Kathryn Moses, Part One from 1976 [limited time only]

An unbelievably beautiful woman in the top photograph with her absolutely perfect anglo-saxon profile, comma-shaped eyebrows, queenlike nose, plus the delicate opening of her fingers pointing upwards as if in a Botticelli painting, I could stare at that image all day long...  as I said before in conjunction with Don Juan, even for us music lovers there is nothing that can compare to the beauty of a woman.

This very accomplished musician (a Canadian who went to university in Oklahoma), is credited with composition (note the back blurb that lists some of her material up to that point), some surprisingly professional vocalizing in both classical and jazz formats, plus virtuoso performance of flute and saxes in not only jazz line-ups but also symphony orchestras.  She toured apparently with Chuck Mangione and I see that she appeared on his 1976 record Bellavia.

Also surprising was a youtube search on her that featured this concert with Chuck in which she, now adorned with a superbly fashionable afro, sings his hokey song "Land of Make Believe" (though I shouldn't say that, having always been a huge fan of the early Mangione.) Notice also this performance from 1980 with the Ted Moses group, where you can get a better idea of what she looked like.)  So was she married to Ted? She appeared only on this (brilliant) album of his.  Were they divorced afterwards maybe?  Anyone know? or care?  What I found interesting though is that on both this album and her next, to come soon, there are hints of his compositional style, which at the time I talked about at length-- even though she is credited as composer on those tracks (that sound so similar to his).  In terms of that style, I talked about the odd chord changes with the very angular but drawn-out melodies.

On this debut record we have quite a mixture, I suppose entirely to be expected from a young artist presenting her first accomplishment.  There are clear commercial throwaways, the ancient proterozoic jazz standards that I so dread to see (luckily only two), some uptempo doodling around, and then some more positive, for us here, material sometimes involving her gorgeously sweet, part girlish, part womanly voice.  All or most of her songwriting is dominated by themes of romance or love or desire, which reminds me a lot of my old favourite Radka Toneff.

One of her quirky habits (which we will encounter in the next record as well) is an intro written in advanced classical-modern chamber instrument style that after 1-2 minutes segues into the aforementioned doodling.  The perfect example of this is a track called Touch Me with its melancholy string quartet intro that, perhaps bizarrely, leads into a latin-themed instrumental: