Search - John McGlinn, Brent Barrett, Judy Blazer :: Busby Berkeley Album

A superb tribute to Warren and Dubin

Gene DeSantis | Philadelphia, PA United States | 04/08/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This inexplicably deleted album features ten Harry Warren-Al Dubin songs from Busby Berkeley's golden years at Warner Bros.; placed next to Rhino/TCM's two-disc soundtrack anthology there is no contest. True it lacks Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and Jimmy Cagney and the whole magical gang, and you can't help noticing, and a faint museum whiff hovers over such projects, what with our current surfeit of musical genius; but it does have engaging singers -- especially the note-perfect Brent Barrett -- great sound, and the witty, beguiling play of John McGlinn and the London Sinfonietta. Indeed no one ever really did these songs right before; listen to Powell's own mediocre Brunswick records (collected on CD by Columbia/Legacy) and you wonder why the notes didn't jump off the staves and demand justice. If only Berkeley had worked in Dolby Digital; Ray Heindorf's eloquent, saucy, quick-thinking arrangements, with their suggestive wah-wahs and astonished woodwinds (and here augmented with apparent restored cuts and discreet modifications), helped define The Warner Sound and call to mind Carl Stalling, who used Warren-Dubin songs (some might say to death) in his cartoon scores. And the huffing and puffing of the Warner brigade (not yet the well-tuned musical fighting machine of the Steiner years) give way to the stylishness and poise of a conductor who had to lead Show Boat (on another EMI album) to do this; after all, there's operatic DNA in every Harry Warren tune, and Jerome Kern's masterpiece was the first High Opera of Broadway.
The only minus is the lack of "I Only Have Eyes for You," perhaps due to time constraints -- a song equally at home with Ol' Blue Eyes and The Flamingos, a romantic expression that only became more impassioned through songs like "At Last" and "Serenade in Blue." But how quickly you forget when someone does this grand music up so grandly."

Outstanding

Daniel Lowenstein | Los Angeles, California United States | 01/07/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In a review of McGlinn's "Jerome Kern Treasury," I said that was McGlinn's best CD. This one is second-best by an eyelash, which is to say it is outstanding, and a serious candidate for anyone's desert island list. As always with McGlinn, the songs and arrangements are faithful to the originals and musically impeccable. The performers are all first-rate. The CD contains familiar songs such as Forty-Second Street, Lullaby of Broadway, and Shuffle Off to Buffalo, as well as less familiar ones like Dames and I'm Going Shopping With You. Mr. Minafri is correct to commend the marvelous Remember My Forgotten Man, but wrong to inject politics. As Amity Shlaes points out in her book, "The Forgotten Man," the phrase was first used by William Graham Sumner to refer to the taxpayer who pays the bill when A compassionately decides to use public funds to benefit B. Can't we leave politics at the door and enjoy such superb music as Americans? And can't Angel re-release this gem of a CD?"