This thoroughly offbeat release arose as the result of a chance meeting in 2013 between comic actor
Bill Murray and cellist
Jan Vogler, and it has the kind of spontaneity that background might imply. Some will buy it on the strength of
Murray's name, and you might sample sheer vaudevillian joy of his version of "It Ain't Necessarily So": it's worth the purchase price all by itself.
Murray's Jeanie with Light Brown Hair...maybe not so much. But the attraction of the album is not the musical value of
Murray's singing or
Vogler's cello, but rather the variety of the program.
Murray reads Walt Whitman and
James Fenimore Cooper and
Mark Twain, not to mention James Thurber, with classical chamber pieces as background, or solo. He's actually quite an effective reader, achieving a vernacular American tone without a hint of cornball. He sings.
Vogler plays instrumental pieces. The Thurber is framed by
Ravel's "Blues" movement from his Violin Sonata in G major, not so much because of a perceived similarity in attitude, but because the phrasing works in the organization of the piece.
Henry Mancini's Moon River breaks off for almost 15 minutes of
Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, far longer than any of the other literary excerpts on the album, and for no very good reason. This damages the balance of the program as a whole, but it fits the program's lively spirit. As you might expect from
Murray, it's a great deal of fun. ~ James Manheim