Love [1995]

Performer: Rosemary Clooney
Artist: Nelson Riddle
Engineer: Al Schmitt
Distributor: WEA (Distributor)

Notes: Personnel includes: Rosemary Clooney (vocals); Nelson Riddle (arranger, conductor). Producers: Dick Peirce, Sonny Burke. Recorded in March 1961. Includes liner notes by James Gavin. Personnel: Rosemary Clooney (vocals); Robert Gibbons, Al Hendrickson (guitar); Kathyrine Julye (harp); Gerald Vinci, Mischa Russell, James Getzoff, William Weiss, Anatol Kaminsky, Henry Hill , Victor Bay, Erno Neufeld, Benny Gill, Jacques Gasselin, Lou Raderman, Murray Kellner, Alex Beller, David Frisina, Marshall Sosson, Victor Arno, Israel Baker, Nathan Ross (violin); Barbara Simons, Alexander Neiman, Louis Kievman, Cecil Figelski, Paul Robyn, Stanley Harris, Alvin Dinkin, Virginia Majewski (viola); Don Cole, Joseph Saxon, Paul Bergstrom, Armand Karpoff, Richard Whitehouse, George Neikrug, Edgar Lustgarten, Ray Kramer, Jesse Ehrlich (cello); Gene Cipriano, Jules Kinsler, Joe Koch, Harry Klee, Abe Most, Plas Johnson , Wilbur Schwartz (saxophone); James M. McGee, John Cave (French horn); Richard L. Noel, George Arus, George Roberts , Robert Knight , Tommy Pedersen, Tommy Shepard (trombone); Donn Trenner, Paul Smith (piano); Irving Cottler (drums). Liner Note Author: James Gavin. Arrangers: Bob Thompson; Nelson Riddle. More than any other arranger, Nelson Riddle understood Rosemary Clooney's voice, including her subtle phrasing and inflection. Similarly, Clooney intuited Riddle's arrangements well. Instinctively, she knew how to mold her vocals to fit Riddle's unique orchestral timbres. LOVE is no exception to this rule. This album features 14 songs that revolve around life's bliss or sorrow, with most of these tunes focusing on the latter. One of the most poignant selections is "How Will I Remember You," a song that laments the loss of a great love. On this tune, Clooney's voice hovers gently above the silky strings and delicate harp accompaniment, and her singing here is sincere, legato, and woeful. On the other hand, George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me" is the most engaging song on this disc, with Clooney delivering Ira Gershwin's lyric with subtlety and finesse. She also exacts the loneliness implied in this tale. For anybody who's been unlucky in love, this album will resonate powerfully. Rosemary Clooney originally cut the 12 ballads (all picked by her) comprising Love for RCA Victor in 1961, arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle, leading an orchestra with one of the most luscious sounds heard on a pop recording during that entire decade. Then RCA shelved the album, and there Love lay, buried for two years, until Frank Sinatra signed Clooney to Reprise Records, bought the master, and released it. Clooney proves herself as good a producer as she was a singer for having chosen a dozen beautiful songs by Marc Blitzstein ("I Wish It So"), Rodgers & Hart ("Yours Sincerely"), and Bronislaw Kaper ("Invitation"), among others -- most (apart from what is arguably a definitive reading of "Someone to Watch Over Me") relatively obscure. Nelson Riddle, with whom she was passionately in love at the time, wrote some of the prettiest arrangements of his career, the product of which is the most ravishingly beautiful album of Clooney's career. Her voice and Riddle's arrangements carry the listener away into a world of the purest sensuality, filled with moods of deepest yearning and intense romantic joy. "How Will I Remember You," "Imagination," and "Invitation" don't even seem to exist in the real world, and the rest aren't far behind. Love is utterly spellbinding in its every quiet nuance from singer and orchestra. The 1995 Warner-Archive reissue by Gregg Geller (the man responsible for the Frank Sinatra complete Reprise box as well) has been remastered about as perfectly as one could hope for, with a rich, soft sound (check out the French horns on Irving Caesar's "If I Forget You"), and the original 12 songs have been augmented by two bonus tracks, the bluesy "Black Coffee" and the moody, quiet "The Man That Got Away," from Clooney's first Reprise recording, Thanks for Nothing. ~ Bruce Eder

Musician (3/96, p.96) - "...Fact is, living vocalists who do justice to the songs of Irving Berlin or Rodgers & Hart can be counted on one's fingers....this 1961 session places Rosemary Clooney in the same league with Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme..."

An iconic American vocalist, Rosemary Clooney often blurred the line between pop and jazz, occasionally even venturing into country and international styles. She started out as a singer with the Tony Pastor band in the 1940s, and her solo career started taking off at the end of the decade. Under the stewardship of Mitch Miller, she had numerous novelty-oriented '50s hits, but later on she dedicated herself to more serious, jazzier work, making some of her finest albums, like 1956's BLUE ROSE. Clooney was also active in films and TV (for a time she had her own television show), and continued performing and recording tirelessly until her death in 2002.

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