Word: balladeer
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...singing than mere vocal acrobatics. There is, for one thing, the sultry, mischievous beauty that belies her 45 years-often enhanced by her penchant for wearing flowing gowns unbuttoned to the waist. There is the emotional intensity that glints inside every wave of her finely controlled vibrato on a ballad like Night and Day. Then there is the quicksilver sensitivity to shifting harmonies on a snaky blues like Gimme a Pigfoot...
...Gourd" give him a chance to display his guitar and mandolin-playing talents. His "Tennessee Waltz" is as kind to the old standard as any singer's rendition could be, and his version of "Mr. Bojangles"--half-singing, half-storytelling--is the first genuinely moving version of this ballad I've heard since Jerry Jeff Walker's original. There are probably some guitarists who play as well as Bromberg. There are certainly people who sing better, but perhaps no folk performer since Bob Dylan has attained as engaging a presence on record...
...reedy clarinet next to the French-horn sound of the older crooners, but he compensates for this with a cunning sense of phrasing that has made him a favorite of many musicians (among those who have happily accompanied him are Count Basic, Woody Herman and Duke Ellington). On a ballad like It Was You, he has a knack of letting the song rise lazily above him like cigar smoke. On standards like Mimi and End of a Love Affair, he is in the jazzy, hold-your-hat tradition. No less an authority than Frank Sinatra once called him the best...
Sophia Loren is a ravishing Dulcinea, but she seems to be playing a kind of high-stepping variation on Two Wom en. James Coco is soundly defeated by the role of Sancho Panza. The score by Composer Mitch Leigh and Lyricist Joe Darion contains the inescapable ballad The Impossible Dream, surely the most mercilessly lachrymose hymn to empty-headed optimism since Carousel's You'll Never Walk Alone. One expects to learn at any moment that it will be come the national anthem of some newly emerging nation...
Married. James Taylor, 24, minstrel of rock music who helped lead devotees of the high-decibel '60s toward gentler sounds in the '70s (Sweet Baby James, Fire and Rain, Mud Slide Slim); and Carly Simon, 27, leggy singer of the slick-folk, gutsy-ballad school (That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be, Anticipation) and offspring of the publishing Simon (& Schuster); both for the first time; in Manhattan...