Hal Willner's is at one with his subject.
As a producer who has gathered, then pushed, disparate singers, players and arrangers to act in the name of diffuse classic composers, Hal Willner has been a pioneering saint for the cause of "the eclectic" before forced eclecticism (i.e.; the "tribute" album) was dully de rigeur.
Think of Willner as music's Joseph Cornell-a pack rat tossing the musty and the rusted into a series of shadow boxes that mean much, symbolically, to him. That someone else gets his jokes on occasion simply makes his season a bit brighter.
For nearly two decades, the Philadelphia-born sonic reducer has taken vocalists and spoken-word deities and paired them with the oddball compositional likes of Weill, Ellington, Rota, Mingus and Monk or with iconic scores from Walt Disney movies and added in everything from old radio library voices (he does work at NBC as music director for SNL) and made the combinations ring and swing angularly, according to his own goofy ear.
"Willner is a wonderful musical playmate and partner," said Lou Reed of his co-producer for The Raven, Reed's newest CD. The two met when Willner got Reed to clearly enunciate Sherwood Anderson's autumnal, forlorn words to "September Songs" for Willner's Kurt Weill mash-up, Lost in the Stars. "Having worked with him a few times, I find Hal's range of knowledge about music and players, as well as his sensitivity where esthetics are concerned, an indispensable tool for making records."
Sometimes that range-the hackneyed film noir idea of knowing too much-can hurt a guy, as it has on the stiff Weird Nightmare, Willner's chunky cover thing of Charles Mingus songs. But then there's the simple, elegant (or elegantly simple) Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen. It is the very reversal of Willner's fortunate, frantic production ideal on the twinkingly, cornball Stormy Weather that makes it so effectively evocative of the composer and his time.
Rather than kitchen-sink this soundtrack to dreamy docudramatist Larry Weinstein's film of the same name, Willner acts in tandem with the hammy, shammy tunes of Tin Pan Alley maestro Arlen-the writer of "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "Ill Wind" and such. Arlen's songs are infamous for being someone else's-the singers who made them famous include Billie, Frank and Lena. Unlike Gershwin or Porter, no one ever says, "Now there's a Harold Arlen song"; no one will ever think of "Minnie the Moocher" and "Over the Rainbow" as anyone's but Cab Calloway and Judy Garland's.
What Willner has done is find the best of odd-pop's theatrical singers (Rufus Wainright, Jimmy Scott, David Johansen), paired them with the delightfully hokey orchestrations of the likes of Van Dyke Parks and let them play in Arlen's self-effacing field of tasteful jazzy-standard tunesmithing. Though some like their Arlen loopy and swooping, the majority of Stormy Weather is a sterling (here's the dirty word) "tribute" to the humble, debonair styling of Arlen.
Shannon McNally and Rufus Wainright take their quietly Olympic singing through the Hot Jazz paces and slippery strings of "As Long as I Live" and "It's Only a Paper Moon"-courtesy of he bell-whistling orchestration of Brian Wilson's best buddy, Van Dyke Parks. While David Johansen does a happily hilarious "Kickin' the Gong Around," balladeers Jimmy Scott and Sandra Bernhard take their epic, decorous (but slow) paeans to pain, "I Had a Love Once" and "Come Rain or Come Shine," easy and sad. They leave the bare bulb simplicity of misery to Arlen himself, singing and playing his piano through the tender "Last Night When We Were Young."
On these-Story Weather's slowest, most sorrow-filled moments-Willner is at his best as producer and Cornell-like compiler because he's living by a most generous golden rule: Sometimes you have to let someone else have all the fun.