You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To   -  Dewey Erney & Ron Escheté
				1998 | CD | RESURGENT MUSIC MUSICIANS: Dewey Erney, vocals Ron Escheté, guitar

LISTEN TO MP3 SAMPLES

PURCHASE CD

READ LINER NOTES

QUOTES/REVIEWS

CD TRACK LISTING & MP3 SAMPLES	LENGTH

			1.		You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To   (Porter)	3:48

			2.		I Thought About You   (Van Heusen/Mercer)	5:15

			3.		Bluesette   (Theillman/Gimbel)	4:11

			4.		Don't Ever Go Away [Por causa de voce ]   (Jobim/Gilbert/Duran)	2:34

			5.		I'm Beginning To See The Light   (Ellington/Hodges/James/George)	3:11

			6.		I'm Afraid the Masquerade is Over || Don't Worry 'Bout Me   (Wrubel/Magidson || Bloom/Koehler)	7:36

			7.		All the Way   (Van Heusen/Cahn)	3:57

			8.		Gee Baby, Ain't You Good Me Me   (Redman/Razaf)	3:53

			9.		Meditation [Meditacao ]   (Jobim/Gimbel/Mendonaca)	5:30

			10.		Sunday In New York   (Nero/Coates)	3:51

			11.		Blame It On My Youth   (Levant/Heyman)	4:46

			12.		I Love Being Here With You   (Schluger/Lee)	3:57

SALES OPTIONS
CD BABY:  CD Baby accepts VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, Discover & PayPal, and offers a choice of shipment options. CD Baby handles both domestic (U.S.) and international orders.				OTHER OPTIONS:  CDs may be purchased from Dewey at his gigs.

LINER NOTES

The first album that Dewey Erney and Ron Escheté made was called A Beautiful Friendship.  And for the A-1 but underrated singer and his partner, the ace guitarist, that's just what the close to 30 years leading up to this latest, and, as expected, outstanding effort has been.  To offer a slight variation on the old cliché, they make wonderful music together. Some history: Erney, who hails from Latrobe, Pa., home of that swell Rolling Rock beer, came west in the early '60s, hoping for that big break.  It never came.  So instead of looking for road work as a singer, Erney, armed with a degree in business, took a day job to stay close to his wife.  "I was in love.  I didn't want to travel", he says now.  But he never gave up singing, his first love and one which he'd practiced professionally since he was a teenager.  The Erneys lived in Long Beach and Dewey often found himself either appearing or guesting in nearby Orange County clubs. Enter Ron Escheté.  The native of Houma, La., who was leading a jazz band by age 17 and who studied at Loyola University in New Orleans, came to Southern California in 1970.  Then, he was working with singers Freddie Bell and Roberta Lynn, who appeared at a joint in Newport Beach for a year.  Escheté liked the area, and settled close by in Whittier.  Over the years, he's found steady employment in rooms in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, and has toured with such names as Ray Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Gene Harris, Peggy Lee and Milt Jackson.  The guitarist has made several recordings, the latest of which is "Soft Winds" (Concord jazz). Our co-leaders' paths first crossed in the early '70s, when they were introduced by the estimable bassist Luther Hughes.  They'd occasionally sit in with each other at various Orange County haunts.  A few years passed and then, in the late '70s, when both principals were performing at a park concert with the Long Beach Municipal Band, the ensemble's director, Marvin Branson, asked the pair to do an impromptu number.  The result so pleased the audience, and themselves, that, as Erney says, "A child was born.  It really worked nice as a duo." By the early '80s, they'd done a few club dates, and then they went into engineer Jim Mooney's Sage And Sound studio in Hollywood (the same Mooney that oversaw the recording of You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To and made a demo.  The material was ultimately sent to Albert Marx, owner of Discovery records.  "He took it right away, said he thought I was a great singer and where had I been all his life," says Erney.  That tape became A Beautiful Friendship. In 1984, the pair made The Second Set for Wayne Knight's Legend records, an album that featured bassist Hughes and drummer John Perett.  Then came about a decade of peripatetic performing, including appearances at Alphonse's in North Hollywood and the Mirage and Giorgio's in Long Beach.  Finally, in 1994, Erney found a new recording home when he hooked up with saxophonist Dan St. Marseille's fledgling Resurgent Music, and made Dearly Beloved, the first of his Standards of Excellence series, which, counting You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To, comprises four volumes.  (Escheté wasn't part of Dearly Beloved, but he appears with Erney, both alone and with a trio on 1996's, You And The Night And The Music [Volume 2].) The singer talks about the unique experience of working with Escheté wondrous guitar backing.  "[Because he uses a seven string guitar], Ron can play the bass line while he's playing chords, he can orchestrate, he's the whole band," Dewey says.  "I don't need anybody but him." In general, Escheté, as they say, floats Erney's boat.  "Whatever feeling or mood I need - funky, bluesy, swinging, a ballad - he can give me.  We get along so well together that all we need is a look and we can go off in a different direction.  It makes it so easy.  I want to keep making music with him.  He's absolutely the best." You get a similar story from the guitarist about his colleague.  "He's my kind of jazz singer," says Escheté "He's subtle, tasty, paces himself well, and picks his spots appropriately.  He's easy to accompany because you can count on him to sing certain notes and then orchestrate appropriately." For a moment, let's let Erney talk about his own voice and style, a voice that in the Los Angeles Times I called "a fat purr of a tenor," a style that fellow - Times writer Bill Kohlhaase said was marked by Erney having "impeccable taste". "I'm not the kind of singer who blows people away," he begins.  "Most people feel I'm subtle in my phrasing and I agree.  I really try to sing the words, get the melody across, though I'm not strictly a melody singer.  In a second chorus, I run the words different ways, change some of the notes while still keeping that melodic thread.  Singing is what I feel I do best in life.  I just love doing it." That's undeniably what comes across in the 12 selections that comprise You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To. The medium bounce opener, "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To", lets us know what these fellows do, and how they do it.  It exhibits Erney's big, natural sounding voice, his good diction and articulation, his manner of emphasizing his middle range, though he can go far beyond that.  Here, as is his wont, he does the first chorus fairly straight, then in the second, squeezes some of the words into tighter groups than the original melody, drags others out.  It swings.  Around him, Escheté uses both chords and bass lines to fatten the sound, and in his solo, mixes in clean and thought-out single lines with glowing chords. "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To" demonstrates another of Dewey's unaffected qualities, his way of singing to you, telling a story.  The song is done "much slower than you usually hear", Erney says. Toots Thielemans lilting waltz, "Bluesette" allows us to hear more of our singer's jazz side.  He takes Norman Gimbel's words and, employing nuance, attaches them to the kind of notes jazz players like: passing tones, chromatic passages, etc. Escheté, who plays mostly a Bendetto electric here, picks up his acoustic Bendetto guitar for the touching Jobim song, "Don't Ever Go Away", with words by Ray Gilbert.  Erney first heard this on the mid-'60s Sinatra And Company LP.  "It's heart-breaking and poignant, and I tried to bring everything I could possibly bring to that feeling," he says. A swinger, Ellington and Don George's "I'm Beginning To See The Light", leads to the delicious two-song medley, "The Masquerade Is Over" and "Don't Worry About Me."  "The lyrics are so in tune with each other that it seemed almost like two tunes with a single thought," says Dewey.  He makes a smooth transition by stretching out the word, "So", which is in the last phrase of "Masquerade."  And so is love and is the first word of "Don't Worry About Me." "All The Way", long associated with Sinatra, who introduced the eventual Oscar-winning song in the film, "Jokers Wild", is treated as a bossa nova, at Escheté's behest.  "I love bossa novas as much as straight ahead", he says. It was Nat 'King' Cole's version of "Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good To You" that grabbed Erney's ear.  "We wanted a tune with a little bit of grease, a little of that blues feeling that Ron plays so well."  They got it. A Jobim encore, the oh-so-slowly-delivered "Meditation," is a song that has long spoken to Erney.  "We did it slow so the words would have the focus", Dewey says. The upbeat Peter Nero/Carroll Coates ditty, "Sunday In New York", which Escheté thinks "grooved pretty well", leads to the excruciatingly sad yet beautiful Oscar Levant-Edward Heyman classic, "Blame It On My Youth".  Erney sings the verse a cappella. Our closer is a dandy, the vibrant "I Love Being Here With You", written by Bill Schluger and Peggy Lee.  Ironically, the number was Lee's regular opener.  Here, Escheté plays a T.V. Jones baritone guitar's tuned a fifth lower so it gives me another timbre and Erney employs some original lyrics for the last chorus, singing the praises of such personal favorites as Escheté, Stephame Haynes, Bill Holman, Sinatra and Cole.  "So many of the tunes here are fairly serious in nature, so a happy romp is a good way to end the album," says Dewey. Both of these artists feel that You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To came out quite nicely, an impression that will be shared by many.  And while the pair have been working more and more steadily in Southern California, a warm and rewarding project like this should increase their visibility.  People need to hear this music.  The honest, deeply positive feeling that permeates it can't help but rub off. Zan Stewart Contributor Los Angeles Times, Down Beat, Stereophile

QUOTES / REVIEWS

Nothing posted at this time