Attention must be paid: Jack Jones, with a voice, shaped by a lifetime of experience, keeps a listener riveted throughout ArtWork
By David McGee
ARTWORK
Jack Jones
BFD
It would be wrong to characterize Jack Jones, the great pop-jazz crooner whose recording career began in 1959 and has addressed virtually every trend in the ensuing decades while staying firmly rooted in big band swing and lush romanticism, as sounding younger than his 86 years on this stunning masterpiece he titles ArtWork. Precisely because his voice—heavier, weathered but remarkably affecting–is now shaped by a lifetime of experience, Jones keeps a listener riveted throughout. Indeed, herein he turns songs by Leon Russell, Stephen Sondheim, Leiber and Stoller, Jacques Brel, Marilyn and Alan Bergman and Michel Legrand, Lionel Richie, Don McLean, et al., into vocal chamber music gems of the highest artistic order. With subtle, understated support by the late multi-instrumentalist master Joey DeFrancesco, primarily on Hammond B3, and composer-conductor-arranger-bassist John Clayton directing a full orchestra, Jones simply and confidently brings new perspectives to a sublime repertoire, thanks to an understated singing-speaking approach that plumbs the shadows at which the lyrics hint for trenchant pronouncements on the human condition—never cynical, but rather wry, bemused, intimately knowing, unapologetically vulnerable at points (“This Is All I Ask”), still searching for answers at others (“If Love Is Overrated”).
‘Is That All There Is,’ Jack Jones, from ArtWork
‘Fever,’ Jack Jones, from ArtWork
Speaking of shadows, the most pronounced relate to artists Jones knew well. The most tragic of these is the virtuoso Joey DiFrancesco, arguably the premier jazz organist of his generation, credited with restoring the organ as a jazz instrument, as well as a towering presence on trumpet, tenor sax, synthesizer and piano. As bassist Christian McBride told the New York Times, “In terms of taking the organ to the next level and making it popular again for a younger generation, no one did it like Joey.” Not long after completing the sessions for this Jack Jones project, Joey, only 51, died of a massive heart attack. Leading the ArtWork rhythm section of Graham Dechter (guitar), Tamir Hendleman (piano), John Hamar (bass) and Jeff Hamilton (drums), DiFrancesco’s instrumental voice is an evocative presence, perfectly attuned to the nuances of Jones’s readings, adding subtle, understated grandeur to a monument in progress.
‘This Is All I Ask,” Jack Jones, from ArtWork
The other notable “shadow” here is Jones’s friend Peggy Lee, who is honored not once but twice on ArtWork. With tasty, minimal B3 backing from DiFrancesco, Jones coolly speaks-sings Leiber-Stoller’s “Fever” as suggestively in his own way as Miss Lee did in hers, but the seasoned attitude he projects over the austere fills DiFranceso provides turn it into a saloon song for the wee small hours but with a tint of fatalism that says Jack’s going home alone tonight, and moreover, isn’t worried about it. Later, as part of a mini-song cycle closing the album, Jones delivers the Leiber-Stoller art song that was Miss Lee’s last hit, “Is That All There Is?”, in the second person, even mentioning at the outset that he “had a very dear friend named Peggy” and then proceeding to tell the story from her point of view, with a figurative arch smile in his voice and, in singing the chorus, a boozy swagger, a certain sang-froid surfacing upon realizing he’d looked into the abyss and found it was no big deal. To this add a soundscape courtesy DiFrancesco’s minimal, often humorous B3 commentary and Clayton coaxing a cool, meditative ambience from the orchestra and you get an interpretation both honoring Peggy Lee—and Leiber and Stoller—and bringing it home with the new perspective born of life lived full measure, on what really matters.
‘One Day,’ written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand, featured on Jack Jones’s Artwork
That this performance is so personal to Jack Jones in no way diminishes or undermines the weight of time and experience informing the other three songs in his closing argument, if you will: the poignant late-life musings animating Gordon Jenkins’s “This Is All I Ask,” and the affirmative outlook of “Here’s to Life” (written by Artie Butler and Phyllis Molinary) and the environmentally conscious “One Day” (originally titled “One Day (Prayer),” which finds Jones returning to the work of Michel Legrand (in 1971 Jones recorded an entire album of Legrand’s songs), who co-wrote the tune with Marilyn and Alan Bergman for Barbra Streisand, who first sang it in 1968 and performed it for the 1990 Earth Day Special.
‘If Love is Overrated,’ written by Gregory Porter, featured on Jack Jones’s ArtWork
‘At Last,’ the Etta James classic as featured on Jack Jones’s ArtWork
Up to the moment Jones begins his finale cycle with “Is That All There Is?” he’s injected some skepticism into his world view on a few occasions. Consider Leon Russell’s “This Masquerade” as one of those moments when the scales have fallen from Jack’s eyes (somewhat mitigated by the interpolation of a lyric from “Angel Eyes” and a Graham Dexter guitar solo evoking the song’s hit interpreter, George Benson ); consider Sondheim’s “Nothing’s Gonna Harm You,” from Sweeney Todd, wherein Jones effortlessly executes a tricky duality by articulating the innocence of youth along with the informed outlook of someone who’s been around a bit, all playing out in an arrangement nodding to Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” in it opening bars and unfolds to incorporate a sly, Miles-style trump solo from DiFrancesco. Consider the looming despair underpinning Jones’s reading of Jacques Brel’s (by way of Rod McKuen’s English lyrics) “If You Go Away.”
Consider it all. And then consider ArtWork as a work of art.
