The Gypsy (2001)

Can’t believe I’m just now discovering this album Willie recorded with jazz guitarist Jackie King.  It’s from that fertile period between 1996 and 2002 when Willie recorded so many of my favorite albums: Teatro (1998), Spirit (1996), Night and Day (1999), Me and the Drummer (2000), and Storytellers (1998).  That and the period 1971-1978 may be Willie’s peaks: Yesterday’s Wine (1971), Red-Headed Stranger (1975), and Stardust (1978).  It is fitting that I listen to this album after having just spent a good bit of time with Willie’s performance on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland and Jackie King in 2002.  They clearly have chemistry.  I wouldn’t rank this as highly as Stardust or Night and Day, but it remains a hidden gem that more folks should know about.  The title song, “The Gypsy,” defines Willie’s whole life perfectly.  I just finished his autobiography today, and it makes clear that Willie came by his wanderlust honestly, from both of his parents.  The book has a jazz-like quality because he alternates chapters between his own version of how things happened and chapters titled “The Chorus,” where other important figures in his life give their takes on Willie.  You get a polyphonic, impressionistic feel for Willie’s life this way.  “The Nearness of You” on track two is purely instrumental.  Willie is playing Trigger and is accompanied only by electric guitar (Jackie King), acoustic bass (Andrew Higgins), electric bass (Jon Blondell), piano (Don Haas), and drums (Bob Scott).  Willie’s vocals on “Heart of a Clown” (track three) contain some inspired phrasings, though I think he has better recordings of this song.  On track four Jackie meanders around the standard “Once in Awhile” for almost seven minutes.  “Jealous Heart” (track five) may be one of Willie’s more inventive vocal performances.  It doesn’t have the clean, polished, perfect finish of the Stardust numbers, but you get the sense that Willie is challenging himself, reaching, extending.  He starts out so slow it almost seems as if his voice will come to a complete halt, but then about three minutes into the song, the piano picks up the tempo and the second half of the song takes off with all of the musicians contributing lively solos.  “Back Home in Indiana” (track six) returns to a purely instrumental setting.  Interestingly, ITUNES (or GraceNotes) labels the genre of this album “Easy Listening,” but the attentive listener will find it to be more adventurous than this label suggests.  It’s only easy if you aren’t listening.  There’s nothing easy about Jackie’s guitar work on “Back Home in Indiana.”  Clearly Willie is doing this album to help out an old friend, but I wonder how much these friend albums really help Willie’s friends.  I’ll need to compare this version of “My Window Faces South” (track seven) to others Willie has recorded, but this one doesn’t disappoint.  The song could be the title of Willie’s biography.  Willie could have written the line “I’m never frownin’ or down in the mouth.”  Despite all the cheatin’ and cryin’ songs Willie has written and sung over the years, he makes sure his own window faces south at all times.  A Panglossian outlaw.  We never knew outlaws could be optimistic till Willie showed us how.  Dark figures always looking on the bright side.  The instrumental “Cherokee” (track eight) confirms that this album is Stardust on speed.  Again, reading Willie’s bio helps you appreciate how fitting it is for Willie to record an album full of gypsies and Cherokees combined with clowns and windows facing south.  Willie is the paradoxically cheery Cherokee.  This may not be Willie’s best “San Antonio Rose” (track nine), but it stands out because of the spare setting.  Willie ends with an almost seven-minute long excursion into “Lover Come Back to Me” (track ten).  I should mention that I listened to this album two or three times through yesterday and then another time through today.  This is an album I will revisit often with pleasure.  It would be nice in a mix with Stardust, Night and Day, Moonlight Becomes You, and the recently released American Classic.