Listening to these songs is like leaning on the piano in the small hours of the night, after the party has broken up and almost everyone else has gone home. It's late, and you should be leaving too, but you stand there and you smoke a last cigarette, while you listen to the guy at the keyboard and the gal with the voice making music.
That's the special kind of haunting intimacy these remarkable duets create.
This is the first time that Stan Kenton and June Christy have recorded a whole album together—just the two of them. The results are exceptionally pleasing.
The founding father of Progressive Jazz and the talented blonde vocalist have contrived, between them, to achieve one of the rarest and most difficult effects in music as easily as though it were no trick at all. They get a spontaneous and apparently effortless sound which belies the enormous amount of experience, artistry, and good taste that went into creating it. It's the sort of easy-going, easy-listening music they once used to perform occasionally as encores during their band days together.
For this, of course, is not the first time their paths have crossed.
One day back in 1945, when Stanley Kenton was looking for a new vocalist, he auditioned and hired blonde and blue-eyed Shirley Luster of Decatur, Illinois, and introduced her to the musical world as June Christy. Band dates, concerts and tours, splits and reunions followed in dizzying sequences as Stan and June pursued their ambitious careers. But until now, there has been no real opportunity to hear what these two sound like all alone—undistracted by hot and coal saxes, volcanic rhythm sections and stratospheric brass. This time, not even an arranger is around to complicate their lives. The total effect is unexpected, ingenuous, and refreshing.
June and Stan, who both have striven to advance the techniques and horizons of modern music, take a backward, nostalgic look in choosing the songs for their Duet. June sings all of them with the unabashed warmth and lack of affectation which have become her trademark. She makes the listener feel that this is the way the song was meant to be sung. Stan is equally forthright on the piano. His playing is rich and inventive, but uncluttered by furbelows. In many ways the album is the most quietly authoritative statement to date of the musical principles in which Stan believes, and for which he has bottled on a glittering and magnificent scale. Both performances illustrate the fact that extreme sophistication and extreme simplicity end up by being one and the same thing.
This may not be music for everyone. But it is music for everyone who prefers the subtle to the obvious, the provocative to the trite. To these people this album will be as bracing as a sudden breeze on a scorching day.
