Nancy Harrow

Secrets is the first of two albums singer Nancy Harrow made for Soul Note, a set of standards and of songs of her own recorded in New York with a band led by pianist and arranger Dick Katz. Harrow had made her debut in 1961 with Wild Women Don't Have The Blues, produced for Candid by Nat Hentoff after he heard her in a club, and Katz was already on her second album, You Never Know, for Atlantic in 1963. She then stepped away from singing when jazz work grew scarce, edited a literary magazine, and came back in 1975. By the time of this record she had begun writing songs, words and music, and she says a few of them first appeared here, before the all-original Lost Lady of 1993.

The album was recorded at Giant Sound in New York between November 1990 and January 1991, with liner notes by Dan Morgenstern. Katz is joined by bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Ben Riley, and Clark Terry, on trumpet and flugelhorn and also as a singer, comes in on part of the programme. Terry goes back a long way with Harrow: he was one of the musicians she sat in with at New York clubs in the years before her first record. There are fourteen songs, most of them between two and four minutes. If You Were Mine, by Matty Malneck and Johnny Mercer, is a trio track with Katz, Drummond and Riley, while Havin' Myself A Time, by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin, adds Terry's trumpet and at over five minutes is the longest track on the record. The programme opens with Guess Who's In Town and also takes in Pennies From Heaven, Someday Sweetheart, Fun To Be Fooled and Hit The Road, Jack, before closing with I'll Follow My Secret Heart.

This is the Soul Note CD, catalogue number 121233-2, first released in 1991.