Last
year, the legendary yet under-celebrated jazz performer Andy Bey released his
tenth studio album, the phenomenal The
World According to Andy Bey, which received a Grammy nomination for Best
Jazz Vocal Album. Bey’s latest
release is an intimate solo affair for his voice and piano; it contains four
original songs, along with seven fine renditions of some classic and
lesser-known standards. As the
album’s individually focused title suggests, Bey’s four-octave baritone takes
up as much time and space as it needs throughout these eleven tracks. His warm vocals are by turns relaxed
and impassioned, improvisational yet studied, burnished by time though never, ever
tired.
Andy
Bey was born in 1939 in Newark, New Jersey. At age seventeen he formed a jazz trio, Andy and the Bey
Sisters, with siblings Geraldine and Salome. Moderate success throughout the 1960s and 1970s was followed
by a fifteen-year hiatus from recording, from 1975 to 1990. Bey’s career picked up again in the
mid-1990s, just when his personal life began to take a darker turn. Twenty years ago in 1994, he was
diagnosed as HIV-positive, and he’s kept a steady regimen of yoga and a vegetarian
diet ever since to keep himself healthy.
Bey came out publicly as gay around the time of his diagnosis and has
remained quietly outspoken for two decades now.
The
four original compositions on The World
According to Andy Bey are especially noteworthy, both for their distinctive
spirit and their unique lyrical approach.
“Dedicated to Miles,” Bey’s tribute to iconic jazz trumpeter Miles
Davis, is a wordless bebop number that features Bey scatting an imitation of
Davis’ playing style throughout the song.
The three other self-penned tracks are like sung journal entries that
comment on the state of the contemporary world and offer gentle advice on how
to survive it. “The Demons Are
After You” suggests that escaping one’s problems is “an individual journey, it
will never work for the masses.” “There’s
So Many Ways to Approach the Blues” places emotion over intellect and argues by its end that telling the truth
about hardship is the only real way to persevere. And the brilliant “Being Part of What’s Happening Now” considers
our current cultural moment and the importance of remaining in touch with the
world around us.
Among
the album’s standards are three George and Ira Gershwin tunes, “But Not for
Me,” “Love Is Here to Stay,” and “’S Wonderful,” along with Ira Gershwin’s
lyrics on a sublime closing rendition of Harold Arlen’s “Dissertation on the
State of Bliss.” Originally
subtitled “Love and Learn Blues,” the song is a clever, point-blank assessment of
heartache: “You may have climbed
the tree of knowledge / But when you love you really learn.” Another Harold Arlen song, “The Morning
After,” dwells on similar themes, while the album’s opening cut, Richard
Rodgers’ and Lorenz Hart’s “It Never Entered My Mind,” contemplates loneliness
on the far side of heartbreak’s distant retrospect.
In
Tony Cox’s 2004 interview with Bey that aired on National Public Radio, Cox
asked Bey about the feeling of melancholy in his music. Bey replied, “Oh, when you live a
certain amount of life, I mean, you try to breathe into a song a concept of
what you’re feeling at that moment...it’s always trying to get inside the song
with an intimacy in mind.” On every inspired moment of The World According to
Andy Bey, the singer/pianist finds his way inside and fully inhabits each
song. The result is a vital new collection of jazz classics.
