Album Notes

Press about "A Date With Judy:"

"The biggest mistake a singer can make when paying homage to a legendary performer is trying to imitate that artist. You know who's going to lose. So give Joan Ellison a massive round of applause for avoiding the temptation to mimic a star. In her thoroughly winning show, Ellison is all freshness, vulnerability and charm, singing up a storm (and, yes, a rainbow) in her own distinctive style.

Ellison draws the listener deeply into the emotions being portrayed. The singer, who devised many of the transcriptions from recordings, brings a keen blend of vocal splendor and verbal crispness to every musical moment. She inhabits the texts as if living them anew and knows when to go for passion and when to up the zany quotient."

~Donald Rosenberg, The Plain Dealer


Album Notes:

A Date with Judy - this CD and the show of the same name - is a Valentine to Judy Garland: in my book, the greatest singer who ever lived. My parents bought me the Wizard of Oz album when I was two, and Judy’s voice defined my earliest idea of what it meant to sing a song. But it wasn’t until about 13 years ago that I began discovering the rest of her early recordings, as my husband, Mark Flanders, and I watched all the Andy Hardy movies during the long, cold nights of a midwestern winter. We were already performing an early version of our first cabaret show, Circa 1939, with vintage-style renditions of classic American popular songs, and “Over the Rainbow” reentered my repertoire then, as well as “Our Love Affair” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

Fast-forward to late summer, 2009, when we decided it was finally time to do the Judy Garland show I’d always longed to do but didn’t see how I could - because only Judy is Judy. In talking with song-lovers over the years, it seemed that most - even her fans - had only a hazy idea of her early work on film, records, and radio, limited to “The Trolley Song” and “Over the Rainbow,” while dozens of her delightful renditions of songs by brilliant songwriters, many with effervescent piano accompaniments by M-G-M studio players like Arthur Schutt and Roger Edens, seemed to be languishing in the land where the good songs go. Finally, Mark created a concept for the show that allowed me to “get inside her throat” as much as I possibly could, but not to actually impersonate her, and drafted a script; we gathered-up all the orchestral reductions and note-for-note piano transcriptions of her recordings I’d done over the years, then added more and handed them over to pianist Michael Leamon, who added some of his own arrangements; and the show was born!

We hope that hearing our faithful renditions of these songs will inspire you to go out and discover the fresh appeal of Judy’s early movies and recordings if they are new to you - they are truly a national treasure. And I am so grateful for the part her voice has played in my life - when I am singing these songs, I feel like I’ve been allowed to cross over the rainbow...if just for a moment...

~Joan

www.Circa1939.com