Liza Minnelli: The Complete Capitol Collection Soundtrack CD

Personnel: Liza Minnelli (vocals).
Containing 55 tracks on two CDs running over two-and-a-half hours, The Complete Capitol Collection presents all the recordings Liza Minnelli made for Capitol Records. Minnelli was signed to Capitol in 1963 at the age of 17, just after she had made her professional debut in the Off-Broadway musical Best Foot Forward. Over the next three years, before she made her final Capitol recordings at the age of 20, she established herself as a Tony-winning Broadway star, a major nightclub performer, and a TV personality. Her recording career, however, was not as successful, as much because of the radical changes wrought in the record business by another Capitol act, the Beatles, as because making records was a relatively minor priority for her. When Capitol signed her, the label must have envisioned a younger version of her mother and labelmate Judy Garland as well as a potential competitor to rival Columbia Records' new star Barbra Streisand. That's no doubt why Capitol hired arranger/conductor Peter Matz, who worked with Streisand, to do the same with Minnelli on her first two albums, Liza! Liza! and It Amazes Me, which make up most of disc one here. As he had with Streisand, Matz resurrected obscure gems from the Great American Songbook and gave them inventive new arrangements, and Minnelli did, indeed, sound like a young Garland and like another Streisand singing them. Only the first of the LPs made the charts, however, and Capitol parted ways with Minnelli after the commercial failure of her third album, There Is a Time, a concept record of mostly French songs (albeit sung in English). Subsequent compilation CDs have drawn only upon those LP tracks and haven't even used all of them; ten of the songs are making their CD debuts here. While Capitol attempted to market Minnelli as an adult artist with her LPs, the company also recorded her on a series of non-LP singles, some of which were aimed more at the teen market. All of them, another LP's worth of material, are appearing here for the first time in 40 years. They include versions of four songs from Minnelli's Broadway musical debut, Flora, the Red Menace, as well as some stylistic experiments. "His Woman," for example, is a dialect novelty, and one single, "I'm Not Laughing"/"Did I Hurt Your Feelings?," consists of co-compositions by Bob Crewe, best known for his work with the Four Seasons. It turns out that Minnelli tried some things even further in the direction of Brill Building pop, if not outright rock & roll, but Capitol never released them. There are nine previously unreleased tracks on the album, and among them is "The Many Faces of Love," a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman that is very much in the Brill Building tradition. Minnelli also tries a pop/rock arrangement of the standard "Everybody Loves My Baby" and even a cover of the Rooftop Singers' folk hit "Walk Right In." (She also cut an early version of her nightclub theme song, "Say Liza [Liza with a 'Z'].") This material suggests that Capitol and Minnelli were already grappling with the problem of marketing a singer coming out of the traditional pop environment who was not yet of voting age in a period when British Invasion rock was all the rage. It never got much easier in the record racks for Minnelli. And yet, all her talents are on display in these early recordings, which will be welcomed by her fans. ~ William Ruhlmann