johnny mercer + cohn/newman/green selects

[ghost of miles]

It has always been obvious to me that Larry and I have very similar tastes (it must have been the water in the fifties-sixties) for this era's jazz, now thankfully being reissued .. even if it takes the Andorreans and Barceloneans to do it! When talking about RCA jazz of the fifties, I just wanted to throw into the mix the three great Tony Scott albums, and to thank Jordi for making these available .. sure a hell RCA in the U.S. would never have reissued those ... and IMO they are among the most interesting RCA albums outside of the Workshop Series. I used to think that I was the only Hal McKusick fan in the world when in the late fifties I collected all of his stuff that I could find, including fugitive tracks on Coral, Decca, Savoy and his fine Bethlehem album with Barry Galbraith. It is a pleasant feeling to see my tastes vindicated by a younger generation of jazz fans. (God! To think that I now have to refer to a "younger generation"!!!!)

Right on to the Tony Scott and Hal McKusick references, Garth... I love that music as well & have been introduced to some of it through people like you on the old BNBB (and now here). And cheers to the Early Avant-Garde! (tm Garth J).

[tranemonk]

Got the shipping email today! Both sets and singles should be here tomorrow (Thursday)!!!!

[medjuck]

Singles! Are they shipping the Ellington?

[J.A.W.]

Singles! Are they shipping the Ellington?

If you mean the Newport 1958 Single, I got that one a while ago.

[medjuck]

Wow. I think it was still listed as a pre-order yesterday. In fact this whole grouping seems to have been removed from pre-order now.

[medjuck]

So I ordered them and they've already arrived. That's service!!

[ejp626]

My Cohn/Newman/Green Select also arrived. Only listened to a bit of it, but it seemed mighty nice.

[mgraham333]

=

Both are good in small amounts. But too much can make you sick.

[medjuck]

Yeah. I could have lived with just a single 'best of Johnny Mercer" disc. It's interesting comparing the live and studio versions on the Ellington disc. They each have their virtues but I admit I have the entire live 2 cd set and find it tiresome.

I do like the Cohen et al sets. I think it's possible that Larry and Garth's aversion to them is because this kind of music and these players seemed ubiquitous at the time. I felt the same way about The Jazz Messengers and "funk" in general when I started listening to jazz in the early '60s. You start to like anything that breaks the mold (like the Jazz Workshop series). Now that no-one plays like that anymore (I know some try to, but where they gonna find a rhythm guitarist like Freddie Green?) this seems pretty fresh to me. As do a lot of Blakey recordings from the early '60s.

[ghost of miles]

I posted a bit about the Cohn Select on the Sunday before the board went down, so the post appears to have been lost. The short of it was simply that the Manny Albam arrangements stand out the most to me... at least, they caught my ear more frequently the first time around. Have yet to listen to disc 3, but I'm looking forward to it.

Mercer's vocals are an "acquired taste" IMO, and I can understand why some folks aren't too keen on the new Select. I'm grateful for it, and also grateful that there's very little overlap with the Capitol single-CD SPOTLIGHT ON... which might be ticket for those who want some JM but also think that a little goes a long way.

[jazzbo]

Yeah. I could have lived with just a single 'best of Johnny Mercer" disc. It's interesting comparing the live and studio versions on the Ellington disc. They each have their virtues but I admit I have the entire live 2 cd set and find it tiresome.

I do like the Cohen et al sets. I think it's possible that Larry and Garth's aversion to them is because this kind of music and these players seemed ubiquitous at the time. I felt the same way about The Jazz Messengers and "funk" in general when I started listening to jazz in the early '60s. You start to like anything that breaks the mold (like the Jazz Workshop series). Now that no-one plays like that anymore (I know some try to, but where they gonna find a rhythm guitarist like Freddie Green?) this seems pretty fresh to me. As do a lot of Blakey recordings from the early '60s.

I've been enjoying the Ellington as well, and listening to the live set, which I don't find tiresome. . . I've always liked it, bought the cds soon after release.

I think the sound on this mono Ellington cd is exceptional!

I decided to order the RCA Newman/Cohn/Green today. I have the material, but think it will sound better here.

Edited July 15, 2007 by jazzbo

[ghost of miles]

Friedwald review from NY Sun:

Johnny Mercer's Dramas

by Will Friedwald

New York Sun, August 7, 2007

The concept of the singer-songwriter came to dominate pop music in the 1960s,

and therein lies an odd dichotomy. It may have seemed more ambitious for a

single artist to write his own songs and sing them, and even accompany himself

playing them on guitar or piano, but in actual practice, pop music suffered for

the transition. It stands to reason that if one man is going to do a job that is

traditionally done by three people, the professionalism of the overall product

will probably suffer. Apart from such examples as Bob Dylan and the tandem of

Lennon and McCartney, the singer-songwriters of the '60s, in trying to do more,

actually wound up doing much less.

These singer-songwriters were generally inspired not by what had formerly been

regarded as mainstream pop, but from the fringes of blues and country music,

adjacent fields where it was more common (if hardly the rule) for performers to

write their own material. Yet at least three of the greatest songwriters of the

1930s, '40s, and '50s were also among the greatest performers of their own music

and everyone else's: Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen, and Johnny Mercer. Sadly,

many of their best recordings as singers are hard to find in the CD era, but a

recent 3-disc boxed set from Mosaic Records, "Mosaic Select: Johnny Mercer" (

http://www.mosaicrecords.com/ ) is the first comprehensive attempt to collect

many of the lyricist's finest recorded moments.

In 1942, Mercer (1909-76) had been living in Hollywood for about six years, and

though he was a few seasons away from winning his first Academy Award (for the

original song for 1964's "Charade"), he was generally regarded as one of the

finest lyricists writing for the movies. In the '30s, Mercer had sung on roughly

two dozen recordings, usually sharing space with better-known bands and

vocalists, such as Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, and Judy Garland. In one of the

first instances of a creative talent (rather than a businessman) starting his

own label, Mercer joined forces with a successful music retailer (Glenn

Wallichs) and a well-heeled mogul (Buddy DeSylva) to form Capitol Records, where

the idea was that Mercer could produce artists and bands simply because he liked

them.

Mercer took a hands-on role in running the label for roughly five years, during

which time he nurtured such major talents and mega-sellers as Nat King Cole,

Peggy Lee, Stan Kenton, and Margaret Whiting. Almost as a bonus for doing such a

great job with the company, he permitted himself the luxury of regularly making

his own recordings. Of course, since many of these recordings sold well enough

to enter the Billboard charts, they were hardly considered vanity projects. The

new Mosaic Select box begins in April 1942, at one of the first sessions for the

new label, with a swinging treatment of Jerome Kern's 1912 "They Didn't Believe

Me." It then proceeds to a gem of a narrative story-song that was always scarce

on both LP and CD: "The Old Music Master," by Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, with

vocals by Mercer and Jack Teagarden. On the track, a 19th-century classical

composer interfaces with a swing-era hepcat. Teagarden's whisky-soaked low

baritone contrasts with Mercer's squawky, high-pitched, high-energy voice.

Interestingly, though, the majority of these 79 sides don't satisfy the

requirements of the singer-songwriter format because only a dozen of the tunes

here are Mercer's own compositions. What is obvious, though, is that Mercer's

north star, his guiding force, is his determination to tell a story (whether

he's writing it, performing it, or, as on 12 of these songs, doing both). This

imperative is most obvious in a subset of recordings in which Mercer doesn't

merely sing, but performs songs entirely in dramatic character. In one case, he

takes the voice of a comically lazy Southerner of the type he might have

encountered in minstrelsy when he was growing up in Georgia. Mercer plays that

role throughout "Sugar Blues," a devastating parody of old-school Mickey Mouse

bands, and "Surprise Party," a comic turn on which he doesn't sing so much as

wheeze out the notes.

The producers of the Mosaic set, Billy Vera and Scott Wenzel, are also to be

commended for including 20 tracks from 1946 originally recorded for radio

transcriptions. Like Sinatra's 1945 album "The Voice," these tracks amount to a

jazz-pop album from well before the invention of the long-playing record. Mercer

deliberately avoided his own songs here, preferring instead to put his

performing stamp on the jazz-age warhorses of his teens. He salutes many of the

great gals of the era in "Sweet Georgia Brown," "Margie," "Lulu's Back in Town,"

"Sweet Lorraine," and "Louisville Lou," as well as American locales like

Indiana, Georgia, and Texas, where it's round-up time when the bloom is on the

sage.

The sides were conducted by Capitol's house musical director Paul Weston and

feature the outstanding, hot tenor sax of Herbie Haymer (who gets off a good

solo on "I Never Knew"). The charts were done in a roughly Bob Crosby-esque

big-band Dixieland style by the clarinetist Matty Matlock (who solos eloquently

on "Sugar"). Mercer is consistently loose and swinging throughout, singing

without a trace of self-consciousness or a care in the world. Often he confines

himself to 32-bar band vocals, but sometimes he spreads out for the whole track.

The most dated, politically offensive track is also the most endearing: Milt

Ager and Jack Yellin's tale of that vampin' baby, the heart-breakin',

shimmy-shakin' "Louisville Lou." Here, Mercer builds to a minstrel show

conversation with himself, as if he were a one-man Amos 'n' Andy.

By 1946, Mercer had become such a great duet partner that he could, in effect,

sing a duo with himself. In nearly all of his recordings between 1932 and 1940,

he's singing with a famous band or another vocalist. Likewise, many of his most

exhilarating performances between 1942 and 1947 are team-ups of one kind or

another, including additional tracks with Teagarden, Manone, ace vocal group the

Pied Pipers, nascent vocal stylist Jo Stafford, and Ellington trumpet star

Cootie Williams. Mercer had worked on a radio series (and one record date) with

Benny Goodman in 1939, but their finest moments together came on the 1947

novelty song "It Takes Time" and Kurt Weill's lovely "Moon-Faced and Starry

Eyed." Mercer is also amazingly simpatico on three hysterical titles with Nat

King Cole and his trio from that same year, especially on Danny Barker's

amazingly prescient ode to vegetarianism "Save the Bones for Henry Jones."

Mercer gave up the active management of Capitol Records after the 1948 recording

ban, and, unfortunately, sacrificed his singing career along with it. For this

apparent abandonment, Capitol seems to have punished him by refusing to

re-release most of his classic recordings, until now. The only regret regarding

the Mosaic Select package is that it only includes three discs' worth of

Mercer's Capitol tracks: It should be three times that size and include a

complete accounting of all of Mercer's recordings. They just don't make

singer-songwriters like him anymore.

[BruceH]

Nice article. Thanks for that, ghost.

[Larry Kart]

To quote from a post on another list:

> Will Friedwald (New York Sun) wrote:

>

> In 1942, Mercer (1909-76) had been living in Hollywood for about six

> years, and though he was a few seasons away from winning his first

> Academy Award (for the original song for 1964's "Charade")

"This is five times wrong. Mercer's four Oscar-winning songs all came before

1964: On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe (1946), In the Cool, Cool, Cool

of the Evening (1951), Moon River (1961) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962).

Charade was nominated in '63 but didn't win."

What the hell was Friedwald smoking?

Edited August 9, 2007 by Larry Kart

[montg]

The sound samples on the Mosaic website for the Newman Select are unusally soft--I have to really crank the volume on my computer speakers to hear the music. For those who have the Newman Select, do the CDs sound OK; that is, is the loudness level within a more or less normal range?

[jazzbo]

HAVE NO FEAR. You will really enjoy the sound of those cds, loudness level is in the normal range.

[montg]

Thanks Lon, that's green light I was looking for!