Carly Simon, Moonlight Serenade

[RonF]

Another "old" pop rocker settles down to record a jazz standards album. Saw Carly on TV this morning. She looks like Mr. Ed with anorexia. Still can't sing a lick. Never could.

[jlhoots]

Another "old" pop rocker settles down to record a jazz standards album. Saw Carly on TV this morning. She looks like Mr. Ed with anorexia. Still can't sing a lick. Never could. 

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She did sound awful on GMA today.

[Dan Gould]

There was an article about this in the NYT yesterday.

I like the phrase "Lawrence Welk for Hip Seniors",

Critic's Notebook

A Sex Symbol of the 1970's Does Lawrence Welk for Hip Seniors

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: July 19, 2005

In the most seductive cut on "Moonlight Serenade," Carly Simon's likable new collection of popular standards, the album's brisk foxtrot rhythms are briefly interrupted by a silky pop-samba arrangement of the Howard Dietz-Arthur Schwartz ballad "Alone Together." Crooning against a luminescent backdrop of strings and electric keyboard, Ms. Simon, whose voice has deepened into a weathered contralto, invests this Depression-era vision of lovers clinging to each other in the darkness with the forthright openheartedness that has always been her calling card.

Ms. Simon still possesses one of pop music's friendliest and most intelligent voices, one that expresses a lot more feeling than the bratty tough-girl shout that dominates female pop singing today. By turns impassioned, sisterly and maternal, she conveys her feelings in blunt, sometimes ungainly phrases. When emotional storms boil up, her voice heaves with anxious tremors. But her underlying tone remains welcoming.

"Moonlight Serenade" (Columbia) is the fourth album of standards Ms. Simon has recorded in the last 25 years. Different from its predecessors, "Torch" and "My Romance," in which her voice slithered along the red-velvet upholstery of Marty Paich's orchestrations, and from "Film Noir," a spotty collaboration with the songwriter Jimmy Webb, "Moonlight Serenade" belongs to an emergent subgenre of traditional pop albums created for stress-free listening and nonathletic ballroom dancing. Arriving on the heels of the summer's surprise television hit, "Dancing With the Stars," its release is fortunate.

This sedate, homogenized ballroom style of traditional pop was dreamed up by the record mogul Clive Davis and introduced 15 years ago on the all-but-forgotten album "Dionne Warwick Sings Cole Porter" (Arista). Its streamlined, some would say dumbed-down approach to standards, which looks back to the big-band era, is a sharp departure from elegant white-gloves-and-orchids albums like "Torch" and Linda Ronstadt's three collaborations with Nelson Riddle. In that style, which came of age in the mid-50's, each song was outfitted with its own dramatically orchestrated movie soundtrack.

The streamlined concept paid off three years ago when "It Had to Be You" (J Records), the first volume of Rod Stewart's "Great American Songbook" trilogy, produced under Mr. Davis's supervision, went through the roof commercially and salvaged Mr. Stewart's fading recording career. The trilogy has been so successful that a fourth volume is to be released this fall.

Richard Perry, co-producer of the trilogy's second and third volumes, is the producer of "Moonlight Serenade." The record reunites him with Ms. Simon, for whom he oversaw "No Secrets," the 1972 blockbuster that included her signature hit, "You're So Vain." "Moonlight Serenade" is marginally better than Mr. Stewart's records; its peppy pulse isn't as rigid, and Ms. Simon brings more personality to the songs.

Who could have predicted that two sex symbols of 70's rock, one notorious for her dressing down of a celebrity lover ("You're So Vain"), the other for his steamy musical pillow talk (Mr. Stewart's "Tonight's the Night") would one day make albums of standards so soothing that their blander moments point toward a niche market that might be described as Lawrence Welk for Hip Seniors?

Mr. Stewart's multiplatinum success with albums made in a style that was anathema to his rock roots, has stirred up bitter echoes of the generational warfare that erupted when rock dethroned traditional pop in the late 1960's. While his sudden switch in direction has undoubtedly alienated some diehard rock fans, how betrayed can they feel, given his booming record sales?

The bitterness comes more from traditionalists aghast at what seems like a crass commercial stunt pulled by an undeserving interloper whose personal investment in the prerock American songbook is dubious. Mr. Stewart's mechanical, matter-of-fact renditions barely swing. He seems content to let the husky lived-in timbre of his voice, with its weird resemblance to that of the late Billie Holiday, do the interpretive work.

No one, however, is complaining about the financial windfalls accruing to the songwriters' estates or denying Mr. Stewart's crucial role in demonstrating the transcendent durability of the Kern-Berlin-Gershwin-Porter-Rodgers legacy.

To be fair, Mr. Stewart's albums are perfectly listenable, as long as you don't expect much depth. On the plus side his singing and the arrangements rarely get in the way of the material, and his playful duets with guest stars like Dolly Parton, Bette Midler and Cher, are fun. Addressing a canon from which others often strain to wring new meanings and shades of pseudo-profundity, his approach is refreshingly unpretentious.

Ms. Simon's and Mr. Stewart's albums have some overlap. Both singers recorded "Moonglow," "I Only Have Eyes for You" and "Where or When" in approximately the same styles and keys. Ms. Simon's voice is actually a little deeper than Mr. Stewart's. Her version of "Where or When" is in A, his in B-flat; she sings the verse, he doesn't.

It's worth noting that both singers have now reached 60, an age when, to quote Shakespeare, "the heyday in the blood is tame." It is an age at which the stranglehold of sex that engulfs popular music, and that inspired many of Ms. Simon's and Mr. Stewart's most memorable songs, has begun to loosen its grip. In their newest records, you can discern a palpable sense of relaxation and perhaps even detect a sigh of relief.

Edited July 20, 2005 by Dan Gould

[Stereojack]

A fourth album of standards from Stewart?

I was so hoping for a Christmas album!

[Free For All]

Of all the pop-star-sings-jazz-standards projects the ones I find most offensive BY FAR are Rod Stewart's. I'm offended that I hear them everywhere I go and that they are being passed off as jazz.

"Look! I can sing jazz, too! It's not so hard! Aren't I great? Now where's my damn money?"

The way he butchers the intricate and challenging melodies of so many great tunes just proves the opposite IMHO. That raspy no-discernible-pitch voice reminds me of listening to a radio when the station's not quite tuned in. Or my garbage disposal when I put chunky leftovers in it.

And people are eating this shit up (hopefully no one here).

I usually don't choose to participate in threads that diss others, but I'll make an exception here.

Stay in your own damn yard.

[RonF]

Of all the pop-star-sings-jazz-standards projects the ones I find most offensive BY FAR are Rod Stewart's.  I'm offended that I hear them everywhere I go and that they are being passed off as jazz.

"Look! I can sing jazz, too! It's not so hard! Aren't I great? Now where's my damn money?"

The way he butchers the intricate and challenging melodies of so many great tunes just proves the opposite IMHO. That raspy no-discernible-pitch voice reminds me of listening to a radio when the station's not quite tuned in. Or my garbage disposal when I put chunky leftovers in it.

And people are eating this shit up (hopefully no one here).

I usually don't choose to participate in threads that diss others, but I'll make an exception here.

Stay in your own damn yard.

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[Tjazz]

Another CD for the Starbucks crowd.

Maybe Carly will do a FAREWELL tour too.

Edited July 20, 2005 by Tjazz

[JSngry]

Torch was actually pretty good. Mike Mainieri produced it, and all his were the core players, so the results were pleasantly "urban". Not at all retro-schlock. Simon dealt with the lyrics in a personal manner, and if you don't mind sacred standards being re-recast as relevant pop tunes, it's not at all a bad listen.

My Romance, however, sucked the proverbial Don Quis Dix. Marty Paich is cool and all that, but his arrangements here went for the bland and succeded wildly. Empty and clueless were the vocals as well. I picked it up on cassette in the 99-cent bin on a whim and felt that I had paid a dollar too much for it.

[Kalo]

It's really great that artists with the stature of Rod Stewart and Carly Simon are reviving these forgotten ditties of yesteryear.