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    Get Happy: The Harold Arlen Centennial Celebration

    02/08/2005 | Verve 

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      GET HAPPY: HAROLD ARLEN CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION

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    All Music Guide Review

    Of all the classic composers in the American songbook, not even George Gershwin channeled the blues and jazz idioms like Harold Arlen. The Buffalo native and son of a Jewish cantor not only wrote that quintessential anthem of the Great Plains optimist ("Over the Rainbow"), but also many plaintive urban laments like "Stormy Weather" and "Blues in the Night." Verve celebrated the centennial of Arlen's birth (February 15, 1905) with a compilation that gathered much of the best jazz vocal Arlen readings extant in its vast holdings -- which includes not only the Verve label itself (home of much that was great by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Mel Tormé), but also the Mercury catalog that includes Dinah Washington and Shirley Horn as well as the excellent EmArcy label's recordings by Helen Merrill and Sarah Vaughan. Thank the composer's son, Sam Arlen, for the excellent compiling job, which begins with a track from the most famous Arlen record of all time, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook. From there he selects a wide range of material, some obscure and some very popular, that does justice to the sizeable impact his father exerted on American popular song. One of the happiest surprises is Abbey Lincoln's bucolic reading of another Wizard of Oz standard, "If I Only Had a Brain." ~ John Bush, All Music Guide

    Get Happy: The Harold Arlen Centennial Celebration Track Listing

    Credits of Get Happy: The Harold Arlen Centennial Celebration

    • Sam Arlen
    • Liner Notes, Sequencing, Selection


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