Rebecca Luker

REBECCA LUKER - ANITHING GOES: SINGS COLE PORTER (2001)

1. Anything Goes    
2. After You, Who?    
3. Night and Day    
4. Ridin' High
5. True Love    
6. The Leader of a Big Time Band    
7. You Do Something to Me    
8. Dream Dancing    
9. I Am Loved    
10. Ah, Fong Lo!    
11. Don't Fence Me In    
12. In the Still of the Night    
13. I Like Pretty Things/Where Oh Where?    
14. Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye

Actress/singer Rebecca Luker, whose Broadway credits include The Secret Garden and the 1994 revival of Show Boat, in which she played the female lead, Magnolia, makes her debut solo album with a collection of Cole Porter songs. In her acknowledgments, she thanks her musical director, Patrick Brady, also credited for arrangements and five of the orchestrations (the rest are by Larry Moore), saying his "name should grace the front of this CD." It may be that both Brady and Moore deserve that credit, since their musical treatments of the vintage songs are so stirring. They start with Moore's setting for "Anything Goes," which begins with a simple piano before involving a swing band in a sort of supercharged recollection of 1920s jazz. On the tracks that follow, the music is vibrant and inventive, redefining the familiar Porter melodies. Luker, a sweet-voiced soprano, holds her own over the maelstrom, after signaling the feisty approach to the material in a cover photograph that finds her, decked out in black dress and elbow-length gloves, wielding a cigar and appearing to be in the middle of a triumphant laugh. It's the right image for the approach she and her orchestrators have taken to reinvigorating one of Broadway's great songwriters. ~ William Ruhlmann

Recorded in New York, New York.

Personnel includes: Rebecca Luker, Emily Loesser, Sally Mayes, Brent Barrell (vocals); Patrick Brady, Larry Moore (arranger); Branch Woodman (background vocals).