My top choice:

JAZZ:  COLTRANE’S SOUND – John Coltrane (Rhino High Fidelity)

Rhino launches a new vinyl series today with the release of this John Coltrane album from 1964. The six tracks on this record were recorded during the same sessions for My Favorite Things. Those tracks are The Night Has a Thousand Eyes; Central Park West; Liberia; Body and Soul; Equinox and Satellite.

Joining Coltrane for this record were Steve Davis on bass, Elvin Jones on drums and McCoy Tyner on piano.

I attended a listening party for this record earlier this week and can tell you that it sounds like you are in the recording studio with these musicians. There were only 5,000 copies pressed for this release and they are only available through Rhino’s website.

What else is New In Music This Week: May 19^th? Here’s my list:

BROADWAY: KIMBERLY AKIMBO OBCR (Ghostlight Records)

This highly acclaimed Broadway musical from Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire received eight nominations for Tony Awards including Best Musical, Leading Actress in a Musical (Victoria Clark), Featured Actress (Bonnie Milligan), Featured Actor (Justin Cooley) and nominations for Best Book for Lindsay-Abaire and Best Score for Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire.

The musical tells the story of Kim (Clark) who is a teenager from New Jersey. She does her best to fit in with the other kids at school, but the fact that she looks 72 doesn’t make things easy for her. That’s just the beginning of challenges she faces.

Clark won a Tony Award for her performance in The Light in the Piazza. Lindsay-Abaire won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Rabbit Hole. Tesori won the Tony Award for Fun Home and also collaborated with Lindsay-Abaire on Shrek: The Musical. (My favorite show of hers is Caroline, Or Change).

CABARET: THE JESUS YEAR: a letter from my dad – Matthew Scott (PS Classics)

Broadway star Scott lost his father at a young age. When the younger Scott was 13, his family found a series of letters his father had written to his four sons. They essentially served as life lessons his father had written because he was certain he wouldn’t live a long life. This show’s title, The Jesus Year, comes from the belief that a sense of rebirth that happens in your 33^rd year.

In the show Scott performs songs by Harry Chapin, William Finn, Ben Folds, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Yusef/Cat Stevens and an incredibly moving version of Children Will Listen by Stephen Sondheim.

Scott will perform the show at 54 Below on May 23^rd.

CLASSICAL: MAX BRUCH & FLORENCE PRICE VIOLIN CONCERTOS – Randall Goosby, Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin (Decca Classics)

Fast-rising violinist Randall Goosby performs Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor; Florence B. Price’sAdoration and her Violin Concerto No. 1 in D and Violin Concerto No. 2 on this, his second album.

Goosby has gotten a lot of attention in his brief career and this album is certain to widen the appreciation for his playing. 

Nézet-Séguin, who also leads the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, is a deeply passionate conductor. I saw him lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in the marathon performance of all four of Rachmaninoff’s concerti plus Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Yuja Wang and was seriously impressed with his conducting and the playing of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Their recording of Price’s Symphonies No. 1 & 3 won the Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance in 2022.

CLASSICAL: THE RITE OF SPRING – Spectre d’un songe – Sylvie Courvoisier & Cory Smythe (Pyroclastic Records)

Pianists Courvoisier and Smythe perform the two-piano version by Stravinsky of his The Rite of Spring. Anyone who knows this work – either in the symphonic version or in the two-piano version – knows this is a massively complicated and exhilarating composition. Courvoisier and Smythe perform it as if it was effortless for them (it certainly wasn’t).

Also on the recording is another track named The Rite of Spring which is an improvisatory exploration of Stravinsky’s landmark work composed by Smythe. It makes for a fascinating conclusion to this terrific record.

JAZZ: LIVE AT SMALLS JAZZ CLUB – George Coleman (Cellar Music Group)

Here’s a pairing of two legends in jazz. The first is saxophonist George Coleman who was a member of Miles Davis’ Second Quintet. He also recorded five albums as a member of the Chet Baker Quintet and six albums with Max Roach. 

The second legend is Smalls Jazz Club in New York City. Not the oldest of clubs in New York, but a significant one that first opened in 1994. They closed for 3-1/2 years in 2003 before reopening the first quarter of 2006. It’s small (giving the club it’s name) with room for only 60 people.

Coleman was 87 when this album was recorded last year with drummer Joe Farnsworth, bassist Peter Washington and pianist Spike Wilner (who also happens to own Smalls Jazz Club.)

There are eight tracks on this album including Four by Miles Davis, the standards At Last, My Funny Valentineand Nearness of You; Jobim’s Meditation and Kander and Ebb’s New York, New York.

This is a terrific record. Don’t miss it.

JAZZ: BIRD IN LA – Charlie Parker  (VERVE/UMe)

28  live recordings from 1945, 1946, 1948 and 1952 by Parker in Los Angeles comprise this box set available as either 4 LPs, 2 CDs or streaming. Amongst the musicians joining Parker in these performances are Chet Baker, Ray Brown, Benny Carter, Nat King Cole, Miles Davis, Slim Gaillard, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Frank Morgan and Buddy Rich.

The songs include Billie’s Bounce, Dizzy Atmosphere, How Hight the Moon, Night in Tunisia, Ornithology, Out of Nowhere and Salt Peanuts. There are fragments of other songs included. This is fascinating series of recordings sure to please any fan of Parker’s.

JAZZ: LEAN IN – Gretchen Parlato and Lionel Loueke (Edition Records)

Vocalist/songwriter Parlato and guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Loueke team up for this album of 12 songs – most of them composed by Loueke and Parlato. There are a couple of covers and perhaps the most surprising is Walking After You which was written by Dave Grohl of The Foo Fighters. The song appeared on their 1997 album The Colour and the Shape.

These beautiful songs are sung in English, Portuguese and Fon (the indigenous language of Benin.)

Eight of the songs find just Parlato and Loueke together. Joining them for the other four tracks on this recording are drummer Mark Guiliana and bassist Burniss Travis. Marley Guiliana, Parlato and Guiliana’s son, appears on one track. 

JAZZ: WEST SIDE STORY – André Previn and His Pals Shelly Manne & Red Mitchell (Craft Recordings and Acoustic Sounds)

Though Previn is best known as a composer, he was also a versatile jazz pianist. He’s joined by drummer Manne and bassist Mitchell for eight songs from the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim musical. 

They perform Something’s Coming, Jet Song, Tonight, I Feel Pretty, Gee Officer Krupke!, Cool, Maria and America. This album won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance Solo or Small Group at the 3^rdannual Grammy Awards. (Trivia: both the 3^rd and 4^th annual Grammy Awards were not televised. They held private dinner ceremonies instead)

This re-release marks the first time this album has been released as an LP in over 30 years. (There is also a hi-res digital release).

Let us know what you’re listening to by leaving a comment!

That’s my list of the best of what’s New In Music This Week: May 19th. Have a terrific weekend and enjoy the music!

The post New in Music This Week: May 19th appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

December Songs is a song cycle inspired by great works by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and others. Since Yeston is best known as a Broadway composer and lyricist (Nine, Grand Hotel), the work wasn’t going to be a fully classical composition, nor was it going to be musical theater. Andrea Marcovicci gave the world premiere performance in 1991.

Clark sings the song cycle in a new PS Classics recording featuring a large orchestra led by Sperling and orchestrations by Larry Hochman. In listening to December Songs it is hard to believe it wasn’t written specifically for the Tony Award-winning Clark (The Light in the Piazza).

Recently I spoke via Zoom with two-time Tony Award winner Yeston about December Songs, its inspiration, Clark and more. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. If you want to see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

I want to start by asking you about something you told the New York Times in 2003 in an interview with Robin Pogrebin. You said, “I’m a man of infinite patience. I write things and sometimes they don’t see the light for years and years and years.” Accepting that point of view in 2003, it is 19 years later and December Songs is newly recorded with beautiful Larry Hochman orchestrations and you have Victoria Clark singing. Has your patience paid off as it relates to December Songs? 

Absolutely. Absolutely. And by the way, with 37 in the band. There are orchestras and then pit orchestras are one thing. 37 great professional New York musicians and some of them were almost on the verge of tears because they sounded so wonderful. The tears were we don’t get to do this much anymore because there’s electronic machines that create violins and things like that. You just don’t have that experience very much anymore. It was quite, quite thrilling. 

I was commissioned to write the December Songs by Carnegie Hall. They commissioned a whole bunch of people: a new symphony, a string quartet, a piano concerto and a cello concerto and I guess they decided to go slumming. They wanted a group of cabaret songs that had Andrea Marcovicci, which was wonderful. They commissioned me to write a series of what they thought were going to be cabaret songs or whatever I wanted to, which I thought was rather wonderful because this was a commission that I felt in some ways was supposed to honor and reference what Carnegie Hall had done for 100 years.

I thought I could do nothing better than to write a song cycle in the tradition of the great masters like Franz Schubert. I thought, if there’s anything I’ve ever learned to do, it’s try to learn from the great ones. So when I began to write December Songs I resolved that I would tell my story as inspired as I can by them. Another way of saying that is steal from the best. 

I’m going to write it for Andrea, a modern woman. Instead of wandering the snows of the Vienna woods [as in Schubert’s Winterreise] she’ll be wandering the snows of Central Park. And instead of losing her mind and descending and devolving into quasi-insanity, she’ll get over the guy. That was my guide. That was my task.

I wouldn’t care if it wasn’t even performed in my lifetime. I wrote it because I was so inspired and so on fire. I just feel so lucky that we did it. It’s been recorded about eight or nine times in English, once in French, once in Polish and once in German. And, of course, this wonderful performance by Victoria Clark, which I think is just for the ages. She’s extraordinary. 

It sounds like it was written for her. I can’t imagine anyone else – and I love Andrea Marcovicci. It is such a perfect blend of artist and material. 

Vicki and I have, of course, the most wonderful relationship. I was actually the director of undergraduate studies in music at Yale after I had gotten my Ph.D. and joined the faculty. For quite a number of years I was in charge of the music majors. I taught the introductory course in harmony counterpoint. Vicki and I go back to when she was in that class. What’s crazy about that is that three years of each other who else was in that class? Tommy Krasker who founded PS Classics. Ted Sperling, who was the conductor, was also in that class. So it’s like a reunion of me and Tommy and Vicki.

Victoria Clark is a perfect example of the intersection of classical music, popular music, and particularly musical theater, because she’s a genius actress. Vicki is the sort of person who can say “I am longing to be loved” as an actress and get infinite meaning every single time she says that phrase differently or sings that phrase differently. She is an exquisite dramatist. I know that from having had the pleasure of writing some of the funniest material in the world. In her performance of Mrs. Bean in Titanic, she’s just hilarious. At the same time she makes us cry because she’s in the middle class and her husband is just a businessman. All she wants to do is interact and rub elbows with the rich people and go to the big dances. She breaks your heart out of her yearning and longing to do it.

I don’t know if you subscribe to the adage that write what you know, but if write what you know is something that you believe, is there a part of you and your own experience that has informed what December Songs became? 

It was very helpful to know what Schubert had done and what Schumann had done and what Brahms has done. To see that and know I don’t want to do that. But I want to be in that family. I want this music to know that it comes from a tradition. One of the great things about tradition is that you have to move it forward. I knew that I would be doing that just by doing something new from my point of view. Also to be able to stretch every muscle I have, whether it’s got to sound more like a musical theater song sometimes or whether it’s going to be a theme in variations sometimes or even have a jazz influence. I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was to make the music right for this moment in the story and it will all work out. 

Every time I listen to it I feel like this isn’t just something that was written in 1991. This is something that could have been written today and that maybe there’s a greater emotional response to it because of what the last handful of years have been like. How does it resonate with you today?

I feel the same way about it. I don’t even feel like it sounds like it was written yesterday. I think it sounds like it was written tomorrow.

Regret is regret. Heartache is heartache. But at the same time, hope is hope and recovery is recovery. I don’t know who it was who said nothing moves me more than unrequited yearning. That hooks into my heart always, because it’s so characteristic of all of us. Sometimes we deeply yearn for something that we had and don’t have or that we can’t have. But there’s something about that sense of yearning. 

I feel like I’m on my own cutting edge of the future because the song cycle can bring everything to the table that a musical can. Whatever Broadway’s going through in terms of how much it costs and what you have to do and how you market it and all that stuff, there’s something about the world of pure composition in the form of a song cycle that attracts me and and gives me an opportunity just to do my work.

The luxury I had in December Songs was a blessed year to really think about it and to approach it, not merely as a dramatist, but as a composer and also as a composer who has been schooled by musicology about how did Beethoven do this? How does Schumann do this? So you learn from your betters and take great inspiration.

There’s an old music theory book from the 18th century. It takes the form of a great maestro who’s teaching a young composer. In one place in the book, the composer says, “Maestro, is borrowing permitted in music?” And Maestro says, “Yes. As long as you pay back with interest.” I think that’s my M.O. I borrow and learn where I can and try to pay back with interest by bringing something to it that wasn’t there before. I feel so strongly that my whole process of writing December Songs has been that. I think that’s why it feels kind of rich.

I want to conclude by asking you about who you are today and what you see for the future by paraphrasing one of the lyrics from the last song on December Songs. Maury, is it amazing to still be here and a relief for you as we near 2023? 

Unquestionably. We all live and we all go through relationships, broken relationships, new relationships, illnesses, recoveries from illnesses, disappointments in a career. Miracles happen to you in a career. Yes. It’s amazing to still be here. It really is.

I just feel like the 13-year-old who discovered that I could make up stuff. That part is perennially filled with wonder of it all. It never ceases to amaze me. I very rarely have a feeling of relief in having done something. What I feel is an inspiration. This whole experience with Vicki and December Songs with Larry and Ted and Tommy, it has just catapulted me with more inspiration to just launch into something else. So, yeah, I feel like Vicki feels at the end of it and I’m looking forward to the rest of my life and my career. 

To watch the full interview with Maury Yeston, please go here.

Main photo: Maury Yeston (Photo by Mark Seliger/Courtesy PS Classics)

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In June, cabaret and recording artist Jeff Harnar released a deeply personal album entitled I Know Things Now: My Life in Sondheim’s Words. He took over 25 of Stephen Sondheim‘s songs to create an episodic, but personal, look at his own life. In the process he takes songs out of their original context in the shows and fashions a way to reveal the ups and downs of his personal life as a gay man.

Harnar was not always open about his sexuality. Nor was he necessarily confident he could sing Sondheim’s music. It took the encouragement of fellow singer KT Sullivan for Harnar to embrace the challenges of the music and be able to sing songs on an album and in a cabaret show in which he declares his love for another man.

The album is available from PS Classics. Harnar is also doing a series of shows: two at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in New York (September 18th and 25th) and one at Middle C Jazz in Charlotte, NC on September 20th.

Last week I spoke with Harnar about Sondheim, his personal story and the satisfaction that has come from being alive, being gay and celebrating it all through Sondheim’s words and music. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. You can see the full interview on our YouTube channel.

Do you remember the first time you ever heard any Stephen Sondheim song, what it was and how you heard it? 

What a great question. Well, I’m going to narrow the question down to Sondheim, both music and lyrics. Liz Callaway and Ann Callaway – we were in high school together – their parents took them to see Company in New York. Liz had us all sit down and listen to the album. And I thought, what angry people. What caustic, angry people. It was unlike any kind of musical theater I had ever heard. I was intrigued and dazzled and humbled and intimidated.

I pretty much stayed in that bucket until I was 51. It was the first time I really had the courage to venture into actually performing his music. I’ve always been intrigued and dazzled and humbled by the original cast recordings of his shows. I always feel like they belong to those singers. They belong in that world. And that was the first time I ever performed as an openly gay man onstage through the courage and ammunition that his lyrics gave me.

You might have been late to performing the songs, but had you always heard something in the songs that was maybe other than what other people were hearing? 

Yes. I had never heard human emotion. I couldn’t express it that way in high school. I had just never heard anything quite like that. Dazzled by it really is the word.

The first show I saw was Sweeney Todd and that 1979 production was all the bells and whistles. I grew up loving horror films. Back then it was not A Star Is Born [he has an original poster from the 1954 version with Judy Garland in his home] on my wall. It would have been Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi. But that combination of a horror story with his writing and then that physical production with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou, that was my first Sondheim Broadway experience. 

The interesting thing about Sondheim, which I find your recording completely upends in a beautiful way, is that he was very careful to write songs that were so closely intertwined with the book of the musical and specific to the characters that he was writing for. What was the process of building the structure to come up with something that was autobiographical for you so that you could express your life through Stephen Sondheim’s words and music?

As a performer in nightclubs or cabaret, whatever you want to call that, I am the narrator when I’m up there. Whatever I’m singing it is my story that I’m telling. So I always begin with lyrics. Sondheim’s lyrics, I just started combing through them for where do I find my story. I found it quite a bit and in quite a few songs. And they do live interestingly outside of the context. What we’re saying is really to try and express them in a way perhaps radically differently to how they were used in the context of a show, but authentically to my life. 

Near the end of your album, and I’m not trying to do a psychological profile of you here, but what goes on in your life that The Ballad of Sweeney Todd is part of your perspective of that life that you wanted to share on this album with that song?

I have dealt with a major eating disorder, a major alcohol problem, and ultimately a major drug addiction that finally got me to the help I needed to get. So that’s the sad part. But the good part is though I couldn’t figure it out at first, I’m really grateful to have figured it out at last. But what precipitated that getting sober was a particularly thick kind of nightmare. And it was wrapped around a relationship. That song allows me to give voice to the rage.

Did you find you had to make any real substantive changes to any of the songs beyond pronouns? 

The primary change that we’ve made – and we lived in terror when Sondheim came to see the show because he’s so specific about the voicings and harmonies of his songs – was that we were probably doing something that he would find not to his liking. I anticipated that he would think it was too disrespectful, perhaps to how he intended the songs to be.

He literally came to my second or third time ever performing his music. There he was. I just could hardly inhale oxygen. I am not kidding. He was very gracious about what he saw that night and very gracious to remain kind of an email pal right up to the end of his life and in communication about this album and the show. But the first thing he said to Jon Weber, my music arranger, was, I love the changes and I wish there were more.

How does this album and your show resonate with you in the months since Sondheim passed away?

I’m wildly disappointed, selfishly, that he didn’t live 16 days longer because I was checking in to let him know that my show was coming. The next night was my show and I was still holding the ticket [for him]. He wrote back and said, “I just sprained my ankle and I’m not optimistic.” But thank you for doing the show was the last word. So yeah, there’ll always be that wish that he had come. 

I want to ask you about something he said in a 2017 interview that he gave The New York Times Style Magazine in an interview Lin-Manuel Miranda did with him. And he said, “You’ve got to work on something dangerous. You have to work on something that makes you uncertain. Something that makes you doubt yourself.” How did your album, I Know Things Now, check off all those boxes for you and what have you learned in the process of creating, performing and recording it? 

I’m blown away by that. That’s exactly what this project is. It’s the courage that it took on the level of just singing his material and trying to feel worthy as a vocalist to the point of view I was taking with this material and the self exposure for me. I have never stood in front of an audience before and sung about loving another man.

The embrace that I’ve gotten everywhere that I’ve gone so far with this show has been extraordinary. And the exhilaration that I get for being this particularly authentic is unlike any other performing experience I’ve ever had. It’s not that I’ve ever denied my sexuality. I just have been crafty about choosing my songs up until now. So it ticks off all those boxes and I hope it’s interesting because it’s received a level of notice, I think, for the very reasons he just said.

To see my complete interview with Jeff Harnar, please go here.

All photos of Jeff Harnar courtesy of PS Classics

The post Cabaret Artist Jeff Harnar Knows Things Now… appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

His new project finds the singer tackling songs that are not usually sung by men. His idea to do so for Will He Like Me? (a love story) was to create a song cycle that depicts the full range of experiences and emotions a gay man would have during his romantic life. What might seem at first glance like a gimmick turns, instead, into a moving story of one man’s hopes, dreams, lusts and loves. And by the end proves Miranda’s point. (Though this project was conceived well before Miranda’s comments.)

I spoke by phone with Chaffin about the concept of the project, how he selected songs and how much this project reflects his own life. He was at times surprisingly nervous, but the determination that got a project like this made in the first place, ultimately won out.

It should also be noted that Chaffin has been in a relationship with Tommy Krasker (to whom he is married) for 25 years. Krasker, who co-founded PS Classics with Chaffin, has been battling autoimmune illness. His illness required the couple to relocate to Florida and take a break from the one thing they most enjoy doing: making and recording music.

To paraphrase a Stephen Sondheim lyric from Anyone Can Whistle, I’m sure there were plenty of people who said “don’t” about this project.

No. Because no one really knew about it. We tried our best to keep it quiet. I told my voice and acting teacher, otherwise I didn’t tell anyone about it. I was so scared somebody would come out with this idea before I could. Honestly, if somebody else did, it would not be the same thing. I don’t know if somebody else has come out with a CD like this before, but I haven’t heard it.

When I listened to the album, I never thought how weird it is to hear a man sing these songs. Is that the goal – to make audiences recognize a universality to straight and gay relationships?

We’re all the same when it comes to love, aren’t we? My original idea was to do something theatrical for myself and then we did this. I was working in Philadelphia and Tommy comes with me so I can help take care of him. He was like, “Maybe we should go into the studio. We’re here in town. Why don’t we knock a few tunes out and see what we got.”

What were those first songs?

“Will He Like Me” and “I Got Lost in His Arms.” When I first met Tommy he was working with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and Patti LuPone came in and she sang “I Got Lost…” and paired it with something else. I always wanted to do it. The songs that ends this is “Windflowers.” Those three songs started the process.

How much is this song cycle autobiographical and reflecting your relationship with Tommy?

I didn’t want the listener to say “This is him doing this” or “This is him doing that.”  I wanted the listener to kind of make their own story from it.

I would say the end part pretty much. The last 4-5 songs. “Who Gave You Permission” (from the made-for-tv film Queen of the Stardust Ballroom)…we’ve been together 25 years now. Tommy does have health issues. It was very emotional in the recording studio. It was also our first time in the studio in three years or so. Seeing Tommy not as strong as he used to be and not able to do the things he used to be able to do, but still coming in the studio for me. This was a lot of work for Tommy. We’re going to take a little break. If something amazing comes long, we’ll figure out a way to do it. This was tough on Tommy.

Did you find it challenging to wrap your mind around singing these songs originally written and performed by women?

A lot of these songs you gotta go, I’m not going to take this traditional male role. I’m going to take the softer side of it. In every relationship a man has a soft side. Not being just masculine. I’m a soft guy. I like a man to take care of me sometimes.  After a while it was pretty much sometimes this is what I want – someone to hold me, to take care of me, to say things are going to be alright. Sometimes I like to be the man to say I’m going to make everything alright.

There are many people who think showtimes and/or the Great American Songbook are relics of a time gone by. Yet here you are reframing them to tell the narrative of a gay man’s life. What does that say about the perpetual topicality of these songs?

What’s kept a lot of the American Songbook going is that the stories are always “now.” The love songs – some of them might be a little corny, but the sentiment is what everybody feels or wants to feel or the lost-ness of being in love or wanting to be in love. Everyone feels it and some of these composers have written songs that have kept with the times.

All photos by Howard Zucker

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