Lush Life

Hartman's voice is among the most unusual instruments in the jazz vocal canon — a baritone of such depth and smoothness that it operates almost below the normal register of emotional communication, arriving somewhere preverbal. On this Billy Strayhorn composition, the most melancholy and gorgeous of the jazz song canon, that voice carries an almost unbearable weight. The lyric is about a life of sophisticated disillusionment — jazz clubs and cigarettes and romances that glittered briefly and burned out — and Hartman doesn't dramatize this so much as simply state it, which is somehow more devastating. Ellington's piano (this version is the Hartman-Ellington collaboration) is crystalline and angular, providing a structure that Hartman moves through at his own pace. There are places where he seems to be thinking aloud, searching for a phrase rather than landing it cleanly, and this quality of reaching — of a man trying to accurately describe something he's still figuring out — is what gives the performance its documentary feeling. This is not a happy song and it doesn't pretend to be. It's for the small hours, for the specific ache of wishing your life had gone differently, delivered with such beauty that the ache itself becomes something you want to keep.