Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 27, 1992 TAG: 9201270047
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
NEW CD RELEASES CAPTURE THE EMOTION OF JUDY GARLAND
Judy Garland was a pop singer with no pretensions about being anything more, despite complaining during her fabled Carnegie Hall concert that "they won't let me sing jazz . . . whoever they are."Truth is, Garland never showed much desire to stray from familiar melody lines - there's little expansion, ornamentation or embellishment in her singing. On the other hand, the actress that was in Garland enabled her to dig deep into the drama of a song to explicate its lyrics. If she took few risks musically, Garland often took them emotionally, as the best numbers of the three-CD box set "Judy Garland - The One and Only" reveal.
This set covers Garland's career at Capitol after she was fired by MGM in 1950, drawing mostly from Garland's studio and concert albums. It's divided into three sections: studio, live and the 1960 England sessions with conductor-arranger Norrie Paramor.
The first section is drawn from five of Garland's six studio albums for Capitol. While often weighed down by pop arrangements that are in and of their time, it delivers several gems: a very blue "Me and My Shadow," absent its playful premise; a jubilant "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart"; "April Showers," a gentle drizzle in Garland's hands; the too-sweet-to-last regrets of "While We're Young" and "Last Night When We Were Young"; and "By Myself," sort of her "My Way" in which Garland insists:
face the unknown, I'll build a world of my own
"because no one knows better than myself
"I'm all by myself alone."
The "In the Footlights" section draws from several live sessions at the Cocoanut Grove, Carnegie Hall, Manhattan Center, London Palladium and from her early-'60s variety show on CBS. Working before an audience of any size seemed to draw the best out of Garland as both singer and actress. She fed off their energies, which in turn inspired emotional release and reinforced her desperate need to be loved, or at least appreciated.
There's really little distance between the brassy confidence of "When You're Smiling (the Whole World Smiles With You)" and the slow, deliberate (and previously unreleased) "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" - they're simply the two sides of Garland's emotional coin. The Palladium recordings include several fresh releases, notably a jolly "Don't Rain on My Parade" duet with 18-year-old daughter Liza Minnelli and "Just in Time," where Garland briefly loses the thread before regaining her confidence and control of the song.
The Paramor sessions disc may be the most cohesive in this set. The 20 selections - only six of which have been easily accessible to the public - are heard here for the first time in digital release and there's a certain flow, a unity of vision and purpose, that makes this feel like a great lost Garland album.
Paramor seemed to have Garland's best interests in mind and his arrangements never overwhelm or obscure her particular instrument, which allows Garland to focus on the drama of each song. Even the Jolson standard "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" is given a subtle context in keeping with the confessional quietude of "The Man That Got Away" and "Happiness Is a Guy Named Joe," not to mention her signature song, "Over the Rainbow," which took on ever new, ever deeper meanings late in Garland's speckled career.