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1 |
In other Words ... Bart Howard
– 4:28
MP3 Sample |
2 |
Medley: Dearest, Darest I ...
Jimmy Van Heusen – 2:24
Thou Swell ... Rodgers & Hart
MP3 Sample |
3 |
Winter Warm ... Bacharach &
David – 3:41
MP3 Sample |
4 |
Great Indoors ... Cole Porter
– 1:31
MP3 Sample |
5 |
If I should lose you ... Robin
& Rainger – 4:19
MP3 Sample |
6 |
Fugue for Tinhorns ... Frank
Loesser – 3:21 |
7 |
Fugue for tinhorns (ending
only) – 1:06 |
8 |
The more I see you ... Mach
& Harry – 3:05 |
9 |
The Trolley Song ... Ralph
& Hugh – 2:05 |
10 |
God Bless the Child ... Holiday
& Howard – 5:06 |
11 |
Let Me Love You ... Bart Howard
– 4:06 |
12 |
Spring Can Really ... Landesman
& Wolf - 5:19 |
13 |
Wonderful Guy ... Rogers &
Hammerstein – 2:20 |
14 |
* Green Dolphen Street ... Bronislau
Kaper – 4:11 |
15 |
* My Heart is a Hobo ... Jimmy
Van Huesen – 2:33 |
*Available
on CD version only |
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Again! Dick And Kiz Harp At The 90th Floor
The following copy, written in 1960, taken from the original LP
Dick and Kiz Harp wove their own pattern in an intricate kind
of musical relationship from which subtle and sly things
came. They belonged to a quasi-pops world of Bart Howard and
Matt Dennis. They Injected an off-hand vigor into their following – a
compound of natural shoulders, renegade high society, hipsters
looking for the rock of rationality, brassy show bizzers,
the inarticulate who accepted, the articulate who interpreted.
The legend of Kiz and Dick Harp was spreading by 1960. Offers
from San Francisco, New York, Chicago, were being mulled. Their
press agents carried such names as Marlene Dietrich, Burgess
Meredith, Stan Kenton, Tony Bennett, who had departed Dallas
bearing the message to the outside world. Their room was the
90th Floor in Dallas. What had been a bleak, dank unused warehouse
the two had converted into a snug, attractive retreat for sane
adults weary of maitre d’s, emcees, hipsters, jazz snobs,
Dixieland and non-melodic musical exercises.
Their first album, “Dick and Kiz Harp at the 90th Floor”
was release in late-1960. You could hear strains of it on the
decent radio programs about the nation. Kiz had a fuzzy, husky
kind of voice that teased like a kid in pig-tails or carried
the drive of an inner sincerity. Dick’s piano slid in
unobtrusively; sometimes a post for Kiz to lean on, other times
a definite, intriguing personality of its own. There was a
special brilliance in the team that carried through the record,
the same uniqueness that captured you when you sat in the room
so you forgot your drink that turned watery and the cigarette
that singed your fingers.
Then suddenly on a December evening in 1960 the word got out:
Kiz was dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. She passed on the next
morning in her 29th year. What had been a team had been split
in half. The followers were staggered. From New York Dietrich
called. “Is it true?” she asked. It was and the
followers sensed deeply the impression carved on a certain
non-geographical community by Kiz. The musicians in the area
filled in without pay to keep the room alive. There was that
strange need to keep the 90th Floor active. A concert was held
and receipts were used to start a Kiz Harp Musical Scholarship
at North Texas State College.
This album, like the previous, has many of the tunes the Harps
worked, experimented and toyed with until they found they had
their own reason for doing it. They are the tunes requested
night after night at the 90th Floor. The music in this album
was taped at the same session as the first.
Dick Harp is back at the 90th Floor now. The spirit of the
team was strong enough to linger. The relaxed jazz feeling
is still there. The informal formality of a disciplined musician
playing with his music and his audience still attracts the city’s
faithful. Different singers fill in alongside him. The taste,
intelligence and informal pursuit of the imaginative continues.
Don Safran
Columnist, Dallas Times Herald
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