Reviewed by Peter Wagenaar (Johannesburg, South Africa)

1963’s Where Did Everyone Go? is the last great Nat King Cole album, a lush collection of sad songs with string-laden arrangements by Gordon Jenkins. It easily stands comparison with their earlier legendary collaborations, Love is the Thing and The Very Thought of You. In terms of overall mood, it’s also very reminiscent of Sinatra’s Where Are You? and No One Cares, also Jenkins-arranged programs of bleak ballads.

Within two years of the release of Where Did Everyone Go?, Cole would be dead of lung cancer. Is it only a consequence of hindsight, then, that to these ears that warm, velveteen voice sounds just a shade "older" than before, infinitesimally less smooth? Are there occasional notes that even a year or two earlier might have been sustained longer? No matter – this album is still one of the best things Cole ever did. In his liner notes to Capitol’s 1995 compilation, Spotlight on Nat King Cole, which includes three numbers from Where Did Everyone Go?, Joseph Laredo warns that it is an album that should never be listened to when there are sharp objects at hand. A neat description, certainly, but not entirely accurate. Cole was far too subtle to over-emote and had too much taste to go in for overt self-pity. The mood throughout is melancholy rather than miserable, by turns resigned, nostalgic, wondering and regretful. It induces a pleasant sadness in the listener, not deep despair.

The "songs of love and loneliness," as the original sleeve notes describe them, are a mix of newer songs and venerable standards. Among the former, the title track is the standout – vaguely reminiscent of One for My Baby in that it is addressed to a bartender by a man bemusedly dealing with the fact that, having lost all his money, he has also lost his "friends" and the woman he thought loved him. Among the standards, three deserve particular mention. Cole’s Am I Blue is arguably the definitive version of this song. It opens abruptly mid-way into the verse: "Woke up this morning along about dawn / Without a warning I found she was gone…," and the trick has the effect of underlining the suddenness of the departure described. (It’s doubly clever in that the first part of the verse would be very difficult to adapt for a male singer!). The rest of the song has a surprised, faintly injured air that suggests the singer hasn’t fully grasped the enormity of the situation. He’s blue, yes, but these blues aren’t yet black!

When the World Was Young is another song that is very much the preserve of female singers. Its highly emotive lyric conjures up images of spring, innocent pastimes and happy days gone forever. When sung with matter-of-fact detachment, the sense of loss becomes paradoxically more acute. If Julie London’s 1962 version remains definitive, Cole’s comes a very close second.

Say It Isn’t So is one of Irving Berlin’s greatest songs, a desperate plea for reassurance in the face of suspicion that love is going wrong. One regrets that Cole omits the verse, which sets a context in which rumors are flying, but in all other respects this is as fine a version as one is likely to find anywhere. Cole navigates the emotional pitfalls of the lyric with no loss of dignity. "Say it isn’t so," he asks, yet at the same time one senses an underlying acceptance that an end is inevitable. His inclusion of the rarely heard lines "People say, passing by / That he’s younger than I / And it won’t be long before you leave me" underlines this.

Looking Back is a very different kettle of fish from Where Did Everyone Go?, and the sudden transition from the sustained mood of the one to the haphazardness of the other comes as a surprise. For the latter is one of the finest of the so-called "concept albums" of the period, while Looking Back is a grab-bag of non-album material, one of several such compilations released by Capitol in the wake of Cole’s death in 1965. In this case, the numbers were all recorded in the 1950s and are, for the most part, supremely indifferent. Time and the River and If I May are passable (and archetypally 1950s) pop songs that had been released with some success as singles, while the string-laden version of Again, with slightly overemphatic percussion, is delightful. The rest of the songs are instantly forgettable, however, and even Cole’s accomplished singing can’t transcend their shortcomings. (Some also have that disconcerting countrified quality characteristic of such unfortunate late Cole albums as Dear Lonely Hearts.) I would rather have seen EMI pair Where Did Everyone Go? with Welcome to the Club. Although the songs from this album have been reissued on CD as part of a Cole compilation, it would have been good to have the album under its own name, and this would have ensured that the two halves of this twofer were of comparable quality.

But let’s not be ungrateful. Where Did Everyone Go? is essential Cole and its CD reissue is long overdue. Even as a "onefer" it would be cheap at the price.

Tracks
Where Did Everyone Go?
1. Where Did Everyone Go? (Van Heusen)
2. Say it Isn’t So (Berlin)
3. If Love Ain’t There (Burke)
4. When the World Was Young (Phillips, Gerard, Mercer)
5. Am I Blue? (Akst, Clark)
6. Someone to Tell it To (Van Heusen, Cahn, Fuller)
7. The End of a Love Affair (Redding)
8. I Keep Going Back to Joe’s (Fisher, Segal)
9. Laughing on the Outside (Wayne, Raleigh)
10. No, I Don’t Want Her (Bailey)
11. Spring is Here (Rodgers, Hart)
12. That’s All There Is (Jenkins)
Looking Back
13. Time and the River (Schroeder, Gold)
14. World in My Arms (Sherman, Keller)
15. Again (Newman, Cochran)
16. Looking Back (Benton, Otis, Hendricks)
17. Midnight Flyer (Watts, Mosely)
18. I Must Be Dreaming (Wolf, Sherman)
19. It is Better to Have Loved and Lost (Lewis, Weissman, Lange)
20. Send for Me (Jones)
21. Just as Much as Ever (Singleton, Coleman)
22. If I May (Singleton, McCoy)
23. Sweet Bird of Youth (Schroeder, Gold)

Reviewed by Earl L. Dachslager (The Woodlands, Texas)

The blind singer-pianist-accordionist-organist Joe Mooney gets relegated to a footnote in Richard Sudhalter's 1999 book Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945. "Mooney," Sudhalter writes, "was all but unknown to the general public, working mostly around New Jersey before moving to Florida in the '60s. He played some major New York rooms, where his quartet (including clarinetist Andy Fitzgerald and the sadly underappreciated guitarist Jack Hotop) won admiration for its inventive arranging and faultless musicianship. Mooney finally broke through to a kind of fame in the early '50s as vocalist on his own Nina Never Knew, recorded by the Eddie Sauter-Bill Finegan Orchestra. But he remained… all but unbookable."

Other than perpetuating the mistaken belief that Mooney composed Nina Never Knew (it was composed by Louis Alter with lyrics by Milton Drake), Sudhalter's note pretty well sums up the Joe Mooney story, at least to now. But happily it's beginning to look like Sudhalter's short shrift won't be the last word on Mooney's reputation. The release in 1999 of two Joe Mooney CDs – one a compilation, the other a reissue of an earlier album – may, we trust, augur a well-deserved and long-overdue revival and appreciation of Mooney's music.

The compilation, Do You Long for Oolong, is available on the British label Hep Records (CD 63) and consists of material recorded between 1946 and 1951. The original Joe Mooney Quartet, known as Joe Mooney and the Music Masters, got its first recording contract, with Decca, in 1946, following its move from New Jersey to New York's 52nd Street. The personnel of the original quartet included, besides Mooney, Andy Fitzgerald, and Jack Hotop, Gaetan "Gate" Frega on bass. In 1946 and 1947 the Quartet was runner-up to the King Cole Trio in the Downbeat and Metronome polls for jazz combo groups. These years, then, roughly 1946 to 1949, were the acme of the original Quartet's renown.

Lush Life, under review here, was originally released in 1957 with personnel made up of Mooney, vocal and organ; Lee Robinson, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Osie Johnson, drums. This fabled recording contains four of Mooney's signature tunes – Polka Dots and Moonbeams, Nina Never Knew, Crazy She Calls Me, and Lush Life – plus five more tunes, including an original Mooney composition, the boppish Nowhere. All the tracks admirably show off Mooney's considerable and unique vocal and instrumental skill, here the Hammond organ. After the original quartet broke up in the early 1950s, following some personnel changes (Bucky Pizzarelli recorded briefly with the quartet in 1951) Mooney switched to organ and, alas, rarely if ever played accordion again.

Vocally, Mooney belongs to the school of "cool," mostly white, male singers of that era: Mel Torme, Bobby Troup, Matt Dennis, Roy Kral – the male counterparts of Connor, Christy, O'Day. While no one ever credited Mooney with having a great voice – "I haven't got a voice, just a delivery," he is quoted as saying – everyone admits that indeed he had a great delivery. What he lacked in range and timbre and pitch, he made up for in rhythm, phrasing, mood – in a word, style. Writer Whitney Balliett somewhere describes Mooney's music as "cool and serene," which seems to me a perfectly apt assessment of Mooney's effect as a singer and instrumentalist, accordion and organ especially.

Lush Life, recorded in 1956, when he was 45, came rather late in Mooney's career. By this time, he was working in Florida, all but forgotten except for some loyal fans who somehow got him to return briefly to New York in the early 1950s, where he recorded, in 1952, Nina Never Knew, his one and only hit and the recording most associated with him. Ironically, the recording was done not with his usual small group format, as it is here, but, as Sudhalter notes, with the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, which, along with Kenton's band, was the most innovative jazz orchestra (if "jazz" is the right word for it) of that time. Incidentally, there is still some debate about who played the trombone solo on that now-famous recording, Kai Winding or Vern Friley, my own vote going for the latter. (Sally Sweetland, who accompanies Mooney on Nina Never Knew and appears as vocalist on other Sauter-Finegan tunes is even more forgotten these days than Mooney).

The success of Nina Never Knew ultimately led to this recording, three years later. Of its ten tracks, my personal favorite is the Burke-Van Heusen tune Polka Dots and Moonbeams, one of those rare male-singers-only tunes. Mooney's take compares favorably with versions by Tormé, Peterson, and, even, Sinatra. Close runners-up include the two swingers, Love is Here to Say and Have You Met Miss Jones; Mooney's own composition, Nowhere; the charmingly rendered That's All; The Kid's a Dreamer; and of course Nina Never Knew. But truth to tell, all the tunes here are all quintessential Mooney, both in arrangement and execution. The musicians, especially Lee Robinson on guitar, and of course Mooney on organ, are flawless, individually and in concert. This is a fine recording, in all respects, and some sort of exemplar of quartet jazz. Incidentally, the cover art of this CD leaves everything to be desired.

Following Lush Life, Mooney recorded, in the mid-1960s, two albums for Columbia, The Greatness of Joe Mooney and The Happiness of Joe Mooney. Koch is scheduled to release both albums on a CD twofer sometime in 2000, and in the coming months the Hep label will issue a follow-up to its Do You Long for Oolong compilation, to be titled Joe Breaks the Ice. With the release of these four discs, the vast majority of Mooney’s recorded output will finally be available.

Tracks
1. Polka Dots and Moonbeams (Burke, Van Heusen)
2. Nina Never Knew (Alter, Drake)
3. Crazy She Calls Me (Sigman, Russell)
4. Lush Life (Strayhorn)
5. Love Is Here to Stay (Gershwin, Gershwin)
6. That's All (Brandt, Haymes)
7. The Kid's a Dreamer (Snider, Snider)
8. Nowhere (Mooney)
9. My One and Only Love (Wood, Mellin)
10. Have You Met Miss Jones (Rodgers, Hart)

Personnel: Joe Mooney, vocals and Hammond organ; Lee Robinson, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; Osie Johnson, drums. Originally released in 1957 as Atlantic 1255.