Love Is What Stays - CD

ENGLISH

The passage of time is on Mark Murphy's mind a lot these days, as this album suggests. 'At my age,' he says, 'you become boggled by how time affects your future, your past, and the present. It's tickin' away, and you can't do nothin' about it.' But time has been good to his voice: a rich, virile, attractively craggy bass-baritone, etched with the wisdom of a fifty-year journey. It's a sound that could have crept from the shadows of some smoky dive in a Robert Mitchum film noir. 'Just listen to Mark Murphy, and the odds are in favor of your being provoked to extremes,' declared the liner notes of his first LP, made for Decca in 1956. Murphy, the writer added, 'is one of the great singers of our times.' All that could just as well be said today. The evidence is on this new album, recorded fifty years after Mark's Decca debut. Love Is What Stays may be the truest portrait ever of this quirky, artistically fearless, emotionally naked jazz singer. At an age when most vocalists have either called it quits or are coasting on the past, Mark is as restless as he was in the '50s, when his career launched him on a Kerouacian road trip without end. In 2006 he went to Berlin, where he made this CD. On it, Mark dips into the songs of Johnny Cash, Oliver Nelson, Alan Jay Lerner, and Coldplay; recites some of his spacey, free-form poetry; unveils the latest of his dreamlike lyrics; and scats as freely as John Coltrane played.