A trio of tenors probably best known for their PBS appearances as Three Mo' Tenors, Victor Cook, Rodrick Dixon, and Thomas Young lost control of that name (which has since been franchised) and have re-emerged under their own names with this varied set recorded December 2004 at New York University's Skirball Center, a companion album to the PBS Great Performances television special entitled Cook, Dixon & Young in Concert. Backed by a 27-piece orchestra conducted by
Paul Gemignami, the trio runs through songs taken from opera, musical theater, soul, jazz, gospel, and even disco, with everything getting the same measure of dramatic staging, which means this concert is probably more fun to watch than it is to listen to. A couple of selections manage to survive the theatrical overkill, though, including a joyous run-through of the
Duke Ellington standard "It Don't Mean a Thing" and a particularly propulsive and skittering version of "Birdland." For many, the eight-minute-plus "Soul Medley" that welds together "Georgia on My Mind," "A Change Is Gonna Come," "I Wish," "Respect," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," "Shining Star" and "Stayin' Alive" into a single journey -- complete with spoken interludes -- from country R&B through Motown and Stax clear through to disco, will be the centerpiece of
Volume 1, and for many others, it will be the straw that finally breaks the proverbial camel's back. Cook, Dixon & Young toss everything into the same generic blender and re-serve it with those truly magnificent voices. It's what they do, and they do it well, but it starts to feel formulaic pretty quickly, and this disc probably works better as a memento of one of the trio's concerts than as any kind of creative statement. ~ Steve Leggett