About this Artist

• Biography

Editorial Reviews

Journeyman singer Perry Danos has an elastic, breathy tenor voice with a smoky edge. There's just a hint of grit when he turns expressive, but it's more Bob Seger than Steve Tyrell, and that voice has given Danos a career in jingles and backup singing. He has also spent a decade fronting Pat Patrick's big band in Nashville, and that experience serves him well as he steps forward here for a collection largely consisting of swing arrangements of songs associated with his big influences, including Tony Bennett, Sam Cooke, Judy Garland, Tom Jones, Paul McCartney, Elvis Presley, Mel Tormé, and Stevie Wonder. There are quite a few pop/rock names on that list, of course, but Danos leans to the softer side of them. His challenge in working with such material, of course, is making it his own in the face of his idols-turned-competitors. Ironically, a singer like this has the opposite problem in a recording studio from the one he has in a club. Performing live, he can lean on doing a familiar song that may even have been a request, and may have trouble working in obscure but meritorious material. On record, it's exactly the opposite. What hope does he have to distinguish himself from the Beatles' version of "The Long and Winding Road" or Garland's of "Somewhere over the Rainbow"? None. On the contrary, he's better off with those unfamiliar songs he can claim as his own. Happily, Danos, or someone close to him, has done some digging into song publishing files and found some gems, starting with the album's title song, a Tormé composition that Tormé himself recorded but that hasn't been heard much since. Another good choice is "That's All," a song of the same vintage (which is to say, the early '50s) that has been described as a standard and recorded many times, but for which there is no definitive version. Moving up a decade, "Snap Your Fingers" was a Top Ten hit for Joe Henderson in the early '60s and even became a country chart-topper for Ronnie Milsap in the '80s, but it still sounds fresh in Danos' hands. And there are other songs like that, vaguely familiar -- but really good -- tunes that had some brief currency but have fallen into relative obscurity, such as Tom Jones' Top 40 hit "Help Yourself" and Tony Bennett's easy listening hit "Yesterday I Heard the Rain," both of late-'60s vintage. All of these Danos performs excellently (he also dredges up an early Bennett hit, "Because of You," and calms it down from the sub-operatic reading the young Bennett gave it), and that makes his only-OK versions of "You Send Me" and "Young and Beautiful," songs that really should be left to Cooke and Presley, tolerable. William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

Customer Reviews

• Listener Rating: