ON THE RECORD: "Quiet Please" From Steven Blier & Darius de Haas, and London's Make Me an Offer

By Steven Suskin
23 Jan 2011

ON THE RECORD: "Quiet Please" From Steven Blier & Darius de Haas, and London's Make Me an Offer

We listen to "Quiet Please," a collection of standards and jazz from Steven Blier and Darius de Haas, and the cast album of the award-winning 1959 West End musical Make Me an Offer.

*

Quiet Please [Bridge 9334]
Pianist Steven Blier — artistic director and cofounder of the New York Festival of Song — and singer Darius de Haas — of Broadway and elsewhere — improvised some jazz standards at a party one night a few years ago. A couple of perceptive bystanders thought: this music is magic. Let's bring 'em into the recording studio.

And so they did, simply for the sake of makin' music. The results were so impressive that the performers and producers decided to supplement what they had and turn it all into a CD. After six sessions, we have "Quiet Please." We could simply say that "Quiet Please" is quite pleasing, but that would be trite and a vast understatement. The combination of Blier and De Haas has resulted in an intriguing and remarkably varied collection of 17 songs.

Blier brought to the table a clutch of so-called Great American Songbook songs: one Arlen, one Porter, one R&H, one from the other R&H, and no less than four from the Bros. Gershwin. De Haas arrived with a handful of jazz favorites, including two Ellington classics. Finally, they threw in three songs that we might call contemporary, one by Stevie Wonder and two — "Hero and Leander" and "Migratory V" — by Adam Guettel. Out of place? Hardly so. If I remember correctly, I first noticed Mr. de Haas in 1998 in the show from whence these last two sprang, Saturn Returns. (That unheralded two-week concert at the Public Theater, along with the following year's one-night "Evening with Adam Guettel" at Town Hall, turned out in retrospect to be two of the music theatre highlights of the 1990s. How glad I am that I found my way to both.)

Oh yes, Bernstein is represented as well, with "Some Other Time." Actually there is more Bernstein here than might be apparent; that partygoer who was so struck by the impromptu meeting of Blier and de Haas was the great Leonard's daughter, Jamie. Ms. Bernstein has served as an impressive representative of and spokesperson for her father's legacy; record producing, as far as I'm aware, is a new occupation. "Quiet Please" is a labor of love all around, and Bernstein and producing partner/recording engineer Harold Chambers deserve a full share of credit with the singer and the pianist.

These recordings were casually made, without arrangements and with only a brief preliminary playthrough in lieu of rehearsal. The results are improvisatory, naturally enough, but improvisatory without a roadmap. (Other than the Guettel songs, that is, which need to be played and sung as written.) Mr. de Haas does very well with this, but the prize here is the playing of Mr. Blier. His work is endlessly fascinating, filled with unlikely and arresting choices which always — somehow — correspond to what the composer wrote. The Gershwin songs are especially arresting; I suppose that Blier knows the songs so well that he can play them as if in a dream. The closest I can come to describing the pianistics is to say that they sound like Vernon Duke playing Gershwin, if you know what I mean.

Blier, in his liner notes, describes listening to the playback and finding moments "when I seem to cross four lanes of musical traffic in the space of six seconds." That's what it sounds like, with everything always successfully resolved. Uncanny. A special session, or series of sessions, with de Hass and Blier.

 Continued...