2020: James Taylor Sings "Moon River" From Breakfast at Tiffany's
James Taylor has , in the last week, put out an album of standards. I'd say I'm surprised that it took him this long. I think it was a couple of decades ago that Rod Stewart put out three albums of standards in a row and got a late career financial boost(fans of a certain age liked both Sinatra AND Stewart -- including me.)
I've followed James Taylor as a favorite for decades now, and I guess you could say that musical artists have the same problem that movie stars do. Taylor was giant in the 70s, did a slow fade in the 80s, hung on in the 90's, and released a pretty damn good album in the early 2000s(it had "September" or "October" in the title.) Basically a 30-year recording career and now he's a big concert act -- and he knows this ("90% of my career now is touring with my hits.") Someone dubbed him "Sinatra for the Baby Boomers" and he kinda/sorta is -- a great distinctive voice, a canon of work(and a talent with a guitar that Sinatra didn't have.)
I've also followed James Taylor long enough to watch him take on slings and arrows for his "overly mellow and sensitive persona," for music that drives some people (mainly men) nuts with rage -- and to see the sexy "Joe Cool with Long Hair and Moustache" cut the moustache, lose all the hair and become a rather grizzled old man with a young man's voice. No matter, I've stayed his fan based on memories of the 70's...much as I'm loyal to Psycho and NXNW from getting some of their biggest broadcast airplay back then.
Taylor put out an album of new songs a few years ago and I was very sad about it. It only had about two tunes with much melody -- it was as if he'd run out of music in his head.
Besides that "new" album, Taylor did a nifty Xmas album back in the 90's that he updates every few years with another song, and two albums of "Covers" -- which while not quite standards, were definitely somebody else's songs.
One of those "Covers" albums featured Taylor doing well by the Jimmy Webb/Glen Campbell classic "Witchita Lineman," which I have always loved as a "movie level" song of yearning love. Campbell did it best; Sergio Mendes and his ladies did a sexy bossa nova version of it, and Taylor won a Grammy for his version. Its a great song.
But an even GREATER song is "Moon River" and when I saw that Taylor was finally singing that one(I read the album cover list)...I smiled. OF COURSE it was time for James Taylor to sing "Moon River." This song just could be -- for my generation -- THE movie song of all time. Its beautiful, its sad, it has lyrics that mean something and nothing at the same time("My huckleberry friend.") The music is by Henry Mancini, "the movie music man of the 60s" , the lyrics are by Johnny Mercer. A special on Mercer showed Mercer on Dinah Shore's show in the 70's , and she said to him "above all, Johnny, we thank you for that wonderful, wonderful song, Moon River."
The 1961 movie from which Moon River is taken is "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and we get an instrumental version over the credits(with Audrey TAKING that Breakfast at Tiffany's -- a bagel on the sidewalk); and Audrey singing it herself(without her "My Fair Lady" dubbing) and I think, a big chorus at the end. Breakfast at Tiffany's -- rather like the lesser "The Way We Were" of 12 years later is "a movie about a song" -- the song enwraps the movie from beginning to end and creates a mood that makes the movie a classic (for instance, the instrumental comes up very sadly as Buddy Ebsen's bus pulls away -- he's a middle aged man who married Hepburn's hillbilly teen and has to be thrown away by the sophisticated new Audrey.)
The years have been tough on Breakfast at Tiffany's because anyone trying to extoll its virtues has to deal with the fact that that the film has a running gag of Mickey Rooney as "a comedy Japanese man with buckteeth" for slapstick. Director Blake Edwards liked to do "ethnic accent humor" --- Peter Sellers as the French Inspector Clouseau, with Kato the Asian karate sparring partner in "The Pink Panther," Peter Sellers as a Hindu Indian in The Party but -- ethnic humor is over, and Rooney looks really BAD in those buck teeth. Oh, well -- movie history is history.