Barbara Cook Releases LOVERMAN Album Today, 9/25

Today, September 25th, music legend Barbara Cook releases an all new recording, Loverman, her latest from DRG Records. Loverman is described as "a brilliant departure from Ms. Cook’s traditional Broadway repertoire, featuring instead a large collection of jazz and standards." In addition to the release of Loverman, on October 18th Ms. Cook will perform a concert at Carnegie Hall in celebration her 85th birthday.

Loverman contains a diverse range of selections, from Hollywood’s “If I Love Again” and “Let’s Fall in Love,” to the contemporary pop strains of “New York State of Mind” and “House of the Rising Sun.” Furthermore, “Loverman”, the enduring “What a Wonderful World,” and bandleader Ray Noble’s “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” take Ms. Cook more deeply into the jazz world than she’s ever gone before.

“I am somewhat surprised with how easily the layouts for some of these songs came to me,” Ms. Cook says. “I suppose I shouldn’t be because Wally Harper, with whom I worked over a period of thirty years, was one of the best song arrangers ever and sitting there right beside him all those years, I was learning from a master without even realizing it.”

A native of Atlanta, Barbara Cook made her Broadway debut in 1951 as the ingénue lead in the musical Flahooley. She subsequently went on to play several famed roles of the American musical theater canon, including those of Marian in the premier production of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man and Amalia in the Bock-Harnick-Masteroff musical She Loves Me, both of which she created. In 1974, Ms. Cook began a creative partnership with musical arranger, accompanist, composer, dance arranger, and conductor Wally Harper, which lasted for nearly thirty-one years until his death in 2004. This partnership produced several live concert recordings, beginning with Barbara Cook at Carnegie Hall from Ms. Cook’s debut in that storied hall in 1975. In 2006, Ms. Cook made her solo concert debut at the Metropolitan Opera, making her the first female pop singer to be presented by the Met in The company’s 123 year history, an event which was also recorded live and released by DRG. In addition to Loverman Ms. Cook has made numerous studio albums, including eight original cast albums and two Ben Bagley albums of songs by Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. A newly named 2011 Kennedy Center Honoree, Ms. Cook recently returned to the Broadway stage after a 23-year absence, and was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance, in the musical Sondheim on Sondheim, directed by James Lapine, for the Roundabout Theater Company.