Mark Murphy Sings Nat King Cole & More is a compilation album of American jazz vocalist Mark Murphy's Muse Records recordings. It was released by the 32 Jazz label in the United States in 1999. This album is a collection of songs from his Muse years 1972–1991.
Background
Muse Records was founded by Joe Fields in 1972. Fields sold the label in 1996 to Joel Dorn who released four compilation albums from Mark Murphy's Muse catalogue on the 32 Jazz label, Stolen...And Other Moments,Jazz Standards, Songbook, and Mark Murphy Sings Nat King Cole & More.[1] Writer and broadcaster Michael Bourne was enlisted to put together the four collections.
AllMusic assigned 4 stars to the album.[2] Its review by Thom Jurek says, "Murphy is one of the great jazz singers of the 20th century. He brought a beat generation sense of cool and experimentation to standards without ever losing the nuances and carefully collected vocal skills that come from the jazz tradition...he offers new — and sometimes radical — interpretations of the music associated with Cole".[2] Jurek goes on to write that Murphy's liberties, "look through tradition and outside it for expression, and in his gorgeous, somewhat grainy baritone, he does the material justice far more often than he simply misses the mark, and pulls to the breaking point of a song's own margins".[2]
Scott Yanow says this release is "excellent" in his book The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide.[3]
Assessing Murphy's recorded legacy from Muse Records in his book A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, Will Friedwald points out the four Muse anthologies issued by Joel Dorn show "the astonishing range and scope, not to mention sheer size, of the singer's seventies and eighties output".[4] Friedwald goes on to say the releases reveal, "his output has been so consistently excellent—that so many of these records deserve to be regarded, in retrospect, as classics of the jazz vocal genre—and that even his occasional missteps are instructive".[4]
^Jones, Peter (2018). This is Hip: The Life of Mark Murphy. Popular music history. Sheffield, UK; Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing. p. 126. ISBN978-1-78179-473-9.
^Yanow, Scott (2008). The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide. New York: Backbeat Books. pp. 161–162. ISBN978-0-87930-825-4.
^ abFriedwald, Will (2010). A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (Kindle ed.). New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. pp. 350–351. ISBN978-0-375-42149-5.
