Mark Murphy - The Jazz Singer

The Guardian 60

(Soul Brother)

Mark Murphy, the great American jazz singer who died last year, made 16 albums for the Muse label between 1972 and 1991, with accompanists including David Sanborn and Randy Brecker, from which Soul Brother have taken 17 tracks for this compilation. On The Red Clay, a Murphy signature song joining his own lyric to a Freddie Hubbard theme, the singer handles the treacherous melody with effortless expansiveness, scats with sleazy ease on Canteloupe Island as Sanborn’s alto curls around him, and is gratefully entranced in a world of his own (though Sanborn isn’t far away) on an account of the classic Coltrane ballad Naima. The American singer’s close relationship to London gets a nod on Dingwalls, a fast, chatty rap about acid-era clubbing, and Eleanor Rigby is a quietly soulful note-warping, falsetto leaping and eventually soulfully muscular tribute. Some of it hasn’t dated so well, and the liner notes could have been a shade more informative (and legible) for such a historic document, but Murphy’s own variations are always a pleasure to hear.