Swingin’ standards from the Great American Songbook
Gary Fields follows in a line of precocious teenagers and twenty-somethings that swim against the tide of their peers with an early interest in the Great American Songbook. Harry Connick Jr. recorded a set of standards at 20, and his protégé Peter Cincotti performed in the off-Broadway production Our Sinatra at 18 before adapting modern pop songs to fit with the works of Cole Porter and Roger Hammerstein. A similar mix of classic and classicized was offered by Michael Bublé, who coolly matched a Sinatra-esque delivery to songs from Sammy Kahn, Jerome Kern, The Bee Gees and Gamble & Huff. Fields borrows from many of the same song and vocal sources, with held notes and spoken asides mindful of Sinatra, a brashness that brings to mind Bobby Darin’s post-rock supper club style, and a hipster swing reminiscent of Sammy Davis Jr.
Although this is a Nashville production and was engineered and mixed by Billy Sherrill, Fields sticks to supper club pop rather than the countrypolitan derivative revisited by the likes of Sara Evans (1997’s Three Chords and the Truth), The Mavericks (1995’s Music For All Occasions), and Mandy Barnett (1999’s I’ve Got a Reason to Cry). Fields sings with a quartet of guitar, bass, keyboards and drums that omit the orchestration with which many of these songs were originally arranged. Sinatra’s 1953 hit “Learnin’ the Blues†is rendered sedate without a horn section to goose the vocal, though “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me†captures the melancholy mood of the Chairman’s take. Fields finds particular affinity with breezy, upbeat arrangements of Sammy Cahn’s “Teach Me Tonight†and “Please Be Kind,†both of which were also recorded by Sinatra, among others.
There’s light Latin swing in Marcos Valle’s “So Nice†and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “How Insensitive,†and a pensive version of “A Day in the Life of a Fool†splits its time between English and Spanish lyrics. More radically, the smooth jazz of Bobby Caldwell’s “All or Nothing at All†is transformed into a swinging piece of lounge cool, and Hugo & Luigi’s “I Got Time On My Hands†appears to have been remade from a mid-70s Stylistics album. Closing the album with “The Best is Yet to Come†Fields sings with both the ring-a-ding-ding attitude of Sinatra and the power of Tony Bennett. It’s a nice capper to an album that wears its influences openly without reducing them to loungey imitation. [©2008 hyperbolium dot com] 