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Cover Critique: A glamorous lady in blue. Cool, confident, classy and radiating strength. Very nice. Four and a half stars.
Track Listing:
Tomorrow Mountain
Out of This World
Summertime
Mad About the Boy
Ridin’ on the Moon
Stormy Weather
Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home
Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home
I’ll Be Around
I Wonder What Became of Me
Just One of Those Things
If you want to know who was keeping the Songbook “alive” in the rock and roll era, a quick listen to Stormy Weather will supply the answer. It’s as if Lena Horne knew that the golden era was over and rather than let herself be pushed meekly into the shadows, she pushed back and recorded this feisty album – or maybe she was just venting frustration over the blacklisting that had stalled her career in the first half of the decade (her first studio album got released in 1955 but unfortunately I missed it while doing that year).
Horne never was a jazz singer – in her youth she sang straight sentimental pop, lushly orchestrated and pleasant on the ears. After being released from Hollywood she became a premier nightclub performer and her live album At the Waldorf-Astoria became RCA’s top-selling record by a female artist. The most remarkable aspect to her recording career is how she transformed herself from a pleasant but routine singer in the 1940s (another in a long line of impeccably trained mechanical songbirds) into Lena Horne, a forceful, smoldering presence with astonishingly modern phrasing. When did it happen? What was the catalyst?
Having given a listen to the Waldorf album I suspect she learned it through the nightclub circuit. Above all else, put on a show. Give em a good time, vary the mood – be a little saucy, a little torchy; make them laugh and then sober them up. Start happy, end happy, but take them for a ride. This made her popular in her time but seems to have had the opposite effect on subsequent listeners, putting her firmly in the second tier after giants like Ella and Billie. Snobs who value “technique” above all else are only part of the reason. A lot of people reach for the old Songbook singers for some mellow, “easy listening” comfort. Those people when they put on Stormy Weather will not be pleased. Too loud, too unrestrained. This lady doesn’t just croon, she bellows.
It all begins with ‘Tomorrow Mountain,’ an upbeat vision of a morally bankrupt paradise selected from Beggar’s Holiday, a musical update on the 18th Century play The Beggar’s Opera (itself the inspiration for The Threepenny Opera) that was written by John La Touche and composed by Duke Ellington. Just this backstory gives Stormy Weather an edge in its industry. But the attraction isn’t the song – it’s Lena’s smoking delivery that blows the mind, more so when attached to ridiculous proto-psychedelic lines like “marshmallows bloom already toasted / and the clouds are made of marmalade and jam.” Nobody else could have done this song justice. Lena owns it, hands down.
Vivacity is the key. Listen to her take on ‘Ridin’ on the Moon’ and compare her full-throttle delivery to other singers of the day. Peggy Lee? Wasn’t her style. Ella? Too well-mannered. Tony Bennett may have been the only one who could rival this approach but he still lacked the modernity of phrasing. The one-two punch of ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’ and ‘Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home’ really proves the point. You could actually lift the vocal straight out of the latter and give it a rock backing (a weird thought, but one I had) and it would fit right in.
A lot of praise has to go to husband Lennie Hayton’s orchestra as well, as it possesses the crackle and attitude of the New York school of orchestration, rather than the smothering syrup of Hollywood. Hayton props up Lena’s performances without distracting from them and even goes for some creative additions, such as channeling Moises Vivanco to give ‘Out of This World’ a taste of exotica. Then there’s whoever’s responsible for the song selection, as it’s formally impeccable; leaning heavily on the bygone classics and ignoring the kitschy material that helped Lena break up any possible monotony while performing live but would have damaged the glamour image Stormy Weather was clearly going for. Instead we get the best songs by Arlen (represented five times over, no less), Gershwin, Coward, Porter – the guys who set the gold standard.
In fact, the weakest reading here is (surprisingly) of ‘Summertime.’ It seems like Horne was experimenting with a theatrical reading, but ‘Summertime’ is a sultry number at heart and this aggressive style is an uncomfortable (though interesting) fit. Trying to take it someplace else is commendable though – especially when the song is a standard and the people involved aren’t rock and rollers. She uses the same theatrical tactic on her signature song ‘Stormy Weather,’ where it makes more sense. Both of these numbers are plenty memorable, so it’s not worth docking points.
To conclude: Stormy Weather is an easy pinnacle of Songbook interpretation and, as I’ve made abunduntly clear, it gets my highest recommendation. Make this your introduction to the genre and you will never mistake it for “easy listening” music again. I know that’s how it worked for me.
Best Track: ‘Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home.’ “Free and easy, that’s my style.”
Worst Track: ‘Summertime.’ Flawed but curious.
Rating: Five stars.