Customer Reviews

Here's to Life

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Recently, I heard someone perform "Here's to Life" at a dear friend's funeral. I investigated and found a recording by Joe Williams. The CD is incredible, but the lyrics and music, especially the orchestration/arrangment, for "Here's to Life" were absoultely fantastic. The colors, timbres, warm horn arrangements and lyrical string section are the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. As a classical pianist and accompanist for almost 30 years, not many songs have moved me to tears as "Here's to Life."

This is a CD of great artistic level. Joe Williams is in his best form. The song "Here's To Life" has to be one of the most beautiful songs ever.

The sound quality is superb on every track! The Robert Farnon Orchestra damn near jumps out at you! The Title Track "Here's To Life" was actually written for Joe and he was performing it on his 'Live' shows. Shirley Horne ask if she could record the song....Since that time SHE has been largely associated with this song, but now you have to hear THIS version by Joe Williams...One word WOW! The hardest of people will tear up upon hearing Joe Willaims version! As a Extra Bonus "Here's To Life" is repeated at the very end of this album in a Acoustic Version with George Shearing on Piano! Other Standout Performances to be found are: "If I Had You", "Maybe September", "Save That Time", and "Someone You Loved". This album ranks alongside Joe's 1958 masterpiece "A Man Ain't Suppose To Cry" This album also plenty of lush strings!...Flawless orchestration!...And timeless ballads! So it be easier to kill 2 (Two) birds with one stone and get BOTH!

This is a CD you will listen to over and over again. It is simply beautiful! The orchestration, the beauty of Joe's unfailing and unaging voice--a fantastic CD to relax to or to put on while you're getting office/paper work done.

I've been a Joe Williams fan for many years and this is one of his finest albums. Joe was a master of several musical styles and genres. I've never heard a bad note out of him. I got what I expected from this collection -- musical perfection. -- Charles E. Killeen

This is Joe at his best. All selections are flawless and sensitive. He is greatly missed on the jazz scene.

My first reaction to seeing this album was "the audacity!" "the presumption!" How can you transgress upon the sacred ground of the perfection realized by Shirley Horn and Johnny Mandel on an album of the same title, and featuring the same unforgettable, unshakable song--and only a couple of years following the sheer triumph of the preceding release? Downbeat Magazine recently polled 30 jazz singers, asking them to name their favorite recording, and Shirley Horn's "Here's to Life" received more votes than any other release of the past 45 years. I'm not sure that this later date quite matches the ceaselessly spine-tingling magic of the Horn-Mandel meeting, but it makes its own statement. And if it's not quite as fresh and scintillating as the predecessor, it's a noteworthy, noble, and even heroic follow-up.

If Mandel has an equal as an orchestrator, it's Robert Farnon, who delivers a glorious and rich yet sophisticated and multihued canvas for the featured vocalist to draw his lyrical pictures on. And Williams, in his last recording of significance, is up to the task, displaying the controlled and gorgeous falsetto that could only come from a singer building upon the platform of a full and solid, naturally baritone voice and drawing upon a lifetime of experience as a blues, jazz, and ballads singer. No doubt Farnon would have been all too happy to drop the key of the title song into Williams' comfort zone, but on this number, especially, Joe senses that the medium is the message. If he's going to sing the words "Give it all you got!", he had better do exactly that.

The title song is actually a profound meditation on the human experience of time--its evanescence, its slipping into the past, its illusory promises of a future that may never be. Ultimately the song comes to the only conclusion there can be for any true "existentialist": all that exists is the present moment, and it is we who create the past and future by our thoughts and actions even as the so-called present is slipping away from us before we can pronounce the word "now." So the implicit message is "deal with it!", but now it's up to the performer to exemplify how that is best accomplished. The possibilities include defiance ("rage, rage against the dying of the light"); disillusionment and despair ("I fall upon the thorns of life; I bleed"); and celebration ("Bring it on, the bad with the good. Here's to life!").

But that sort of resolution and courage communicates only when we're convinced the person who proclaims such a toast knows the score--the weight of the hours, the knowledge that we can't always do it "our way," yet the courage and ability to "sing in our chains like the sea," showing us all how we can know the difference between denying and affirming life.

The artist knows the difference. Certainly the poet John Keats knew when he wrote in the face of intense suffering, "Truth is beauty, beauty is truth. That is all we can know on earth." Certainly Joe Williams knows--and to insure we do, too, he delivers the song twice, the second time accompanied only by George Shearing's piano, which enables him to make his statement plain, direct and heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

I was motivated to write this review after reading a "jazz" critic's panning of the recording on the grounds that the title song is "sappy," and the recording as a whole is just another one of those sessions where Nat Cole's voice is accompanied by Gordon Jenkins' smothering strings. Aside from the enormous, uninformed insult to major artists like Cole and Jenkins, the comment about the title song alone betrays astonishing ignorance. There will always be those who confuse living with "Tiny Bubbles" and loving with "For the Good Times." But worse are the arrogant and defensive know-it-alls who, rather than confess puzzlement or uncertainty when faced with something they don't understand, merely dismiss it as "sappy." In this case, ignore the critic and just trust the message and its powerful messenger.

Famous English Robert Farnon wrote the arrangements and Mr.Williams has finally recorded "Here's to Life", the splendid song that led Shirley Horn to the Grammy and to hit the charts. What a few people know is that the song had been a gift from composer Artie Butler to Williams before. Though great, this is not the best Joe Williams you can buy.