My Discovery

After some painful minor surgery, I was awake one morning, floating on a sea of painkillers. I turned on my bedside radio and tuned to a station that was playing old standards. Drifting in and out of sleep, I became aware that a female vocalist was singing “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” The voice was warm and filled with emotion. The arrangement was perfect . . . caressing, lifting and swirling around the voice like a tropical sea around a beautiful woman.

I knew I would not be able to contact the station. It was one of those that played music that was programmed on some distant planet. I was right. The station didn’t even have a phone number. I could only hope to run across the same artist again and have her identified. Later, I even wondered if my reaction to what I heard had been caused by the music or the painkillers. Months went by and then . . . serendipity struck.

I was exercising on the floor at my gym listening to a talk show on AM radio. I rolled over to do some pushups, accidentally pressed a button on my little radio and changed the station. Suddenly, I was listening to the same version of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” This time they identified the artist: Carly Simon. The Internet took care of the rest.

I found a Carly Simon album called My Romance. Sure enough, one of the tracks was “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” A week later, I had the album, and I knew for sure that my reaction had not been due to the painkillers.

The whole album is moving, interesting . . . nearly perfect musically. Carly Simon and Marty Paich . . . what a combination!

So many vocalists are just stylists and sound emotionally flat. Ella, Nat King Cole, Cleo Lane and, especially, Tony Bennett all have lots of feeling in their music but, when Carly sings, her interpretations overflow with feeling. She moves with grace from passion to poignancy.

Carly is intensely musical. Her phrasing is lovely, and her voice is unique. Unlike Ella, whose big notes are smooth and bloom into a beautiful tremolo, Carly’s big notes are loud and edgy with the slightest tremolo at the end. Her soft notes are warm with a full tremolo. This contrast, the dynamics she uses and the way she slides into a note, combine to create the beauty and interest. Then there is that indefinable something in her voice that makes it more musical than most singers. Call it magic. Ah . . . Carly Simon!

Then there are the arrangements . . . .

I have always loved Marty Paich but knew him more as a jazz arranger. The arrangements he did for Carly’s album are something else. Rightly, he puts the emphasis on the piano; and by the way, pianist Michael Kosarin does a wonderful job on this album.

Even when Marty uses the whole orchestra—as in the title song—he is musical and never lets the arrangement sound like an ego pump-up for the singer. His scope is huge, moving from a powerful, irresistible piano in “When Your Lover Has Gone”—that eventually washes over Carly’s voice like the tide coming in—to the lightest accents from strings or oboe. He inserts tasty jazz trumpet or sax solos that enhance the feeling of the song. He has the courage to end a song with nothing but the voice or a sustained piano chord, and a couple of pieces do not resolve on the tonic but, like life, leave you floating on what has happened. Ah . . . Marty Paich!

If the sheer beauty and feeling of this album doesn’t make you cry, nothing will. It is so far beyond any other vocal album I have ever heard that it is a shame that Carly has nothing else like it. She should record all the great romantic ballads of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin and the rest. What a boon to American music it will be, if she does this. What a loss if she doesn’t.

My Romance was recorded in 1990. I discovered it in 2001. It makes me wonder what other great music I have missed and how I will ever find it.