Ladies Only Cafe Strings - Angel Eyes

This Ladies Only album includes a cross-section of the repertoire they play regularly on Scandinavian television Caféprograms and Melodifestivalen. In a variety of contrasting styles the pieces selected are over-tinged with an 'olde-worlde' or even pseudo-baroque flavor, which adds charm, for example, to Jules Caty's pseudo-Edwardian Con amore. Probably the only piece in the album classifiable as 'salon', a retrospective waltz recalling an earlier idiom, it has echoes of Berger's Edwardian drawing-room gem Amoureuse with perhaps a hint of Franz Pola's For Love Of You (1931). Tin Pan Alley is another rich seam for the Ladies Only ensemble. Standards, like Seymour Simons' 1931 All of Me and Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust (1929), just a little square-sounding become virtual twins, while a less-than-orthodox perception of Jimmy McHugh's I'm in the Mood for Love (1935) introduces a lilting waltz and some interesting rhythmic contrasts. Jazz and bop items have distinctly classical overtones in Lars Kallin's obliquely slanted transcriptions. Whereas Splanky (originally a Neal Hefti creation for big band), Morgan Lewis' How High the Moon and Charlie Parker's Ornithology sound more soporific than their models, languid violins evoke the tone-painting mood of Misty (although now best known by a 1959 No. 12 US pop chart song-hit version by Johnny Mathis, it should be remembered that the best-selling 1954 solo original featured by it's creator, the 'Picasso of the Piano' Erroll Garner, was really a 'rêverie for piano').