| WHICH IS NOT EVEN A
RECORD I’D KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT if it weren’t for our neighbors
having given us that huge stack of vinyl back in the summer. The
Debonair Mr. Hartman came out of nowhere, unsought, and spent
more time on the turntable than anything else has in ages, and I would
have told you all about it, but what could I have said? This is an
album of jazz ballads by a guy who evidently made a record with Coltrane
once, which record I will doubtless get around to buying rather sooner
than later, but who generally is so unknown that you can’t find
even a single fansite dedicated solely to him anywhere on the web.
It’s a record whose liner notes sketch a portrait of the artist
so laboriously false as to make even a casual reader wonder whether
the debonair Mr. Hartman isn’t actually trying to conceal something
— why, otherwise, would he suffer Joe Quinn to imagine him lost
in reverie in his New York apartment in autumn of 1956: “’What
does anyone want out of this business?’ Johnny thought, watching
the sparse traffic dart aimlessly,” the liner notes suppose
early on. “What does it mean to have a talent that puts you
on a merry-go-round of clubs, theaters and one nighters so that Jane
and John Public can feel that their entertainment dollar was wisely
spent?” |
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