Shirley Horn - May the Music Never End
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Shirley HornEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2003-06-24
Music Label: Verve
Soundtracks:
- Forget Me
- If You Go Away
- Yesterday
- Take Love Easy
- Never Let Me Go
- Watch What Happens
- Ill Wind
- Maybe September
- Everything Must Change
- This Is All I Ask
- May The Music Never End
Free Music Notes for May the Music Never End
Free Music Review: Lengthening Shadows
Hit: 5 Stars
In dedicating the eleventh album of her late-career Verve renaissance to long-time bass player Charles Ables, who had died two years earlier, Shirley Horn wrote, "There is no saying goodbye to you -- just a slight postponement until the next gig. Those thirty-three years of love and music will hold me and [drummer Steve Williams] until later." Later, alas, would come all too soon for her and for those who had listened with delight to her regular releases on Verve, an association that began in 1987 and gave the D.C.-based veteran performer a larger fan base than she had ever enjoyed. A decade of declining health, during which she remained a committed, energetic, and often stirringly communicative live performer and recording artist, culminated in her own death in October 2005, and thus this 2003 album represents the final page in a distinctive chapter of jazz vocal history.
With benefit of hindsight, it is impossible not to notice what some of us feared at the time -- that in addition to being an elegy for Horn's friend and collaborator, the album was Horn's goodbye to us. She seems to have known it would likely be her last such effort (a few subsequent live tracks are fill-ups on Verve's most recent, unsatisfactory best-of). Were it not that it would make this eloquent and meaningful recording sound morbid and off-putting, I would go so far as to call it a concept album on death: not the indulgent juvenilia some Goth-rocker might make, but a mature artist's graceful acceptance of others' passing and the inevitability of her own. Most of the songs chosen look back fondly and wistfully, and forward with the melancholy of resignation. The titles give some hint of these themes: "Forget Me," "If You Go Away," "Yesterday," "Never Let Me Go," "Ill Wind," "Everything Must Change" (heard here for most of its duration in an unusually rigid arrangement, with a taut, heavily accented rhythm that suggests the beating of a heart), "May The Music Never End." The Horn musical formula outwardly appears not to have changed (a handful of ballads taken at the slowest of possible tempos; a couple of genial uptempo tunes to let some air into the room; and the obligatory number done with Latin inflections, usually a gentle samba), but the tone is more contemplative and somber than ever before. This is autumnal music, and the autumn it evokes is not the autumn of brilliant blue skies, an invigorating nip in the air, outdoor festivals, and children playing in piles of leaves, but the late autumn days of slate-colored skies, bare trees and russet-brown fields, lengthening shadows, the specter of oncoming winter, ruminations on last things. "Ill Wind," indeed.
The reason Horn held up so well as a performer in the frailty of her last years (a foot amputation had rendered her unable to accompany herself on piano by this time), had to do with what made her performances interesting in the first place. Her appeal never was rooted in those virtues on which time tells most heavily with singers: she never had Ella Fitzgerald's pure, pellucid, girlish sound; Sarah Vaughan's virtuoso agility; Dinah Washington's locomotive-like raw power. She captivated us with her masterful use of silence and space, her individual and arresting phrasing, the precision with which she weighted and colored words, her facility for conveying both humor and heartbreak, often within a line or two of one another. She had more in common with her beloved Billie Holiday, who also was a prolific recording artist when in declining health (mostly for the same label), and whose best late recordings make a similar emotional appeal. But because Horn was not the self-destructive personality that Holiday was, she was more consistent -- her late recordings never are as difficult to listen to as those of Holiday at her most physically compromised. Horn's best virtues had not abandoned her by MAY THE MUSIC NEVER END; indeed, she never gave more penetrating performances than these. Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" seems made new. Her reflective, utterly earnest approach to it -- here sounding casual and nearly offhand, here pained, here numbed and bereft -- seems to scrub the song clean of decades of associations, uncovering emotional truths of such a universal nature that they unite a 25-year-old Liverpudlian pop star and a sextugenarian American jazz chanteuse. It's a miraculous reimagining. She lays claim at least to co-ownership (with Sinatra) of Gordon Jenkins's lovely prayer of advancing age, "This Is All I Ask." And in the closing title track, Artie Butler and Norman Martin have given her a farewell song I could not imagine being improved upon, and she rises to the occasion with a performance that, under the circumstances, is almost unbearably poignant ("We were young/Tomorrow seemed so far away/But now there are times when it's all too perfectly clear/Tomorrow is here"), but richly rewarding for all that. Its effect defies description; it belongs on the shortest of short lists of this singer's greatest performances.
Roy Hargrove, who had guested on Horn's 1996 album THE MAIN INGREDIENT, turns up here on flugelhorn for "Take Love Easy" (one of the two swingers) and a solo of great poise on "Ill Wind." Ed Howard capably fills the vacated bass chair; Steve Williams on drums is by now an old friend to us too. George Mesterhazy, who memorably collaborated with Horn on 1997's LOVING YOU (a surprisingly successful experiment with synthesized textures), takes the lion's share of the piano duties, and the spare tastefulness of his playing reminds one of Horn's without aping it. Ahmad Jamal spells Mesterhazy for two tracks, and on "Maybe September" provides a flowery, busy solo that is the closest thing to a false note on the album: it is technically brilliant but at odds with Horn's atmosphere of simplicity and economy (she could not have played like this, but she probably would not have chosen to in any case). His accompaniment on "This Is All I Ask," however, puts all that technique in the service of a perfect touch, and there he is above reproach.
And so, a towering valediction by an artist who, for all her infirmities, was still at the peak of her powers in the ways that counted most. It is a knockout blow in the final round of a career that represented a victory for the arts of subtlety and nuance. "Where do you start?" she once mused, on another of her great albums; and this is where, and how, she finished: powerfully, indelibly, unforgettably.
May the Music Never End Poster
Shirley Horn is one of the great voices in jazz, her warmly breathy, slightly gritty voice investing ballads with rare depths of meaning. There's a level of emotional intensity here that's achieved by few singers, and it's made even more compelling by Horn's innate reserve. On May the Music Never End, Horn acts as producer as well, and she eschews the lush string accompaniments of 2001's You're My Thrill for the minimum accompaniment of a piano trio. It only magnifies the intimacy of her performance, with pianist George Mesterhazy's spare, understated chords gently lapping against her voice on songs like Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" and Michel LeGrand's "Watch What Happens." Long-time drummer Steve Williams adds real drama to "Everything Must Change." Horn has always had a special affinity with trumpet players--having recorded with both Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis--and here Roy Hargrove turns up on two tracks, adding subtle punch to "Take Love Easy" and "Ill Wind." There is also a guest appearance by Ahmad Jamal, and his sparkling piano further illuminates "Maybe September" and "This Is All I Am." --Stuart BroomerJazz Music CDs
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