Friday June 26th 8:00pm
at The Mann Center in Philadelphia, PA
Boz Scaggs
To sing the Great American Songbook convincingly, it helps to believe in chance. All the legendary composers of standards – George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen, the list goes on – had something to say about life’s serendipities. Their songs are full of unexpected encounters, fine romances that blossom out of nowhere. Their wistful and often impossibly beautiful melodies convey the magic of happenstance and also its flipside, the capricious cruelty of fate. Their lyrics celebrate the notion that life can change in an instant – when that vision of loveliness steps out of a dream and you suddenly find yourself bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
Boz Scaggs believes in this sort of thing. You can tell that from the opening stanzas of ‘Speak Low,’ the sublime and sexy follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2003 standards collection ‘But Beautiful.’ Recorded in four days with the musicians playing live together in the same room, Speak Low oozes the spontaneous essence of a torch song. It’s romantic singing done casual and breezy – from the first notes, you sense that everyone involved is alive to the possibilities of the moment. At the same time, it’s a feast of carefully wrought moods – here’s Scaggs, owner of one of the most distinctive voices in popular music, singing sweet and low in the thick shadows. About the lover who, he discovered too late, was too good to be true.
Michael McDonald
"You just try to pick the songs that are most meaningful to you,” says five time Grammy-winner Michael McDonald about the inspiration for his new album, Soul Speak. “These songs span my life—they’re the ones where I can remember where I was when I first heard them, the ones that made me interested in becoming a recording artist, the songs I’d always imagined myself singing.”
Soul Speak is the natural follow-up to McDonald’s two smash explorations of the Motown Records songbook—the platinum-selling Motown from 2003, which was nominated for two Grammy awards, and the next year’s gold-selling Motown Two. But this time, McDonald didn’t restrict himself to any one style,record label or decade; he wanted to interpret songs that he loved, regardless of genre. So while some of the selections—“For Once in My Life,” “Walk on By,” or the album’s first single, “Love TKO”—fall squarely within the blue-eyed soul territory that we associate with Michael McDonald, others, like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” are a bit more surprising.
To sing the Great American Songbook convincingly, it helps to believe in chance. All the legendary composers of standards – George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen, the list goes on – had something to say about life’s serendipities. Their songs are full of unexpected encounters, fine romances that blossom out of nowhere. Their wistful and often impossibly beautiful melodies convey the magic of happenstance and also its flipside, the capricious cruelty of fate. Their lyrics celebrate the notion that life can change in an instant – when that vision of loveliness steps out of a dream and you suddenly find yourself bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
Boz Scaggs believes in this sort of thing. You can tell that from the opening stanzas of ‘Speak Low,’ the sublime and sexy follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2003 standards collection ‘But Beautiful.’ Recorded in four days with the musicians playing live together in the same room, Speak Low oozes the spontaneous essence of a torch song. It’s romantic singing done casual and breezy – from the first notes, you sense that everyone involved is alive to the possibilities of the moment. At the same time, it’s a feast of carefully wrought moods – here’s Scaggs, owner of one of the most distinctive voices in popular music, singing sweet and low in the thick shadows. About the lover who, he discovered too late, was too good to be true.
Michael McDonald
"You just try to pick the songs that are most meaningful to you,” says five time Grammy-winner Michael McDonald about the inspiration for his new album, Soul Speak. “These songs span my life—they’re the ones where I can remember where I was when I first heard them, the ones that made me interested in becoming a recording artist, the songs I’d always imagined myself singing.”
Soul Speak is the natural follow-up to McDonald’s two smash explorations of the Motown Records songbook—the platinum-selling Motown from 2003, which was nominated for two Grammy awards, and the next year’s gold-selling Motown Two. But this time, McDonald didn’t restrict himself to any one style,record label or decade; he wanted to interpret songs that he loved, regardless of genre. So while some of the selections—“For Once in My Life,” “Walk on By,” or the album’s first single, “Love TKO”—fall squarely within the blue-eyed soul territory that we associate with Michael McDonald, others, like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” are a bit more surprising.
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