ALBUM REVIEW:

Lisa Remick and Mike Renzi

BY WILL FRIEDWALD

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Lisa Remick tells me, “It's really all about the intelligence of the music, for me.”  I had a similar reaction when listening to her latest album, but I would put it slightly differently.  I had never met her or even heard her live, but she came highly recommended by Mike Renzi, which is more than good enough for me. (The previous singer, then also new to me, who had been recommended by Mike was Nicolas King.  Nuff said!) The first line of Ms. Remick’s bio, which states that Ms. Remick is a native and a resident of South Florida, was, combined with the beauty of her music, enough to set my imagination in motion. 

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With that thought in mind, her singing paints vivid pictures for me: hers is a rich and luxurious sound, the voice, the interpretations, the piano work, the musical direction, and the song selections are of such high quality, and made with such intelligence, that she paints pictures in my mind of well-dressed women wearing high class jewelry, lounging about on overstuffed couches plopped down in front of expensive draperies and other truly haute furnishings in the fanciest parts of Palm Beach.  It’s all very classy with impeccable musicianship and taste. It’s the musical intelligence made both visual and concrete.

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But it should be noted that this kind of rich taste has nothing to do with opulence for its own sake, Ms. Remick has a sound that’s truly “luxurious” in the best sense of the word, even though the sonic tableaux is far from cluttered or overstated. And she knows well that there are two ways to get such a magnificent background sound: 1. you could go out and hire a string section with over 100 violinists fiddling frantically (but even then, you’d be taking your chances); or 2. You could get Mike Renzi. (It also should be made clear that these images are strictly in my own head; for all I know, in reality, she’s lived a hardscrabble existence, peddling papers, selling blood, and singing sad chansons for francs on street corners like the Piaf of Greater Miami.)  

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That intelligence is keen enough to draw upon songs from all manner of sources, including jazz composers (“Until I Met You,” “When Lights Are Low”), films (“Two For the Road”), Broadway hits (“Nobody Else But Me” fromShow Boat) as well as flops (“The Kind of Man a Woman Needs” from The Yearling and “I Just Found Out About Love” from Strip For Action, which closed out of town), other musical theater classics (“Soon It’s Gonna Rain” from The Fantasticks), foreign melodies (“Once Upon A Summertime”) and songs by such uncategorizable authors as Dave Frishberg (“You Are There”) and Bart Howard (“I’ll Be Easy to Find”). Intelligence indeed.

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Whatever we call it, that quality can be found throughout.  It’s particularly poignant on her collage of “You Are There” and “Where Do You Start?” - the latter is virtually the only major song by Marilyn and Alan Bergman that’s never been a favorite of mine; as brilliant as they are in other areas, the Bergmans, who have been married for 60 years at this point, don’t know much about divorce (and hopefully they’ll never learn).  But where the song in itself sentimentalizes a situation which is anything but sentimental (and ‘twil always be ever thus), Ms. Remick leavens it by bringing in Dave Frishberg’s “You Are There,” a very different kind of a song about the post mortem of a relationship, and that changes the equation entirely; the second song now makes the first song surprisingly effective.  

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Likewise, there’s extra brain power in her reading of “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” which was originally written by the Gershwins for the 1927 show Funny Face, but then dropped and used instead in a 1928 show called Rosalie, and eventually worked back into Funny Face via the 1957 movie version.  Ms. Remick knowingly draws upon new lyrics written by producer Roger Edens for Audrey Hepburn in that film.  (“Can I trust how I feel? / Is this my Achilles heel…?.”) And in “Two For the Road,” she has the good sense to take the title literally, in making it a duet with Mr. Renzi.

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Intelligence is all over “The Kind of Man a Woman Needs”; where dozens of jazz singers do “I’m All Smiles” and “Why Did I Chose You?,” Ms. Remick is one of the few singers to not overlook this remarkable ballad.  “Once Upon a Summertime” originated as the “Waltz of the Flowers” before Blossom Dearie brought Michel Legrand’s tune to Johnny Mercer, and I find it especially fascinating that Ms. Remick de-emphasizes the ¾ time signature, and then the whole number seems to get even more French during Mr. Renzi’s piano break - a move that she compliments by return to the lyrics en francais.

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And more so, I was glad to hear Bart Howard’s “I’ll Be Easy to Find”; his blockbuster, “Fly Me to the Moon” is heard more than all of his other songs combined, but Ms. Remick (abetted by Steve Ahern on flugelhorn) shows that “Easy to Find” is among the best songs that anybody ever wrote.   The song turns out to be an apt signifier for the team of Remick and Renzi themselves; a musical partnership (and an album on this level), a meeting of two musical intelligences resulting in a package that’s so radiantly luxurious, is anything but easy to find. But once you’ve found it, its beauty is impossible to miss.

 

Will Friedwald writes about jazz and nightlife for The Wall Street Journal. His last story for Vanity Fair focused on Michael Feinstein. Friedwald is the author of eight books on music and popular culture, including A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, Stardust Melodies, Tony Bennett: The Good Life, Jazz Singing, and the award-winning Sinatra: The Song Is You.

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