As you may recall from my last review, I am currently working my way through Masterworks Broadway's latest releases into the digital age. Last time I reviewed the excellent Ed Ames - Ed Ames on Broadway. This time, it's another new artist to me, Roslyn Kind in another two-fer release - Give Me You and This Is Roslyn Kind.

On a late spring morning in 1968, seventeen-year-old Roslyn Kind graduated from high school in Brooklyn and immediately began a new job later the same day. “I graduated to ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ in the morning,” she recalls, “and that evening I was in RCA Studio B, down around 23rd Street in Manhattan, making my first recording.”

Kind’s two RCA albums Give Me You and This Is Roslyn Kind are fascinating time capsules from a period – 1968-69 – when American popular music was undergoing seismic changes. There is a bit of Broadway to be heard, but most of the material reflects Kind’s own taste and then-current trends in popular music.

Kind rarely looked back to the albums that started her career, until 2014. At the behest of her director, she began to sing some of the material from Give Me You and This Is Roslyn Kind in her live act. Audiences loved it. “It was a surprise to me that I could return to this,” Kind says. “But people love the vintage material. They love to know your history.

As I said last time, these albums are very much of an age, and this age is given away by the orchestrations and arrangements. They are so much fun, and are something we don't hear much of anymore, despite us still hearing many of the songs. The choice of songs here shows that it's from a bit later in the '60s than Ames's album from my last review, and it shows the shift in American Popular Music, towards more mainstream composers. As with today, singers tried to stay with the times, and perform songs that would appeal to younger generations before, and this album is no exception.

In terms of appeal to me, it wasn't as great as with Ames's album. There's nothing wrong with the song choices, it's just that it would have been nice to have a couple more in there that could have been described as "standards of the time". Sure, there's a great arrangement of 'Fool On The Hill', and my favourite track on the album, 'Make Your Own Kind of Music', but I was struggling after that to find anything that I had heard of, and to be true, anything that warranted another listen. Not that it's not worth a listen - it is - and it's great to have these albums available again, but for me, it wasn't as appealing or as satisfying as the Ames release.

6

Ian Gude