Harold Arlen’s rich legacy of film, theater, and popular songs has long lent itself to popular piano stylings. To tie in with the composer’s 2005 centenary, pianist Richard Glazier offers a program of such arrangements, along with the two rarely-heard Arlen piano compositions listed in the heading (both are splendidly pianistic and harmonically sophisticated).
The arrangements themselves vary in effect. I especially like the alluring bi-tonal touches and textural delicacy of Cy Walter’s elegantly stylized That Old Black Magic and Blues in the Night (Walter was one of America’s greatest “society” pianists, and made some remarkable solo recordings for the Atlantic label in the 1950s). Tom Grant’s treatments of One For My Baby, Come Rain or Come Shine, and I Got the World on a String follow a ruminative, “smooth jazz” trajectory that occasionally breaks for a loud, rhapsodic flourish. Joe Gilman interweaves A Sleepin’ Bee and Let’s Fall In Love into a semi-classical tour-de-force where the spirits of Bach and Chopin dominate.
By contrast, Stephen Prustman obliterates Get Happy’s catchy essence with a series of drawn-out, ill-proportioned Lisztian clichés and an all-too-brief stride-piano teaser; Glazier himself fashions a rather turgid and at times overpedaled version of The Man That Got Away. Although several pieces are not credited, the beautifully reharmonized Over The Rainbow seems to elaborate upon an arrangement that appeared in a George Shearing folio many years ago. In general, Glazier’s full-bodied pianism suits the idiom well, although a few up-tempo flagwavers (like Art Tatum’s classic take on Get Happy) would have provided welcome relief from the slow-to-medium-tempo numbers that dominate this program.
