Too Much in Love to Care; Introduced by Will Friedwald
When I first listen to a new album, I'm generally trying to prod myself for some kind of reaction: what am I going to say about this music, whether as an annotator or a reviewer? When I attended one of the sessions for Too Much in Love to Care (Claire Martin sings with Kenny Barron) in the summer of 2011, and then, six months or so later, when the sound files for the album arrived (via the miracle of the world wide interweb) in my inbox, my first thought wasn't, ‘well, what am I going to say about this one,' but rather, I immediately started thinking of young, contemporary jazz singers whom I wanted to play it for. I started making a list of all the vocalists who could learn from Claire Martin, and it's practically all of them, even more than a few who are older and perhaps more experienced than Wimbledon's favourite jazz singer. It would be hard to find any vocalist of the current generation who's been as prolific as Ms Martin, in terms of both quality and quantity: math was never my strong suit (I can't even count to 21 with my clothes off ), but as far as I can ascertain, this latest project is her 15th album in 20 years (the first was The Waiting Game in 1992). You'd have to go back to the 60s or earlier to find singers that busy, when being a recording artist was something more like an actual profession. Singers like Nat King Cole or Nancy Williams would often release upwards of three albums a year back in the day, but no other artist singing today has amassed a body of work that's anywhere near as complete or impressive as Ms Martin's. Not bad for a girl of, at this writing, not yet 45 summers.
