YOUR
HEART OUT PRESENTS:
YOU
KNOW MY NAME:
THE
LOVERS, THE DREAMERS, AND BOBBY SCOTT
by
Kevin Pearce
with a cover designed by Per-Christian Hille
NEW
BOOK OUT NOW IN AN EXCLUSIVE ELECTRONIC EDITION
“This is a book about
Bobby Scott. Or rather it is a book that starts with Bobby Scott and ends with
Bobby Scott. It is all to do with discovering his music and what it leads to.
It is a meditation on musical contexts and connections. The book uses Bobby as
a totem, in terms of wide-ranging interests and varied activities. It is a
celebration of a magnificent musical journey and illogical career progression.”
Perhaps you won’t
actually know his name, but if you’ve any interest in the jazz, soul, pop,
folk, blues or Brazilian music of the 1960s and 70s, then you will almost
certainly have heard either the songs or the piano playing of Bobby Scott. Take
‘A Taste of Honey’, recorded by The Beatles for their first LP – that’s one of
Bobby’s. ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’, another.
Following on from his
previous book, ‘A Moment Worth Waiting For’, which focussed on the early 1980s
and took the equally adventurous Vic Godard as its touchstone, here Kevin
Pearce traces an insightful and alternative path through the music of the two
previous decades – alternative in the sense that Bobby Scott and many of the
singers and musicians with whom he worked have not been anything like as
celebrated as they deserve to be.
Bobby Scott’s approach
was genre-blind if not genre-busting, illustrative of the plurality,
interconnectedness, and cross-pollinating tendencies of a certain type of
musical adventurer. He was, in the best sense of the word, a mastermind, but
one who never lost sight of the gifts which individual singers possessed.
This was a man who
packed a lot of living into too short a life. From precocious and energetic
youth to grey-bearded patrician, Bobby composed, arranged, conducted, produced,
sang, and played on countless sets of music, working with an amazing cast of
fellow musicians and singers, including Bobby Darin, Jackie Paris, Chet Baker,
Roland Kirk, Quincy Jones, Aretha Franklin, Timi Yuro, Nana Mouskouri, Esther
Ofarim, Catherine Howe, Luiz Bonfá, Eumir Deodato, Marvin Gaye, and Dionne
Warwick – and just as many less well-known performers, each treated by the
writer on the merits of the work they left behind rather than plaudits gathered
along the way.
It’s a journey which
‘You Know My Name’ maps in meticulous detail and with great affection, building
a portrait of a gifted, fascinating, and generous man, as well as a rich and
enlightening history of the music of the times. Among others, Astrud Gilberto,
Stan Getz, Gary McFarland and Lalo Schifrin all also feature prominently in the
story as it diverges from its central character to record the influential
effect that Brazilian bossa nova had on music in the United States from the
early 1960s onwards.
The book becomes an
evocation of the depth, breadth and staying power of the great American and
Brazilian songbooks, and in so doing, an extended treatise on the art of
singing. Bobby Scott – himself a vocalist of raw emotional power – is
rightfully rescued from the cracks in history down which he has fallen, and
along with him, dozens of fine singers and musicians worthy of far greater
attention than they received at the time.
"Kevin Pearce is a
writer whose work includes the acclaimed work of pop mythography ‘Something
Beginning With O’ and film scripts for ‘Finisterre’ and ‘What Have You Done
Today, Mervyn Day?’, two of the Paul Kelly/Saint Etienne London films.”
AVAILABLE NOW WORLDWIDE
THROUGH AMAZON for £3.00 or an equivalent amount.
