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LIVIN' ON LOVE
- This Can't Be Love
- Our Love Is Here To Stay
- East Of The Sun
- Pure Imagination
- For All We Know
- Get Out Of Town
- Once in a While
- The Gentleman Is a Dope
- Alfie
- I'm Glad There Is You
- Do I Hear A Waltz
- I've Heard That Song Before
- Whistling Away The Dark
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| John, wesla, Alec & gary |
LIVIN' ON LOVE
Wesla Whitfield: vocals
Mike Greensill: piano / arranger
John Wiitala : bass
Vince Lateano - drums
Gary Foster: Alto, Tenor, Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Flute & Alto Flute
French Horns:
Leader - Bill Klingelhoffer
Alicia Telford
Keith Green
Eric Achen
orrin keepnews & Mike greensill: producers
LIVIN' ON LOVE
It's impossible to identify Wesla Whitfield as anything less than one of the most original and articulate members of the American Songbook community. Her singing is witty, melancholy (without being sentimental) and informed by a worldliness that enables Wesla to find the center of a lyric and move in, becoming the lyric, bringing the music to life without a theatrical vibrato or a false emotion. She is reflective, literate, and more than often, kind, inhabiting the complexities and, well, the sadness with which many of us are afflicted. We are in her songs and she knows who we are. I often feel revealed when listening to Wesla, either on a CD or in person (on a stage she is a superior actress and a frequent humorist - really something to see and hear). Any new recording by Wesla Whitfield is cause for celebration.
Celebrate, then, Here's Livin' On Love.
-- Jonathan Schwartz
NPR New York, and XM Satellite Radio
When I've described Wesla's latest CD to friends, they often say, "but why 4 French Horns?" Good question. The answer is akin to a wonderful story that Sammy Cahn would tell when asked what came first, the words or the music. He would inevitably reply, "The phone call!" Meaning that music is not always created from artistic decisions but molded out of circumstance and coincidence.
Well I have a friend, Bill Klingelhoffer who just happens to be a Wesla fan and the principle horn in the San Francisco Opera and Ballet orchestras. One day over a particularly good martini I was waxing poetic about the glorious sound of the French horn when he said, "Well, why don't you write something for me". And so an idea was born.
I initially used Bill's horn quartet in a jazz concert that I do every year at Old First Concerts in San Francisco. The line-up for this concert often features a "mystery vocalist", guess who? I did a couple of arrangements that included the horns backing Wesla, and it worked out so well that it was immediately decided that we must record this ethereal sound. And just 5 years later, we have!
The beauty of the horn quartet in this setting is that they can provide a velvet carpet of harmony as warm and beautiful as a large string orchestra while also give us that brassy punch one associates with the sound of a big band. Coupled with Gary Foster's lyrical improvisation on alto, clarinet and tenor and his overdubbed flute work, they manage to make 8 musicians sound like a full orchestra.
Wesla also loves the clear and open sound of the basic jazz quartet as a setting for her interpretations of American Standards, and so on this CD we decided we'd like to use both styles of accompaniment. Of course all of this instrumental hoopla is really just a subtle and tasteful way of providing the glorious voice of Wesla Whitfield with the tools she needs to create her usual magic!
-- Mike Greensill
