Once Upon A Time - Poetry & Ellington Album Qnote Records
Format: CD
Price: £10.99
ONCE UPON A TIME
Shakespeare into jazz – big news?
When CLEO LAINE is involved it certainly is. Ever since the review in US magazine Downbeat gave Cleo’s first brush with the Bard 5-stars, a rare accolade indeed. Soon afterwards the famous Kennedy Center in Washington DC picked up the news and featured a Cleo-Shakespeare concert, and the album Shakespeare and all that Jazz became a classic. Later the Kennedy Center chose the Dankworth-Shakespeare combination for their special Millennium commission, and four more of JOHN DANKWORTH’s settings emerged.
Now the Cleo- Bard duo are back in the news with six new Shakespeare songs, all previously unrecorded. Two of them feature a duet formula, tailor-made for Cleo and daughter JACQUI DANKWORTH herself a Grammy winner like her mother.
Poetry - commercial? Ask the backers of “Cats”, the musical based on TS Eliot’s poetry.
Shakespeare and jazz – big news? When Cleo’s involved it is!
Release date: October 24, 2005
Titles include Where The Bee Sucks, Live With Me And Be My Love, It Was A Lover And His Lass (re-titled Hey Nonny Nonny), Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind. Other British poets featured are A. E. Housman (When I Was One-And-Twenty) and Ralph Hodgson (Time You Old Gypsy Man). Hodgson was a multi-talented man – cartoonist, dog breeder as well as poet – who lived his later years in Ohio. The titles We Are The Music Makers and As An Unperfect Actor have been previously recorded, the first on Cleo’s Grammy award winning Carnegie Hall concert in 1985.
Track Listing
- Where The Bee Sucks
- Live With Me And Be My Love
- Hey Nonny Nonny
- Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind
- Under The Greenwood Tree
- As An Unperfect Actor
- Over Hill, Over Dale
- Time, You Old Gypsy Man
- Stupidity Street
- The House Across The Way
- The Ousel Cock
- Love Among The Haycocks
- Drink To Me Only
- Methuselah; Sinner’s Rue
- When I Was One And Twenty
- We Are The Music Makers
- Once Upon A Time.
Recommendations
- LET THE MUSIC TAKE YOU, Cleo Laine and John Williams
- LOESSER GENIUS, Cleo Laine
- QUALITY TIME, Cleo Laine
- SMILIN' THROUGH, Cleo Laine and Dudley Moore