 Исполнитель: Carmen McRaeНазвание альбома: I Am Music Год выпуска: 1975 Формат файлов: MP3@320K/s Размер архива: 106,2 MB Скачать с: rusfolder.com
2.The Trouble With Hello Is Goodbye (3:45)
3.Faraway Forever (3:20)
4.I Ain't Here (3:28)
5.You Know Who You Are (5:19)
6.I Have The Feeling I've Been Here Before (5:56)
7.Who Gave You Permission (3:14)
8.Like A Lover (5:56)
9.I Never Lied To You (3:19)
10. I Am Music (4:19)
“Life is just too much for me to bear…I guess nobody ever really cared…do you?” Carmen McRae poses that question some four minutes into “A Letter for Anna-Lee,” the Benard Ighner song that opens her 1975 Blue Note album I Am Music. It’s a startling moment of direct address in this sad tale of a man for whom “the business of the day won’t let me be,” adding that “this life’s not meant for me.” The song, its accompaniment led by Dave Grusin’s burbling electric piano, shifts from its third-person narration to a reading of the titular letter, then reveals itself as a first-person account. As McRae’s pain and anguish come to the fore, the smooth backing builds to a dramatic crescendo, strings slashing through the gentility. McRae naturally brings a jazz singer’s vocabulary and phrasing to the song, elongating syllables and thoughts, indulging in the kind of melodic improvisation and exploration only she could do. (Its portrait of the strife lurking under the veil of domesticity actually recalls one of Barry Manilow’s finest songs, “Sandra,” so memorably recorded by another legendarily soulful voice: Dusty Springfield.) Carmen McRae was always among the more burnished and precise, yet bluesy, voices of the American songbook. With I Am Music, she created a hybrid of R&B, soul, and contemporary jazz that set it apart from most other titles in her deep catalogue. Its new reissue from Cherry Red’s Big Break Records label sheds some welcome light on this rare gem.
Big Break has previously reissued 1976’s Would You Believe, with its roster of songs from the worlds of R&B (Bill Withers, Skip Scarborough), modern jazz (Chick Corea), Broadway (Cy Coleman, George Gershwin) and pop-rock (James Taylor). The repertoire on I Am Music takes a different approach, avoiding standards. The songs are less familiar, some newly-written, with five coming from the lyrical pens of Alan and Marilyn Bergman (with various composers), two from Benard Ighner and two from Jelsa Palao. The album is rounded out by a Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song. And though Blue Note was aggressively courting the modern market, the album is more than just a one-note exercise in updating a legendary chanteuse’s sound for a rock crowd more interested in, say, Alice Cooper than “Alice Blue Gown.” (Though it has its own considerable merits, Would You Believe is more explicitly “contemporary” in feel and material than I Am Music. And Carmen actually covered an Alice Cooper song to good effect on that disc!) Roger Kellaway, once Bobby Darin’s accompanist and a talented composer-arranger in his own right, produced the album after Benard Ighner became indisposed. Kellaway arranged the lion’s share of the disc himself, bringing in Dave Grusin and Byron Olson as well.There’s more after the jump!
The cover photograph of McRae, cheerfully ready to party with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, might seem a contradiction when considering the dramatic songs on I Am Music. In addition to the restless soul portrayed in “A Letter to Anna-Lee,” she embodies a grieving widow in “Who Gave You Permission” from the Bergmans and the underrated composer Billy Goldenberg. The song was written for the television film Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, which the team later adapted into the Broadway musical Ballroom under the aegis of visionary director Michael Bennett. It’s an odd fit for the album – for any album, really – as it’s essentially a monologue spoken over orchestral accompaniment. The Bergmans and Goldenberg would more fully musicalize their touching story in Ballroom the musical. But McRae finds both the humor and the pathos in “Permission,” verbalizing sentiments familiar to anyone who’s lost a loved one: who gave you permission to go? It’s honest and heartbreaking, and another portrayal of turmoil amidst the mundane. ~ Joe Marchese
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