The utility of music, at its very core, is entertainment. It is not all about dissonance and consonance, tonal conflict and resolution; heart and intellect, pathos and ethos. Somewhere in everything music has to offer, there must be a smile. It is in music’s smile that vocalist Mark Winkler exists. An elegant West Coast mainstay, vocalist/lyricist/composer Winkler, drove across my radar first with his 2011 recording Sweet Spot (Café Pacific Records). I was struck by how well Winkler could skirt the orbit of con brio cabaret singing, with its fun, entertainment core, and remain completely fixed in his capacity of jazz singer and composer.
Winkler followed Sweet Spot with his bold 2013 release, The Laura Nyro Project (Café Pacific Records). An exceptional duet recording with The Manhattan Transfer’s
Winkler had a period of personal loss in 2016 that would have crushed lesser musical mortals. Rather than dwell in the loss, Winkler circled his wagons, and, by wagons I mean his friends, producing the present recording, The Company I Keep. The recording is tacitly a duets recording, where Winkler shares singing duties with the likes of
vocalist