Alto saxophonist Sam Braysher has a liking for the less familiar work of the American Songbook composers, a body of music that’s seldom performed in the twenty-first century and rarely heard played by jazz musicians. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth hearing, or that it lacks the quality of more popular pieces. Perhaps it was buried in a show that bombed, or never got to Broadway in the first place, or came too soon in a writer’s career to have reached a mass audience — but it’s still worth exploring. On That’s Him: the music of Kurt Weill, Braysher delves into some of Weill’s less familiar compositions, gives them a modern interpretation and crafts an excellent album that brings fresh perspectives to these fine songs.
Braysher plays beautifully throughout, his solo on “What Good would the Moon Be?” is an album highlight. He’s matched by a superb trio of instrumentalists — pianist Matyas Gayer, bassist Dario Di Lecce and drummer Steve Brown. Vocalist Sara Dowling also joins in, on “What Good Would the Moon Be?” “The Right Guy for Me” and “That’s Him” — she’s a fine interpreter of the songs and it’s a shame that she only makes those three appearances.
In his sleeve notes, Braysher writes that he was attracted to Weill’s “career of two halves.” The first half, through the 1920s and early 1930s, is represented by three songs written by Weill and Berthold Brecht — the romantic “Liebeslied,” the haunting “Marterl” (a duo performance by Braysher and Gayer) and the better-known “Bilbao-Song” (an upbeat Braysher/Di Lecce duet). In the second half, after Weill fled Germany for the USA, the composer worked with an array of lyricists including Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner and Ira Gershwin, all of whom are represented here.
Braysher found the jaunty “The Right Guy for Me,” written for Fritz Lang’s movie You and Me, in a book of Weill sheet music. It’s a lucky find. The band plays with a gentle but swinging groove while Dowling gives Sam Coslow’s lyrics, all about a seemingly rootless, good-for-nothing chap who is nevertheless “the right one,” plenty of punch. “That’s Him,” written with Ogden Nash and previously recorded by Abbey Lincoln, praises the titular Him by comparisons with the effect of the smell of baking bread, a hairdo by Antoine and the sudden end of a toothache. It features the classic line “He’s like a plumber when you need a plumber.” It’s hard to imagine Brecht writing lines like that.
There’s also an appearance by “My Ship,” a Weill/Gershwin song, albeit in disguise as a driving bop-style Braysher contrafact called “Ships Adrift” which he based on the former’s chords and structure: there’s a catchy hook, brisk interplay between sax and piano, a Steve Brown solo and powerful bass from Di Lecce for listeners to enjoy.
