Customer Reviews

May the Music Never End

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

 

 

Simply Incredible that at 69 Ms. Horn can turn out an album like this. Especially given her personal health issues and the fact that she does not accompany herself as she ususally does, this is a 5+ star winner--one of the best of her career.

"If You Go Away" is haunting and magical at the same time--the best track on the CD. Not since "I Love You, Paris" has Ms. Horn been in such consistent top form, with each track a wondrous experience.

If this is your first introduction to Shirley Horn, you are in for a treat. If you don't know her work, what are you waiting for?

I've been a fan of Horn's since she released "You Won't Forget Me," and since then I've bought her recordings faithfully, and never been disappointed. Horn continues to please with "May the Music Never End." Where the title of "You Won't Forget Me" seems like a musical promise, "May the Music Never End" is surely the fervent hope of any Horn fan. Her choice of material is immpecable, as usual, and one notes the hint of a farewell in her choice of songs like "Yesterday," "If You Go Away," "Everything Must Change," and the title track. There's a moment in "Yesterday" when her voice breaks, either because she's approaching its limits or because of the emotional delivery. Either way, it works. But Horn truly hits her stride during the final half of the cd, beginning with a haunting take on "Ill Wind." The autumnal tone really takes hold with the final three songs: "Everything Must Change," "This Is All I Ask," and "May the Music Never End." It sounds as if Horn - after the death of her usual bass player, and her own health problems forced her to hand-off piano duties on this CD - is bidding a fond farewell to music and to the world. But Horn's fans certainly hope not. After all, we don't want the music to ever, ever end.

Shirley Horn's pianos and vocals are so interdependent on each other that the whole has always been so much greater than the sum of the parts. Witness Horn's piano accompaniment of Carmen McRae's vocals on "Sarah: Dedicated to You" which, while sensitive and skilled, somehow lacked the Horn "magic". Similarly, when Horn lent her vocals to Charlie Haden's "Art of the Song", there was a hesitancy to them that one simply does not hear when she provides her own accompaniment (making her 2001 release, "You're My Thrill", a particularly welcome return to form). On this album, the recent amputation of Horn's right foot has forced her to leave the keyboard work to two other artists; this has resulted in a program which, while still masterful, leaves the listener wondering just how much finer it could have been with Horn in her rightful place seated at her Steinway. There is more breathiness here, and a far more tentative, less fluid approach to her singing which seems to be as much about remaining in step with her musicians as it does about providing emotional depth to the material (which is particularly noticeable on the slower ballads). The playlist is typically top-notch, of course - especially the mesmerizing "If You Go Away", the poignant "This is All I Ask" and the gorgeously sung title song that is almost ineffably moving. There is an autumnal cast to this album which, in view of Horn's recent health problems (coupled with the loss of her long-time bassist), cannot be merely coincidental. In fact, it almost appears as if Horn is saying goodbye to her listeners with this release - something no devoted fan of Horn wants to hear any time soon.

I just got home from doing some CD shopping, and turned on Shirley Horn's "May The Music Never End." As I type and listen - multi-tasking here - I can only say WOW! At age 69, Ms Horn is better than ever!

Joined by pianist extraordinaire, Ahmad Jamal, on four tracks, and flugelhornist Roy Hargrove, Ms. Horn sings in her distinctive, rich, soulful style. She is filled with love, emotional intensity - and is absolutely breathtaking! Shirley Horn is one of the few ballad singers who literally causes listeners' to hold their breath, as she weaves her spell, while the stories she sings unfold. She is a vocalist who has built her legend singing of heartbreak. And she can break your heart.

Her previous albums have received eight consecutive Grammy nominations. And this is one of her best ever. The twelve songs, filled with bittersweet longing, unrequited love, and love hard-won, include: Harold Arlen's classic "Ill Wind," Paul McCartney's and John Lennon's "Yesterday," Jacques Brel's brilliant "If You Go Away," Duke Ellington's "Take Love Easy," Michel LeGrand's "Watch What Happens," (with a bossa nova beat), and a bluesy version of "Forget Me."

This entire collection is heartfelt and top-notch! Shirley Horn, may your music never end!

I never thought Horn could top an album like "Here's to Life" or a track like "You Won't Forget Me," but she does both here. Not only is this her best album and clearly a front runner as the best album of 2003, but her English rendition of "Ne Quitte Pas" is phenomenal. This track should be required listening for every Mariah screamer and American Idol dramatist out there. She manages to oscillate between joy and pain in this brief song as if the two emotions were her invention.

If there is any drawback to this album, it is twofold: The Beatles' track, "Yesterday" exposes how trite the lyrics to that song are, and, more grave, there is a sense that Horn is calling it a career here. I hope it's not the case, but if it is, she knows how to end it. Why she is not a national treasure, I don't know.

In dedicating the eleventh album of her late-career Verve renaissance to long-time bass player Charles Ables, who had died two years earlier, Shirley Horn wrote, "There is no saying goodbye to you -- just a slight postponement until the next gig. Those thirty-three years of love and music will hold me and [drummer Steve Williams] until later." Later, alas, would come all too soon for her and for those who had listened with delight to her regular releases on Verve, an association that began in 1987 and gave the D.C.-based veteran performer a larger fan base than she had ever enjoyed. A decade of declining health, during which she remained a committed, energetic, and often stirringly communicative live performer and recording artist, culminated in her own death in October 2005, and thus this 2003 album represents the final page in a distinctive chapter of jazz vocal history.

With benefit of hindsight, it is impossible not to notice what some of us feared at the time -- that in addition to being an elegy for Horn's friend and collaborator, the album was Horn's goodbye to us. She seems to have known it would likely be her last such effort (a few subsequent live tracks are fill-ups on Verve's most recent, unsatisfactory best-of). Were it not that it would make this eloquent and meaningful recording sound morbid and off-putting, I would go so far as to call it a concept album on death: not the indulgent juvenilia some Goth-rocker might make, but a mature artist's graceful acceptance of others' passing and the inevitability of her own. Most of the songs chosen look back fondly and wistfully, and forward with the melancholy of resignation. The titles give some hint of these themes: "Forget Me," "If You Go Away," "Yesterday," "Never Let Me Go," "Ill Wind," "Everything Must Change" (heard here for most of its duration in an unusually rigid arrangement, with a taut, heavily accented rhythm that suggests the beating of a heart), "May The Music Never End." The Horn musical formula outwardly appears not to have changed (a handful of ballads taken at the slowest of possible tempos; a couple of genial uptempo tunes to let some air into the room; and the obligatory number done with Latin inflections, usually a gentle samba), but the tone is more contemplative and somber than ever before. This is autumnal music, and the autumn it evokes is not the autumn of brilliant blue skies, an invigorating nip in the air, outdoor festivals, and children playing in piles of leaves, but the late autumn days of slate-colored skies, bare trees and russet-brown fields, lengthening shadows, the specter of oncoming winter, ruminations on last things. "Ill Wind," indeed.

The reason Horn held up so well as a performer in the frailty of her last years (a foot amputation had rendered her unable to accompany herself on piano by this time), had to do with what made her performances interesting in the first place. Her appeal never was rooted in those virtues on which time tells most heavily with singers: she never had Ella Fitzgerald's pure, pellucid, girlish sound; Sarah Vaughan's virtuoso agility; Dinah Washington's locomotive-like raw power. She captivated us with her masterful use of silence and space, her individual and arresting phrasing, the precision with which she weighted and colored words, her facility for conveying both humor and heartbreak, often within a line or two of one another. She had more in common with her beloved Billie Holiday, who also was a prolific recording artist when in declining health (mostly for the same label), and whose best late recordings make a similar emotional appeal. But because Horn was not the self-destructive personality that Holiday was, she was more consistent -- her late recordings never are as difficult to listen to as those of Holiday at her most physically compromised. Horn's best virtues had not abandoned her by MAY THE MUSIC NEVER END; indeed, she never gave more penetrating performances than these. Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" seems made new. Her reflective, utterly earnest approach to it -- here sounding casual and nearly offhand, here pained, here numbed and bereft -- seems to scrub the song clean of decades of associations, uncovering emotional truths of such a universal nature that they unite a 25-year-old Liverpudlian pop star and a sextugenarian American jazz chanteuse. It's a miraculous reimagining. She lays claim at least to co-ownership (with Sinatra) of Gordon Jenkins's lovely prayer of advancing age, "This Is All I Ask." And in the closing title track, Artie Butler and Norman Martin have given her a farewell song I could not imagine being improved upon, and she rises to the occasion with a performance that, under the circumstances, is almost unbearably poignant ("We were young/Tomorrow seemed so far away/But now there are times when it's all too perfectly clear/Tomorrow is here"), but richly rewarding for all that. Its effect defies description; it belongs on the shortest of short lists of this singer's greatest performances.

Roy Hargrove, who had guested on Horn's 1996 album THE MAIN INGREDIENT, turns up here on flugelhorn for "Take Love Easy" (one of the two swingers) and a solo of great poise on "Ill Wind." Ed Howard capably fills the vacated bass chair; Steve Williams on drums is by now an old friend to us too. George Mesterhazy, who memorably collaborated with Horn on 1997's LOVING YOU (a surprisingly successful experiment with synthesized textures), takes the lion's share of the piano duties, and the spare tastefulness of his playing reminds one of Horn's without aping it. Ahmad Jamal spells Mesterhazy for two tracks, and on "Maybe September" provides a flowery, busy solo that is the closest thing to a false note on the album: it is technically brilliant but at odds with Horn's atmosphere of simplicity and economy (she could not have played like this, but she probably would not have chosen to in any case). His accompaniment on "This Is All I Ask," however, puts all that technique in the service of a perfect touch, and there he is above reproach.

And so, a towering valediction by an artist who, for all her infirmities, was still at the peak of her powers in the ways that counted most. It is a knockout blow in the final round of a career that represented a victory for the arts of subtlety and nuance. "Where do you start?" she once mused, on another of her great albums; and this is where, and how, she finished: powerfully, indelibly, unforgettably.

While Ms. Horn has long been known as an inimitable master at squeezing emotions from well-selected lyrics, I find that this recording carries an even heavier emotional load than normal. Always taking ballads at a crawl--she seems to have slowed down even more on some of these tracks--if such a thing were possible. The singing is also somehow more raw--one hears the vulnerabilities of age slowing being etched into this heaven-sent voice. As I listened to the final, and title track, I broke down and wept, to contemplate that this angel's music will someday end. Only the truest of fans will likely grasp the full depth of this beautiful work.

Every new album Shirley Horn releases seems to be better than the previous one...and this new one is certainly no exception.

Despite losing her right foot to diabetes last year, and leaving her usual piano crafting to George Mesterhazy and Ahmad Jamal, Ms. Horn offers a well-crafted program of ballads, sprinkled with a few uptempo gems. Also providing support were Roy Hargrove on flugelhorn ("Take Love Easy" and "Ill Wind"), Ed Howard on bass, and Steve Williams on drums. Mr. Jamal provides thoughtful accompaniment on two other tracks, "Maybe September" and "This is All I Ask."

Legendary arranger-composer Artie Butler, who composed "Here's to Life" for Ms. Horn, delivers another gem with the album's moving and heartfelt title track (...). This new song not only gave me the chills, but moved me to tears.

I predict another Grammy nomination for this grande dame of jazz next year!

Ms Horn is a master of interpreting lyrics. She is able to take many of the old frequently played standards sound like you are listening to a selection for the first time and loving it. It's a great experience to listen to music that moves you emotionally.

I've just listened to MAY THE MUSIC NEVER END--it's breathtaking, matchless, perfect. 5 stars aren't enough and it's priceless. Buy it NOW! May her music never end...