This welcome and inexpensive two CD-set - cost 12 Euro approx - assembles Shirley Horn with her eponymous 'friends', whose number includes Wynton Marsalis, Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis, Joe Henderson, Ahmad Jamal, Toots Thielemans, Ron Carter, Carmen McRae and Roy Hargrove. An august bunch of players indeed and with friends like these, well, anything is possible.
Much of the music is drawn from the singer's comeback albums recorded for Verve in the 1990s. She mixes the playful and party-going and the melancholy right from the off. Thus the convivial Come Dance with Me, track one, is followed by the placid yet wistful You Won't Forget Me, which after a perfunctory verse or two of vocal from La Horn gives way to Miles Davis on beautifully-measured trumpet.
The latter track is one of the best things on the entire album of 28 tracks, 14 each CD. Sparse, enigmatic and somehow opaque, it is a classic of jazz singing. It is followed by a faltering, deliciously hesitant You Go to My Head which opens with Joe Henderson's smoky sax, the perfect preamble to Horn's equally smoky vocal.
The Boy from Ipanema - as opposed to the Girl from that place, natch, same song anyway, different gender - pushes along nicely. However, no one tops Astrud Gilberto and one assumes any female singer who has sung the Jobim/De Moraes standard may have known this.
I don't know though what Bye Bye Love is doing in there, she didn't not need to do that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant evergreen hit, popularised by the Everly Brothers. Put it another way, it doesn't suit her. Summertime, with Thielemans on the harmonica, does not seem right either, but maybe we have heard too many versions.
On the second CD, there is a lush treatment of the Johnny Mandel and A & M Bergman tune, Solitary Moon, arranged by the incomparable Mandel himself. The Meaning of the Blues is credited to one B Troup and one L Worth, but Shirley Horn makes it her own, imparting drama and a sense of absolute loss that is quite heart-breaking. When Roy Hargrove comes in on flugelhorn, you feel it rarely gets better than this.
The legendary Lena Valerie Horn - a Washingon DC native who did not come to real prominence until 1980 - was a student, not just of music and the bars that fill the score but also the business of pause and quiet. She had immaculate timing. The American singer-pianist died in 2005, following complications from diabetes at the age of 71.
