ROSEMARY CLOONEY
The Last Concert (Concord)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

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The existence of this album is the product of a series of happy coincidences. First, Rosemary Clooney decided to schedule a family vacation in Hawaii while Matt Catingub was home conducting the Honolulu Symphony Pops. When not busy with that, Catingub tours as the leader of Big Kahuna and The Copa Cat Pack, which happens to be the big band that had backed Clooney on her last studio album. It was natural then, for Clooney to agree to do a couple dates with the Honolulu Pops and the Copa Cats while she was in town. It wasn't planned as a Clooney live album, but the Pops were recording their shows that season to use as demos in negotiations for their own recording contract, so on November 16, 2001, the tapes were rolling for Rosemary Clooney's final performance.

By the following February, when she was awarded a lifetime Grammy for her contributions over seven decades, Clooney was incapacitated by treatment for the lung cancer that would take her life in June of 2002, but any ill effects of the disease at the time of this recording are indiscernible. Some of the range and power of her earlier career were diminished by the time she was 73, of course, but along the way she'd compensated with a gift for phrasing and direct emotional delivery that can only be compared to the same vocal development over the career of Frank Sinatra.

Too often underappreciated because of her early success with pop novelty tunes (the outcome of a commercially successful but artistically unfortunate early association with Mitch Miller at Columbia Records), during the later years of her career Clooney established herself as one of the great interpreters of the Great American Songbook, and that's the Rosemary Clooney you'll hear on The Last Concert. It's a fitting tribute to a remarkable performer, packed with outstanding music and the indelible imprint of her endearing personality.

Track List:

Overture Medley: Tenderly/White Christmas/Half As Much/Sisters/This Old House * Sentimental Journey * Dialogue * I'm Confessin' That I Love You * Just In Time * Dialogue * Happiness Is A Thing Called Joe * You Go To My Head * Rockin' Chair * Dialogue * Ol' Man River * The Singer * They Can't Take That Away From Me * God Bless America

© 2003 - Shaun Dale