 With Change Partners, I do mean to summon up a time when it was possible for a movie to have a score by Irving Berlin and star Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers but, more — that same time gave birth our musical palette, the Great American Songbook. That Songbook's history is inseparable from music for and about social dancing and a dance theme weaves its hopeful, wary, lethal, loving way through this passel of songs. I've been dancing with these songs for a while now... More than a reference to Carefree, the 1938 MGM musical from which "Change Partners" is taken, I know the words "change partners" have other connotations — some about dancing and some not — and...so be it! This CD is a dance card of songs spanning 80 years of musical imagination, a who's who of composer-lyricist partnerings that I like to imagine taking place across an expanse of punished parquet... I want to know just how it feels to be in another's arms... If, as one of the songs says, life's a dance, one thing is for certain: the dance floor is always open...   |