Reviewed by Bill Reed (Los Angeles)

One would be hard-pressed to find a more fitting interpreter of the songwriting team of Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen than Lena Horne. On the occasion of the singer’s 80th birthday two years ago, Stephen Holden of the New York Times wrote, "When she pours herself into a song, the complicated crosscurrents of crankiness and joy, humility and hauteur merge into an expression that is as nakedly honest as pop singing can get." I would amend that to read "jazz singing;" otherwise I couldn’t agree more. Horne, Burke and Van Heusen are a perfect team: cool, laid-back and moderato to a fault.

If there is a mawkish moment in the Burke-Van Heusen catalog, I’ve yet to hear it. They wrote love songs about love, and of such offbeat topics as slacking (Get Rid of Monday), hedonism on five dollars a day (You Don’t Have to Know the Language), sleigh rides in July, swingin’ on stars and runaway rocking horses. When they did manage to meditate on the likes of Moonflowers and moonbeams, those potentially sentimental, celestial rays tended to be offset with things like "polka-dots." There is probably not a single lyric of unrequited love in the entire Burke-Van Heusen canon; when they did traffic in the more essential passions, it was almost always from an oblique angle. So subtle is their A Friend of Yours, seemingly a narration about an affair in progress, it’s not until the song is almost over that one comprehends this is actually a lover’s pledge to live and let live now that the romance is over.

Burke and Van Heusen were the top house songwriting team for Paramount Pictures during most of the 1940s. Thus the majority of the songs presented here are from that studio’s films, mostly the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby "road" pictures. In addition, Just My Luck is from their stage musical, Nellie Bly, and Polka Dots and Moonbeams and a handful of others were written with no particular project in mind. A true tribute, Horne intones the verse to most of them.

While it is true that Lena Horne never recorded anything as woefully misbegotten as Yummy, Yummy, Yummy or Louie Louie, as did Julie London, beyond that, the similarities between the two singers are considerable. Both are past mistresses of the less-is-more approach to a song, and had husbands who micro-managed their recording careers. (For London, it was Bobby Troup, for Horne, Lennie Hayton.) In addition, thanks to killer cheekbones, the two were world-class beauties whose looks have tended to overshadow their singing capabilities. Too, London and Horne both had major hits with songs sporting the sparest of orchestrations. London’s was, of course, Cry Me a River; during the same era Horne charted with her version of Love Me or Leave Me, featuring equally minimalist backing.

Lastly, and maddeningly, throughout the 1950s and 1960s both recorded – prolifically – albums that seldom if ever made mention of orchestral personnel. Just about all we glean from the liner notes for the Burke-VanHeusen is that it was cut in New York in late 1958 and early 1959, and that an ordinary, mortal "singer spends a great deal of time looking for the song, [but] not for Lena," writes Burke, "the song looks for her." Agreed! But whose smashing sax solo is it on?

A bit of sleuthing has uncovered the players on at least two of the cuts on the It’s Love album, which was recorded in 1956: the title track and Let Me Love You. Just as I suspected; they’re a blue ribbon panel of top 1950s New York session musicians, including Mundell Lowe (guitar), George Duvivier (bass), Joe Wilder (trumpet) and Ellington alter-ego and Horne soulmate Billy Strayhorn on piano. The latter is also clearly discernible on his own composition, You’re the One. Thanks to the facsimile nature of these reissues, such discographical oversights reverberate, sins-of-the-father fashion, down through the ages. Forty years later, an informative insert is called for.

The arrangements on both albums are implied to be the work of Lennie Hayton, but in fact, some of the charts on the Burke-Van Heusen album are known to be by Ralph Burns. It's Love also probably sports other arrangers. The voicings on some of the charts, in fact, are very close to a younger generation of West Coast arrangers like Shorty Rogers and Jimmy Giuffre. The Burns touch perhaps? Whoever is responsible for the actual arranging is finally beside the point; the orchestral "auteur" on both efforts is Hayton. Clearly the thirteen years he spent as a music director at MGM, starting in 1940, kept him on his toes. The Burns or Hayton question aside, the first opening instrumental eight bars of the opening song, You Don't Have to Know the Language, are as flat-out Basie-cally swinging as it's possible to get.

From 1941 right on up to today, Horne’s recording output is of the highest quality; there really isn’t a weak entry in her approximately 25-album oeuvre. Both the Burke-Van Heusen album and It’s Love are from her eight-LP go-round (1956-1962) with RCA, also her first major label association back in 1941. Like the others in the recent of RCA reissues from BMG-Japan (Rosemary Clooney, Teddi King, Lurlean Hunter, Matt Dennis, Perry Como, et. al.), these two can probably be found at most large CD exchanges, notably the Tower chain.

In recent times Horne’s reputation as a jazz singer (as opposed to superb pop singer) has grown dramatically, thanks especially to the warm critical reception lavished upon her three recent Blue Note Records outings. The newest one, Being Myself, was laid down more than 60 years after she began her recording career; the three are among her finest works. Not that there’s anything wrong with these peerless RCA releases from the late 1950s.

An Album of Songs by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen
1. You Don’t Have to Know the Language
2. Like Someone in Love
3. It’s Anybody’s Spring
4. But Beautiful
5. Just My Luck
6. Get Rid of Monday
7. A Friend of Yours
8. It Could Happen to You
9. Sleigh Ride in July
10. My Heart Is a Hobo
11. Polka Dots and Moonbeams
12. Ring the Bell

It’s Love
1. I’d Do Anything (Dubey, Karr)
2. You Do Something to Me (Porter)
3. You’re the One (Strayhorn)
4. Fun to Be Fooled (Arlen, Gershwin, Harburg)
5. Call Me Darling (Reisfeld, Fryberg, Marbot)
6. It’s All Right With Me (Porter)
7. Frankie and Johnny (Moore, Hayton)
8. Let Me Love You (Howard)
9. Love Is the Thing (Washington, Young)
10. Then I’ll Be Tired of You (Schwarts, Harburg)
11. It’s Love (Comden, Green, Bernstein)

Lena Horne: Blue Note Records