Review: Clued in on Clooney
Debby Boone lights up somebody else's life
By Porter Anderson
CNN
 |  Debby Boone's new muscial tribute to her mother-in-law, Rosemary Clooney, releases Tuesday. |
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| | TOUR INFORMATION | Debby Boone is being staged by Richard Jay-Alexander in performances to support the new CD, which releases Tuesday, April 19:
- May 8 (Mother's Day), Hershey, Pennsylvania
- May 10-21, Feinstein's at the Regency in New York
- June 20, a Clooney tribute concert at Carnegie Hall, New York
- June 22, Sculler's Jazz Club in Boston
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ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- It's not that you expect her to turn up in white buck shoes. Still, Debby Boone is the daughter of Pat Boone. And she spent a lot of time doing Christian music.
She was good at it, too. She pulled down Grammys in 1977 (best new artist), 1980 (best inspirational performance) and 1984 with Phil Driscoll (best gospel performance for a duo or group).
In fact, you may still be holding "You Light Up My Life" against her. With 10 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's charts in 1977, it even won best song at the Oscars that year.
Now, all is forgiven.
Did you know that Boone is the wife of Gabriel Ferrer, son of Jose Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney? Did you know that when Clooney died close to three years ago, she'd given all her arrangements to daughter-in-law Boone?
Concord Records, Clooney's recording-label home from the 1970s, has done us the favor of setting us very straight: Boone isn't just the lucky owner of John Oddo's arrangements; she's also a remarkably gifted heir to the Clooney canon.
Don't be put off by the Stepford CD cover photo. In "Reflections of Rosemary," Boone does much more than simply cover a few Clooney hits. She makes this CD her own, choosing each cut -- some of them Clooney's, some of them might have been -- for specific relevance to a memory of her former mother-in-law.
Stylistic evolution
At the end of the CD, you hear a family tape of Clooney doing "Blue Skies" for her grandson, Boone's son Jordan. That trademark Clooney hustle is there in force, right down to the "big finish!" she announces just before singing the final phrase. Clooney was a creature of that peculiar tomboy-shout sound so common to several singers of the last century. For Ethel Merman, it was a bark. For Clooney, a hoot.
For Boone, it's a sigh, and a sweet one. Boone is her own woman. And her rendition of "Blue Skies" is threatened by the subtle clouds of melancholy always just over Irving Berlin's horizon.
Things get even more serious in Randy Newman's "I'll Be Home," which Boone has chosen to conjure a feeling of attachment she recalls to Clooney's welcoming home. It's a meditative, pointed rendition, determinedly quiet.
Never read liner notes? Make an exception just this once. Boone explains her choice of each selection, noting, for example, that Clooney had no use for pre-show preparations. "The extent of her vocal warm-up," Boone writes, "was a quick pass at the opening melody from 'The Best Is Yet To Come' (bah-DAH, bah-DAH, bah-DAH ...) and then one good cough and she'd head for the stage."
When Boone starts singing her own bossa-brilliant "The Best Is Yet To Come," hit your Repeat button. You'll want to listen several times to the razor-sharp modulation Oddo's arrangement pulls off in this one, getting Boone into briefly eerie territory.
That's its own warm-up for the gentle, brooding combo she makes of Sinatra's "It Never Entered My Mind" and "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning."
Day-light
 Debby Boone's "Reflections of Rosemary" is produced by Rosemary Clooney's former manager and producer Allen Sviridoff. | |
How does Debby Boone sound doing jazz? Like Doris Day at night.
Boone is perfectly adept at the sort of opening-phrase glissandi that Day favored, but it doesn't come off as a grown woman trying to sound girlish when Boone goes for it. There were times you might want to have yelled, "Oh, grow up," even to Ella Fitzgerald for this sort of thing. Not Boone. She sings her 40-something age and the effort rings classy.
No less a light than John Pizzarelli contributes warm guitar to Boone's "I've Grown Accustomed to His Face."
Oddo's original arrangement for "You're Gonna Hear From Me," in Boone's care, has all the everything's-coming-up-roses optimism you'd expect from his first song for Clooney.
Throughout this CD, Oddo has contributed each track's notably clean piano work while conducting the larger ensemble. He and Boone reassure us, one cut after the next, that we're in the hands accomplished pros who know what Clooney meant to them and to a couple of generations whose lives seemed at times to be scored by her music.
And finally, it's in a song that Clooney didn't record that Boone and Oddo find their best moment, the restless Dave Frishberg "You Are There."
"Pretend the dream was true," Boone sings, ever so slightly wobbling in the last two bars: "And tell myself that you are there."
