Dave van Ronk - Sweet & Lowdown
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CD Details
Artist: Dave van RonkEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2001-06-26
Music Label: Justin Time Records
Soundtracks:
- I'll See You In My Dreams
- Comes Love
- Zoot Suit
- As Time Goes By
- Some Of These Days
- Thanks For The Memory
- Puttin' On The Ritz
- Blues In The News
- I'd Rather Charleston
- I Can't Get Started
- Sweet And Lowdown
- I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone
- Your Feet's Too Big
- Bye Bye Blackbird
- A Cottage For Sale
Music reviews of Sweet & Lowdown
Music Review: Charming if lightweight retro album
Rating: 3 Stars
This album is an unexpected one for Dave van Ronk, the sandpaper-voiced folk singer: a bunch of 1920s & 1930s jazz standards; he doesn't play guitar on this one, leaving the accompaniment to a bunch of revivalist jazzmen jed by the expat British pianist Keith Ingham whom one usually would find on a label like Arbors or Sunnyside. All in all it's quite a pleasant disc, assuming you're like me & like van Ronk's voice. If you're looking for smooth readings of tunes like "As Time Goes By" or "I Can't Get Started", you'd better head to John Pizzarelli; this album is more along the lines of the raspy, inimitable singing of Armstrong & Fats Waller. As with a lot of other singers who don't rely on beauty of tone, one of Van Ronk's methods of invigorating songs is by digging up the forgotten verses & 2nd choruses that have been dropped over time; this is for instance the only version of "Bye Bye Blackbird" I've heard with the original minor-key introduction. I tend to think singers can get too hung up on preserving the verses, but it's nonetheless interesting to hear some of these rarities.Van Ronk actually shines best on the ballads, which he lends quirky gravitas. The album is peppered with some novelty numbers which I find irritating ("Zoot Suit", Gershwin's forgettable "I'd Rather Charleston", the old Waller novelty "Your Feet's Too Big"), & a few of the tunes misfire ("Comes Love" is oddly laboured) but there's enough here that works that the disc is worth a listen. Scott Robinson does a really nice job on the reeds, though he's no great original: his tenor on "I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone" is patently pinched from Zoot Sims' great rendition on _If I'm Lucky_. The studio sound is pointedly old-fashioned, sounding rather like it was recorded by Columbia in the 1950s or 1960s instead of in 2001.
The main reason for the rather low marks I've given this disc is contextual: this album is charming but lightweight, & given that it came out at roughly the same time as albums like Geoff Muldaur's _Password_ & Bob Dylan's _"Love and Theft"_, albums that came up with brilliantly fresh music by digging around in the music of the 1920s and 1930s, I can't help feeling that the treatments of the standards on this album are too insubstantial & fail to interrogate the material with much care. Still, it's not a bad disc--worth a listen.
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Description of Sweet & Lowdown
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