Nick Drake's songs have attracted a large number of admirers for their beauty and melancholy, but few can have approached those compositions with the stylistic imagination found on Songlines Recordings'
Poor Boy: Songs of Nick Drake. Songlines owner Tony Reif organized a tribute concert to
Drake in Vancouver, Canada, in 1999 featuring many of the artists heard here, and he added to them with many musicians based in Seattle. While the result is many different interpretations of
Drake's work, the lengthy CD breaks down for the most part into two halves. In the first seven songs, the artists basically take
Drake's simple folk melodies and sad lyrics as the basis for jazz performances, much as if they were the work of Rodgers & Hart.
Kate Hammett-Vaughan begins "Clothes of Sand," the second track, a cappella before being joined by
Chris Gestrin's piano,
Ron Samworth's guitar, and Simon Fisk's bass in an arrangement that recalls
Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit." Then
Gestrin and Fisk return for "One of These Things First," which they treat as a jazzy piano instrumental in the style of
Art Tatum or
Oscar Peterson. In "Three Hours," Jason Michas gives the lyrics a forthright, declarative reading that suggests
Nina Simone or
Sarah Vaughan. The
François Houle 6, led by
Houle, a clarinetist, spends 14 minutes working its way through an original atonal instrumental called "For Nick" and into a medley of
Drake's "Horn" and "Know." And
Hammett-Vaughan returns for a bluesy version of "Poor Boy" that would fit into any good set in a jazz club. By this halfway mark in the album, the listener may be forgetting the elegant, becalmed folk arrangements found on
Drake's own albums, but Mike Dumovich returns to familiar ground on "Fly," and most of the rest of the album is given over to versions of
Drake songs performed more in the spirit of the original versions, although
Veda Hille and
Robin Holcomb mix things up in a four-handed piano treatment of "Road," and
Ian Moore and
Eyvind Kang turn "Black Eyed Dog" into something of an Indian raga, complete with sitar.
Drake fans ultimately may prefer the songwriter's own recordings, but this album demonstrates that his songs can be interpreted differently, which speaks well for their long-term appeal. ~ William Ruhlmann