Allan Harris pay tribute to Bill Evans/Tony Bennett

Bill Evans’s wistful, lightly skipping “Waltz for Debby” is a classic 1950s jazz composition that doesn’t really need words to conjure an evanescent childhood dream world. But its lyrics, added several years later by Gene Lees, about a little girl who will soon outgrow her “dolls and clowns and a big purple bear,” deepen the poignancy of a song that imagines those toys missing her once she abandons them. Enlarge This Image Ruby Washington/The New York Times Allan Harris performing songs from his CD “Convergence.” To hear the jazz singer Allan Harris pouring warmth and tenderness into that song, which he performed in an exquisitely syncopated vocal arrangement on Tuesday evening at the Metropolitan Room, was to peek into a child’s enchanted toy land through the eyes of a devoted father. Music Review  By STEPHEN HOLDEN for The New York Times Published: August 29, 2012 That performance was the high point of Mr. Harris’s new show, which remembers the ’70s duet albums that Evans recorded with Tony Bennett. Mr. Harris’s new album with the pianist Takana Miyamoto, “Convergence” (Love Productions Records), consists of recordings of 10 songs from the Bennett-Evans sessions that closely echo the style and spirit of the originals. Orrin Evans (no relation to Bill) was Mr. Harris’s excellent pianist on Tuesday. Mr. Harris’s formidable baritone, with its husky edges and deep, resonant low notes, bears little resemblance to Mr. Bennett’s tenor-baritone. But the two singers are temperamentally quite similar. When Mr. Harris mutes his lurking blues bark, he closely resembles Nat King Cole. His approach is polite, pleasant and reassuring without being bland. Mr. Harris performed the songs in the same order that they appear on “Convergence,” with only one addition, a fragment of “When in Rome,” a number he was still in the process of learning and for which he played guitar. A lightly swinging version...

Tessa Souter “Beyond The Blue”

Three of the tracks—“The Lamp Is Low,” based on Ravel’s “Pavane”; “My Reverie,” built from Debussy’s “Rêverie”; and “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” from Borodin’s “String Quartet in D”—will be instantly recognizable, though Souter’s slow, sensual readings are stunningly original. A fourth is based on another Borodin composition, his “Polovetsian Dances,” transformed more than a half-century ago into “Stranger in Paradise,” but here reimagined by Souter as the more intimately romantic “Dance With Me.” The eight remaining tracks embrace source material both familiar (Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony,” Brahms’ “Symphony No. 3”) and comparatively obscure (Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor,” Gabriel Fauré’s “Pavane” and his “Elegy”), all refitted with splendidly crafted Souter lyrics. In the liner notes, Souter says that the majority of the arrangements “emerged spontaneously in the studio.” Such alchemic dexterity is a rare pleasure. By Christopher Loudon “Jazz...

VSOJAZ 08/17/19 (Recently Received Recordings & Tribute to 1969 & Woodstock

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VSOJAZ 08/03/19 (Recently Received Recordings)

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