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BOZ SCAGGS | Speak Low
ARTISTS
Boz Scaggs
TRACK LISTING
1 Invitation
2 She Was Too Good To Me
3 I Wish I Knew
4 Speak Low
5 Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me
6 I'll Remember April
7 Save Your Love For Me
8 The Ballad Of The Sad Young Men
9 Skylark
10 Senza Fine
11 Dindi
12 This Time The Dream's On Me
To sing the Great American Songbook convincingly, it helps to believe in chance. All the legendary composers of standards – George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen, the list goes on – had something to say about life’s serendipities. Their songs are full of unexpected encounters, fine romances that blossom out of nowhere.
Boz Scaggs believes in this sort of thing. You can tell that from the opening stanzas of ‘Speak Low,’ the sublime and sexy follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2003 standards collection ‘But Beautiful.’ Recorded in four days with the musicians playing live together in the same room, Speak Low oozes the spontaneous essence of torch song.
The multi-dimensional singer, whose 1976 album ‘Silk Degrees’ was one of the landmark pop titles of the decade, began working on ‘Speak Low’ several years ago. He’d settled on most of the material, and had developed a rough notion of the sound in his head. “I had a few distinct elements I wanted to hear with my voice,” Scaggs recalls. “I knew I wanted reeds, bass flutes and clarinets. I wanted to try to sing with strings, but I didn’t want it to sound like generic strings.” He needed an accomplice, an arranger who could bring those textures to life; as part of his search, he flew from his home in the Bay Area to New York to meet with some prospective collaborators.. We walked by the Blue Note and heard music coming out of the club. It was vibes, string trio, a couple of horns – this was the sound I’d been hearing in my head, exactly. Turned out to be the Gil Goldstein Septet. After the set we started talking, and it was just a really nice meeting. When we got together around a piano, that was it. We knew.”
That sense of invention – coy, often oblique invention rather than radical reconstruction – defines ‘Speak Low.’ One example is Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me,” which is most often rendered in a bouncy medium-tempo swing pulse. After trying it that way, Scaggs and his crew slowed the tempo down dramatically, to a captivating crawl. The possibilities, Scaggs says, suddenly multiplied. “When we tried it like that, we were surprised at how the slow ballad tempo gave the lyrics more emotional dimension. It’s hard to sing that way – I call it ‘jumping from post to post,’ because there’s a lot of area between the beats. But it really works.”
And though Scaggs took care to avoid copying or emulating the classic interpretations of these songs, in a few cases he found it nearly impossible. His “I Wish I Knew” draws on the memorable rendition on John Coltrane’s Ballads album: “That’s where I learned the tempo, and the phrasing. He legitimized that song for me.” And then there’s “She Was Too Good To Me,” which was recorded by jazz vocalist and trumpeter Chet Baker. “It’s very hard to escape Chet on that,” Scaggs acknowledges. “It will be said that I leaned on Chet, and I openly admit it. When he goes into that pure, unwavering place, that’s some of the most beautiful singing on the planet.”
The singer adds that the airy, inviting feeling of the new album is partly due to the atmosphere of the studio. The album was recorded at Skywalker Sound, a state-of-the-art studio that’s part of filmmaker George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch complex. The room is massive, a soundstage big enough to fit an orchestra. Yet ‘Speak Low’ sounds like it was made in someone’s cozy living room. “The sense of intimacy you can get there is quite remarkable,” Scaggs says. “You sorta naturally think that you can get closer to the music in a smaller room, but that’s not always true. At Skywalker, the vastness brought us all together......When you enter you go through these huge heavy doors, and the enormous space and enormous quiet really gives you a sense of intimacy. The quiets in that room are much quieter, and all of the dynamics are really vivid. It’s a great room to sing in.”
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