Al Haig Plays the Music of Jerome Kern
| Al Haig Plays the Music of Jerome Kern | ||||
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| Studio album by Al Haig | ||||
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Publication |
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| Label (s) | Trio Records | |||
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Format (s) |
LP, CD |
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Title (number) |
9 |
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Helen Merrill |
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Studio (s) |
Downtown Sound Studio, New York City |
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Al Haig Plays the Music of Jerome Kern (also Helen Merrill Presents Al Haig Plays the Music of Jerome Kern ) is a jazz album by pianist Al Haig with compositions by Jerome David Kern . The recordings were made in 1978 in Downtown Sound Studio, New York City and were released in the same year as an LP on the Japanese label Trio Records. This session was recorded four years before his death in 1982 and was his penultimate studio appointment.
background
At this point in time, American labels had largely written off jazz greats, Marc Myers noted, and Japanese record companies such as Trio Records saw an opportunity, especially for their jazz-enthusiastic market, to take on veterans like Haig. The album was produced by singer Helen Merrill , who can be heard on one song ("They Didn't Believe Me"), accompanied by Haig. The versions of " Yesterdays ", " All the Things You Are ", "Can I Forget You?" And "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" are solo performances by Haig. Plays the Music of Jerome Kern was released on CD in 1998 on Gitane's Jazz Productions.
Track list
- Al Haig: Plays the Music of Jerome Kern (Inner City Records - IC 1073)
- The Way You Look Tonight (Kern / Dorothy Fields ) 7:32
- Dearly Beloved (Kern / Johnny Mercer ) 3:54
- Yesterdays (Kern / Otto Harbach ) 3:33
- All the Things You Are (Kern / Oscar Hammerstein II ) 4:43
- Can I Forget You (Kern / Oscar Hammerstein II) 3:01
- The Folks Who Live on the Hill (Kern / Oscar Hammerstein II) 4:39
- I'm Old Fashioned (Kern / Johnny Mercer) 5:00
- The Song Is You (Kern / Oscar Hammerstein II) 5:24
- They Didn't Believe Me (Kern / Herbert Reynolds) 2:33
reception
According to Marc Myers ( Jazzwax ), this album is a reminder that Haig was exceptional in the 1940s when the market was flooded by great pianists and when his approach sounded terrifyingly beautiful in the 1970s and beyond. Fortunately, Japanese labels were still taking care of it. In the author's opinion, Haig and Nasser “played so well together that there was no need to add a drummer .” Like so many of Haig's albums under his own name, this one reminds of “how crystalline he played. Haig was a bebop veteran who could swing with fine sensitivity. Like Bud Powell , Haig could effortlessly transform himself from the hustle and bustle of the bop into passages of moody elegance, as if he were offering the listener a cup of hot chocolate as a reward ”.
“This is Haig at its finest - tall, broad, cocky, responsible, and exuberant. In addition to his superb pedal tones and great voicings , Haig strikes the keys with moving force and uses the best improvised runs without losing the outstanding quality of Kern's compositions. ”In Myers' view, Al Haig Plays the Music by Jerome Kern is one of his most beautiful albums from Haig's late work. Singer Helen Merrill - heard on a track - delivered "a breathtaking and wonderfully geometrical rendition" of "They Did't Believe Me".
Scott Yanow gave the album three (out of five) stars and praised it as a "tasteful, but rather obscure set". From Jerome Kern's songs, which have long been a medium for jazz improvisation, Al Haig selected some of the best for this session, including "The Way You Look Tonight", "All the Things You Are" and "The Song Is You".
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Marc Myers: Al Haig Plays Jerome Kern. All About Jazz, January 30, 2013, accessed October 16, 2019 .
- ^ A b Marc Myers: Al Haig Plays Jerome Kern. Jazzwax, May 6, 2019, accessed October 16, 2019 .
- ↑ Al Haig: Plays the Music of Jerome Kern at Discogs
- ^ Review of Scott Yanow's album on Allmusic . Retrieved October 16, 2019.