Betty Buckley - The Doorway
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CD Details
Artist: Betty BuckleyEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2002-10-29
Music Label: Varese Sarabande
Soundtracks:
- The Doorway
- With A Song In My Heart
- An Interesting Person
- Sycamore Trees
- Meditation/I Concentrate On You
- Autumn Leaves
- A Loss Of Heroes
- St. Francis Prayer
- America The Beautiful/Bridge Over Troubled Water
- God Bless America
- For The Beauty Of The Earth/Imagine
Music reviews of The Doorway
Music Review: Extra Credit
Rating: 5 Stars
Remember that one professor that a lot of students thought was too hard, while some students utterly worshiped her? When you listen to The Doorway, you'll realize that Betty Buckley is that professor, and this recording is that upper level seminar class that scares off most students. But it beckons to the True Believers.
The Doorway is Betty Buckley's toughest class. It's her smartest, most challenging work. As with studying under a very, very good teacher, you find yourself enjoying the act of reflecting on the meaning of how one song is linked with another. You notice something done very differently on the phrasing of a familiar song, and you construct theories about the development of thematic structure. It becomes reflexive to explicate her work like poetry, uncovering the layers meaning. And before ya know it, you're on track eleven, translating Seneca without hardly noticing that you're speaking Latin. Or something like that.
Betty Buckley wrote the haunting title track. To my recollection, she hasn't recorded her own songs since that first concert album back in the Eighties. And she ought to do more of it. When she writes lyrics, she's clearly more poet than song-writer in the traditional sense. You'll find no obvious conventions and defaults so common in pop music-- the kind that ensures you can probably guess the next line before you've ever heard it. Really a very gifted writer, she'll give you no clichés as familiar road-signs in her lyrics. And the way through can be damn near un-navigable, but such are the challenges of the Tough Professor, right? Rest assured, any work she makes you do is worth it.
Other highlights include her lovely rendition of "With a Song in my Heart" (Rogers and Hart). As much as I'd like to see Buckley record more of the songs she's written, I wish she'd record more Rogers and Hart. The straightforwardness of their combined lyrics and melodies--their pattern of writing in concrete terms and leaving it to the listener supply the more abstract meanings--these features are well-matched to Buckley's sensibilities as a singer. A Rogers and Hart songbook recording would be swell.
Fans of the "Bridge Over Troubled Water" part of her medley in the London Concert will be relieved to find the song included here with nary a hint of that deeply unsettling pairing with "The Greatest Love of All". Here it's matched with "America the Beautiful"--making perfect sense in its immediately-post-9/11 context.
Perhaps best of all on this recording is her "Autumn Leaves". I've heard many, many fine recordings of this near perfect song. This is among the best, and it alone is worth the price of the CD.
I'll admit, I often stop listening after Track 6 ("Autumn Leaves") of this 11 track recording. Not because the other tracks aren't good, but on a Sunday afternoon, I'm reluctant to subject my neighbors to the so-refective-it's-kinda-weird quality of tracks 7 through 11.
A little bit of weirdness not withstanding, the recording deserves all the stars available to it. Werner's arrangements are at their most ambitious, and they are precisely right for echoing and developing the tone of the music. Though the first half is more accessible--and truly more entertaining--than the second half, it's all pretty heady stuff. But I'm sure you're up to it. And come on--you know you always wanted to feel like someone who can speak Latin.
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Description of The Doorway
In September 2001, Broadway veteran Betty Buckley was preparing concerts to open the Lincoln Center American Songbook Series when the tragic events of 9/11 unfolded. But at the urging of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the events weren't canceled, instead becoming a tribute to the city's indomitable spirit and Broadway's most treasured adage: the show must go on. Recorded just weeks later, this album is built around the repertoire of those inspirational evenings, a warm, intimate reminder that there is considerably more to the Broadway musical tradition than vocal bravado and show-stopping musical numbers. Indeed, Buckley caresses every jazzy nuance and bolsters the innate cabaret drama of this material, which ranges from her own introspective title track through Rodgers, Jobim, and a smoky en Francais take on the standard "Autumn Leaves" to the understated dignity of her "America the Beautiful"/"Bridge Over Troubled Water" medley and the mournful jazz band improvisation, "A Loss of Heroes." Arranged by Kenny Werner (who also wrote the meditative "St. Francis Prayer" here) and produced by Buckley, it's one of the most dignified and thoughtful musical projects to have been inspired by the horrors of 9/11. --Jerry McCulleyBroadway & Vocalists CDs
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