Stella Magic It's Magic review

Pretty squeaky clean stuff but infinitely preferable to Laufey’s latest.

Most things that producer Matt Pierson touches work but like a football manager: the direction is nothing if the players don’t perform.

And certainly with arrangements by Alan Broadbent upping the ante and a certain consummate grace that’s part of American singer Stella Cole’s modus operandi the building blocks are in place.

But what of the songs? Below are my favourite versions of the 10 songs and that is the tough part because for a singer of today dealing with classics like these the example is the daunting vastness of the past. But happily as the Bard himself put it in the 18th sonnet: Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade/When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.

‘Till There Was You’ – the Meredith Wilson song that goes back to the 1950s I know mostly from Sonny Rollins’ instrumental treatment. As for vocals versions I plump for Judy Collins’ glassy take on her Classic Broadway album. It’s less ornamented than Cole’s treatment.

As for the Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh Buck Benny Rides Again song from the 40s ‘Say It’ that’s easier. I go for Kurt Elling’s stately Flirting with Twilight treatment although Cole’s version is absolutely fine.

The Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn title track ‘It’s Magic’ on this Cole version has a lovely strings arrangement and the vocal is marshmallow soft and very appealing. But she doesn’t sound like Doris Day at all, it’s a red herring to think so, who sang the song in the 40s. Among versions I know I like the way Michael Feinstein does the song. But ultimately Carmen McRae’s treatment is the one I most prefer. And while Cole’s is credible I’ll be going back to McRae as a first port of call on her Sarah: Dedicated to You (and Sassy of course did a version of the song too).

So is there a song here that is better than classic versions from the past? Hmmm, not sure if that is even possible to know without living with these songs for a while, months, years ahead, but the take on ‘Stairway To The Stars’ definitely is a big highlight of a very fine album that one would hope has a better chance of sticking the course than most. Ian Shaw did a raspily effective version on his The Abbey Road Sessions album, which has. Cole’s in terms of grandiosity functions in a more ambitious milieu given the added lushness of the strings. And this glossiness may put people who instinctively recoil from this kind of thing off. Tough!

With ‘Alfie’ a Burt Bacharach and Hal David song that Shaw has also covered in recent years Cole and the Broadbent methodology stick to the mood set virtually everywhere on the album. That’s play it slow and dreamy and being resolutely misty blue certainly works in terms of pacing. Chopping and changing in terms of tempo would have broken the spell. But I crave some darkness on the album, there isn’t enough of it which is a flaw – yet Cole manages to go that bit more interior here on a song that Dionne Warwick made her own.

‘As Time Goes By’ again has a wonderful strings intro – a big highlight of the album. I’ve never cared for the number synonymous with Casablanca. Shoot me but it’s true. Cole’s take isn’t particularly interesting nor is it as hip as say the way supremely pure voiced Rosemary Clooney approached the song on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie.

I love “lips songs” and Ray Noble’s ‘The Touch Of Your Lips’ is always a pleasure to hear. Full marks for its inclusion and song choice is so important in this standards strewn domain when producers are spoilt for choice. But it will always be Tony Bennett who I turn to in his duo with Bill Evans but I will return to this enjoyable treatment often.

The album gets better and better and the rendering of Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke ‘Imagination’ is fluffy and delicate. It’s different to the way Ella Fitzgerald did it and certainly doesn’t ascend to those heights. That’s the version I go to first when thinking of the song.

Cole is probably suited most of all to ‘My Ideal,’ a song introduced to the world by Maurice Chevalier in the 1930s. I turn to Chris Connor’s version which is great and Cole’s treatment stacks up well.

Happily the best is kept to last and the way Cole does Rube Bloom and Johnny Mercer’s ‘Fools Rush In’ really works and proves just as effective as the version I appreciate most which is Stacey Kent’s on Love Is… The Tender Trap back in the 1990s.

So it’s a world of song sensitively framed and in all sanity comparable in the main to past achievements given the skill in replicating the feel and ambience of the “gone with the wind-ness” of classic vocals jazz and song that can never be mothballed.