Liza minelli 20218/17/2023 ![]() By 1975 she was running from engagements on Broadway to all-night coke parties at Studio 54 with her pal and confidant, the designer Halston (who helped define Liza’s stage presence by creating her sequined pantsuits and five-inch heels). Garland finally overdosed on sleeping pills in 1969, and ironically, it was at her funeral–with over twenty thousand people filing by her mother’s coffin–that Liza, age 23, took her first Valium. She became the quirky, always-looking-up gal who demanded in “Liza with a Z,” her trademark romp, “Keep it a happy sooooooong!”īut it’s hard to play the ingenue. As a child, she entertained her parents’ movie-star friends by belting out mom’s songs into a pinecone microphone. Perhaps, like many children of substance abusers, she did her best to make things nice. ![]() “You lie awake,” she moans, “and think about the man.”īy the age of two, Minnelli had witnessed violent family arguments over her mother’s prescription-drug abuse, had seen her mother’s suicide attempts, and had been temporarily separated from her mother during Garland’s incarceration in sanitariums. The album ends in perfect heartbreak with the terrifying quiet of “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” in which Minnelli sings deep and airy in a voice that sounds exhausted from crying. But the song does make perfectly clear just how odd Minnelli’s husky coal mine of a voice sounds when paired with the more traditional female vibrato and range of Summer. It’s the kind of thing you hear when the bank puts you on hold. The only low point on Gently is a duet with Donna Summer, “Does He Love You?”–a “lite” contemporary number that breaks the mood of the album. The album begins with a joyful duet with Johnny Mathis on “Chances Are.” On Gus Kahn and Nacio Herb Brown’s “You Stepped Out of a Dream,” Minnelli becomes swaggering and masculine, singing with a sinister sensuality: “Could there be lips like yours?” The affair simmers with Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost in His Arms,” sung humid and sexy as swampland. Gently is a song cycle depicting the rise and fall of a love affair. The songs on this album, in truth, are much more what I’m really like: sentimental, romantic and sometimes foolish….So, without a sequin in sight…I sing you these songs with all the love I have, hopefully, tenderly, and most of all…gently.” At their best, they are strong, unsentimental, and relentlessly cheerful. “Usually the songs I choose, the songs I’m drawn to,” Minnelli writes in Gently’s liner notes, “are about what I hope to be like. The songs on Gently are light jazz standards– romantic ballads and hep cocktail numbers arranged with vibes, piano, and muted trumpet–far different fare from her usual plucky show tunes. But Gently finds Minnelli singing darkly, from the pit of her stomach, beckoning us down to desolate depths, far from her old chums at the cabaret. Minnelli rose to fame belting out feel-good stompers in much the same manner as her show-stopping mother, Judy Garland–songs like “Some People” (“Some people can get a thrill knitting sweaters and sitting still….But some people ain’t me-ee-ee-ee!”) and “I Happen to Like New York” (“Pastrami on rye at the Carnegie Deli / There’s jooooooy in each bite!”). ![]() On her new album, Gently, she strips away her lollipop optimism and Ethel Merman delivery to reveal a lonely, sentimental voice full of frailty and sorrow.
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