Mad About (EU)

This Portuguese package of three CDs takes advantage of the 50-year copyright limit on recordings in Europe to present unlicensed reissues of the 1950s Noël Coward albums Noel Coward in New York and Noel Coward at Las Vegas, along with a disc transcribing Coward's appearance on the radio show The Treasury Star Parade and other airchecks from the 1940s. Thus, the material is presented in reverse chronological order. (The Las Vegas album is a live recording made in 1955; the New York album, despite its title, is a studio-recorded follow-up.) In fact, the radio disc jumps around in time, with certain tracks clearly recorded during World War II (such as "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans" and the poem "Lie in the Dark and Listen," about planes going over to bomb Germany), while others date from after the war ("This Is a Changing World" and "I Saw No Shadow on the Sea" are Coward performances of songs he wrote for the 1946 musical Pacific 1860). Some songs are repeated, notably "Nina," "A Marvellous Party," and the inevitable "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," but the discs taken together provide a good survey of Coward's cabaret work in his middle age. (Born in 1899, he was in his forties in the '40s and his fifties in the '50s.) They lean a bit toward the novelty material in which he specialized, with one patter song after another presenting observations of proper Britishers who go native in tropical climes, from "Uncle Harry" to Mrs. Wentworth-Brewster in "A Bar on the Piccola Marina." Of course, there are also wistful romantic ballads like "Matelot" and "Sail Away," too. And Coward sings them all in his "World Weary" voice, savoring each syllable. The Las Vegas and New York albums may have been mastered from legitimate CDs, since the sound is good. The radio disc is a bit more muffled, but the music still comes through. ~ William Ruhlmann|