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As anyone who caught their superb September 2008 Vortex performance
(part of the ASC piano festival) will already know, a duo gig by Mike and
Kate Westbrook is a rare treat, intimate and intensely personal,
wide-ranging (taking in material from the theatre and film worlds as well
as standards, original songs and settings of European poetry) yet
pleasingly informal. Many of the songs they performed on that occasion are
collected on this album, which brings together recordings made at Jon
Hiseman's Temple Studios between 1991 and the present, only one of which
('Surabaya Johnny') has been issued in its present form before (on Kate's
Goodbye Peter Lorre album). The material has been arranged
(roughly) thematically, so that Blake's 'London Song' is followed by
'Limehouse Blues' and the Westbrooks' own 'Wasteground and Weeds' (sparked
by Sunday walks round their then London base in Bow, before Canary Wharf
and associated developments); three Weill songs ('September Song', the
aforementioned 'Surabaya Johnny' and the gripping narrative piece 'Pirate
Jenny') form a sequence; two expressions of sophisticated world-weariness,
Billy Strayhorn's 'Lush Life' and the Leiber/Stoller curiosity 'Is That
All There Is?' are programmed together; and Friedrich Hollaender's
heart-on-sleeve love songs, 'You Leave Me Breathless' and 'The Moon's Our
Home' also come one after the other. For the rest, there are highly
affecting versions of two standards/show tunes ('Stormy Weather' and
'You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To'), a rare version of a
Theodorakis/Sefaris song, 'On the Beach' and two Westbrook settings
(Blake's 'A Poison Tree' and short-story writer Helen Simpson's 'Honest
Love'). Such an apparently heterogeneous collection needs confident
handling in order for it cohere; Allsorts succeeds courtesy not
only of Kate Westbrook's consistently intelligent approach to a lyric
(adopting what amounts to a dramatic persona where appropriate, as in
'Limehouse Blues' or the grippingly acerbic 'Pirate Jenny', rendering the
straight-from-the-heart sincerity of 'September Song' or 'You'd Be So
Nice.' all the more touching), but also of Mike Westbrook's subtle,
perfectly judged but robust piano playing. A fine memento not only of a
great live act, but also of a wonderfully fruitful, long-lasting
collaboration between two highly original artists and a sympathetic and
sensitive studio.
Chris Parker VORTEX
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