COMPOSERS: Various
LABELS: IPO
WORKS: Beyond the Sea, Charade, My Buddy, Just in Time, When I Look in Your Eyes, The Shadow of Your Smile, I was There, I’m Beginning to See the Light, A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square, When Your Lover has Gone, That’s All, My Funny Valentine, All By Myself, Something in Your Smile
PERFORMER: Roger Kellaway
CATALOGUE NO: IPOC 1006
Pianist Roger Kellaway served as Bobby Darin’s music director in the late 1960s and more recently worked in that capacity on Kevin Spacey’s biopic about the mercurial singer, Beyond the Sea. Repertoire associated with Darin provides a springboard for Kellaway’s considerable solo piano expertise. Kellaway is a virtuoso who eschews symmetrical dazzle in favour of long, winding and often colliding two-handed phrases (‘Beyond the Sea’ and ‘Just in Time’), and finds fresh meanings in old chestnuts (his slow, gospeltinged spin on ‘My Buddy’ and medium swing approach to ‘That’s All’). Barrelhouse brass figures and loping left-hand stride never overstay their welcome, while Kellaway’s elastically impassioned vocal on ‘Something in Your Smile’ weaves around his ravishing reharmonisations. Other highlights include a shimmering ‘My Funny Valentine’ and a Bartók-meetsbebop essay on ‘I’m Beginning to See the Light’. Gene Lees’s superb booklet notes cap this invigorating, beautifully engineered release. Jed Distler