Johnny Mathis! Thrift store gold!!!!!!!!! For some reason although there is a lot of Mathis in the trifts and junkyards of America whenever I find it its trashed... So given this is an early original Columbia pressing with the beautiful six eye labels (boy do these sound great or what?!) at the handsome price of $0.25 I decided to take the plunge... Its of course Mathis' third album...From 1957 on CL 1078 nestled nicely between the Satchmo the Great soundtrack (CL 1077) and Tony Bennett's wonderful The Beat of My Heart (CL 1079) which of course included Blakey..ANyhow the story according to the all music guide is that Columbia tried to make Mathis a jazz singer on his first album and having failed Mitch "King of Schlock" Miller decided to make him into a "pop" star bathing his voice in Percy Faith's strings.. But the truth is that its pretty good romantic music...And some of the songs how can you argue with them?? This album has one of my alltime favorites "My One and Only Love" which I"m of course familiar with from the superlative Coltrane and Johnny Hartman version... this album also has "A Handful of Stars" which I think Serge Chaloff played (with none other than Sonny Clark) on the masterpiece "Blue Serge" album...No this album does not reach the heights of either of those but if this is pop schlock man I wish it was 1957 all over again because this is quality music compared to what passes for pop schlock these days!
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