bad she is not more popular.

Here's Gershwin like you've never heard it but at the same time, as you've always heard it: this dozen or so fresh interpretations walk a fine line; with only a couple of exceptions, the artists manage to be true to the songs without losing their diverse signature styles. Very few collections of this type are this consistently good. Sting, Cher, Simon and O'Connor are pure magic to listen to. The only clunker is Elton John. "I'd like to add HER initials to my monogram? " oh, please, Elton. Men don't add women's initials to their monogram. This is a woman's song, and given what we know about Elton, the gender changes sit there like a lump of coal. But those shaky gender shifts are not the only things that miss in his version of "Someone to Watch Over Me". Never mind; Cher makes up for it a few cuts later. Unless you want to keep Gershwin frozen in time, you are sure to enjoy this album. Backup for each singer brings continuity with a tricky instrument. The steady wail of a harmonica for almost an entire album could easily get on one's nerves and here, it doesn't. This is a real jewel.

I like George Martin's idea to use contemporary singers to perform music that has become such a big part of American life. Some of the performances in this CD are excellent. Sinead O'Connor is perfectly lonesome and beautiful singing "My Man's Gone Now", Elvis Costello, of course, does an artful rendition of " But Not for Me"--but
the surprises I find are in singers which I do not usually
listen to, who in this format really come through. Cher, who is the ONE
person you need to sing a song with sexy undertones about the
veracity of Biblical traditional stories (maybe Eartha Kitt could be another choice), does a masterful job. I have never liked Carly Simon's music (about the day-to-day problems of wealthy women), but she also becomes one with the music and makes
it her own. Meat Loaf and Jon Bon Jovi do themselves proud, with very good performances of this music from another time. The
female singers in general do an excellent job, and
it appears that the production of their particualr songs helped in this. - Lisa Stansfield, Kate Bush, Oleta Adams, Courtney Pine, Issy Van Randwyck wrap their vocals around the arrangements in the fashion of all of the hundreds of Gershwin songstresses of the past. But the male versions often left something to be desired.
Many sound like part of a different album, out of place, not quite finished. Sting's version of "Nice Work If You Can Get It" is very un-Stinglike, without the polish he puts on his own music. I simply don't like the Elton John version of the medley
" Someone to Watch over Me/Our Love Is Here to Stay"--I actually LIKE Robert Palmer's version of "I Got Rhythm" -but it seems to be totally out of place in the context of the rest of the album.
The best thing about this music is Larry Adler's harmonica, which works as a link between the past world of Gershwin and the modern world of Pop Music.
All in all, when the performances are good--they are very good...Those which are NOT good, seem to need more work. I wish that the
ragged songs could have been polished just a bit, so that the
package would be more rounded and complete.
I recommend Herbie Hancock's Gershwin album, Joni Mitchell does a couple of Jim-Dandy versions of George and Ira's pieces.
I wanted to give this 3 and one half stars, but there is no
place to do that.

I've always been a fan of the brothers Gershwin and their friend Oscar Levant. Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue spoke to me at an early age. I had never heard somone's musical writing so well transformed to instruments. I have to say that my favorite song on this disc is something I have LOATHED all my life. Summertime. I hated this song every time I would hear it. Peter Gabriel has transformed this song. Kate Bush's pouty version of The Man I Love is almost Art Deco in it's rendition. Sting weighs in with a light rendition of Nice Work If You Can Get It. Cher has a very smoky voiced version of It Ain't Necessarily So, and Jon Bon Jovi suprised me with a very good version of How Long Has This Been Going On. The suprise on this disc to me was Somebody Loves Me, by MEATLOAF!!! Meatloaf? Yes, Meatloaf. Who knew he could really sing? The late Robert Palmer and Carly Simon do good versions of their covers too.
This is an excellent disc to sit in your study and work by. Not obtrusive, and a real toe tapper.

My biggest surprise after reading reviews that trashed Elton John's performance of "Someone to Watch../ Love is Here to Stay" was actually listening to the mature Captain Fantastic's track and being very delighted and impressed by his vocal control and inspired interpretation of these songs. Bravo! And shame on those listeners who bring their prejudices about a performer's nationality, sexual orientation, etc. to negatively color their enjoyment of music. Very nice listen, the whole CD. You won't be disappointed.

This album is a flawed but beautiful-sounding colloboration between the legendary producer George Martin, the even more legendary jazz harmonica player Larry Adler, and an assortment of pop singers. The album sounds a lot like of the sort of music Martin did before EMI assigned him 40-plus years ago today to be the Beatles' mentor. All the tracks (14 vocals, 2 instrumentals) are recorded live in the studio with a wonderful orchestra. (You haven't heard such beautiful strings or such lusty horns on a pop record since the late Beatles albums, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Martin used the same players here who played on those Beatles albums.) The singers were obviously forbidden to use their usual studio tricks, with the result that they don't always sound like themselves. Many of them sound very different from their usual selves (Elvis Costello, for example, ends up sounding like a young Brian Wilson) and two or three of them struggle with their intonation. The three big flaws with this project, aside from the uneven intonation are as follows. #1: the album is slightly dull; it has the dusty feeling of those specials your local PBS affiliate runs during fundraising week to get donations from nostalgic baby boomers. #2: several of the greatest tunes have lyrics which were written in what was thought at the time to be authentic African-American dialect; for obvious reasons of political correctness, these songs have been translated back into standard white-speak, which blands out the music quite a bit. #3: there's not enough rock and roll here; Gershwin's music translates quite readily into the rock and roll idiom (as the last half-century's diverse cover versions of "Summertime" so richly demonstrate) but aside from the occasional guitar lick there's not much rock here.

First of all, in the song title listings above, 2 songs are not included, the wonderful 'Do what you do' sung by Chris DeBurgh, and the wonderful bass voice of Willard White singing 'Biding my Time'. Anyway, this is a terrific album of some of Gershwins most memorable tunes, sung by a wide range of different artists who bring their own personal touches to the songs. Looking through the lyrics in the booklet though, I did find one disappointment. Jon Bon Jovi sings 'How long has this been going on!'. Unfortunately he only sings the refrain of the song. How I would have LOVED to hear him sing 'As a tot, when I trotted in little velvet panties, I was kissed by my sisters, my cousins and my aunties.' Oh well, I guess we can't have everything.