Phoebe Snow's extraordinary debut album, one of the year's sleepers, has steadily climbed the charts, despite minimal fanfare and no major tour. Born in New York in 1952 and brought up in Teaneck, New Jersey, Snow emerges a prodigiously talented singer/writer/acoustic guitarist in a jazz-rock idiom, with a highly distinctive alto. Snow's singing is cool, yet not blasé; perfect enunciation coincides with spontaneous melismatic invention. Dino Airali's production brings out her uniqueness. Distant mellotron fills the role of strings, and Zoot Sims's tenor sax counterpoints her haunting vocals.
With the exception of "Let the Good Times Roll" and "San Francisco Bay Blues," the album's
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nine songs are Snow originals and might be described as light jazz torch songs, but they transcend the rigidity of form and attitude which that implies. Snow's lyrics, which alternate quirky urban images and first-person cries of pain and confusion, seem to come directly from some primal source, each song embodying a moment of total recall, confiding past experience as though it were present—raw, untainted by sentimental reflection.
The album's finest cut, "I Don't Want the Night to End," recalls the death of a lover and the urge to indulge in despair:
The dirty city mist
Has seeped too deep inside
It took me on some kind
Of heady ride
They told me Charlie Parker died
And I don't want the night to end*
In the excellent "Poetry Man," Snow secretly addresses a man she loves who is married. "Either or Both" and "Harpo's Blues" evoke abject loneliness, the feeling of being an unlovable yet fiercely romantic adolescent. "Take Your Children Home" offers a comic vision of mysticism; "No Show Tonight" describes a daydream of fame and rejection; and "It Must Be Sunday" sketches a self-portrait of desperation on New Year's Eve.
Together these songs portray a writer of uncompromising honesty. In "Either Or," her most revealing song, Snow discourses with her mirror image:
Sometimes this life
Gets so empty
That I become afraid
Then I remember you're in it
And I think
I might still
Have it made*
Phoebe Snow has made it. On a musical level, she shows the potential of becoming a great jazz singer. Among confessional pop songwriters she immediately ranks with the finest.
*©1973, Tarka Music. (RS 177)
STEPHEN HOLDEN
