The Manhattan Transfer - The Offbeat of Avenues (1991)

Now, stop reading this, and go listen to the titular song from the magnificent 1991 album.  The Offbeat of Avenues (the song) recalls a very specific memory: sitting with my parents in the living room, well... I say living room, but it was really a larger space created by opening the doors to our balcony.  Candles lit, just hanging out, waiting for my sister, who would be born a few months later, to come out of my mother's belly so I could have a sister for real*.

And that song.  The Offbeat of Avenues.  My God, that song.

Listen to it now, can you hear it? Can you hear the song? Can you her the darkness of it, the elusive shadows lurking within it? Look at it now, it's a New York song, jive up the wazoo.  It's vocalese, it's jazz, not too dark, going for smooth but... can't you hear it? It's a New York murder mystery wrapped in the supernatural, the avenues after hours holding secrets darker than you'd know.  Sultry mistresses and betrayal - "first you crawl then you walk / scat, then you talk" and then it swallows you whole.

Tim Hauser's laugh is still burned into my mind.  From the first time I heard it, every time I listen to that song, I know it's coming, and I anticipate it as much as I am afraid that it will come.

But back then, I remember sitting there, jawing off as I usually do, thinkin' that this hidden mystery, this darkness... I love it.  God, do I love it.

The album took a bit longer to register because of that.

Truth be told, The Offbeat of Avenues has its other moments, some dark, some not, but all parts of an amazing whole, that are just as memorable... but not as striking to me as the opening.  Immediate recollections of the whole album were, back then: 10 Minutes Till the Savages Come, What Goes Around Comes Around, Confide In Me and of course, the magnificent downer, Gentlemen with a Family.  Upbeat and energetic when it wants to be, like in Sassy; fun and light, like in Blue Seranade; quirky, like in Women in Love.

All lush, sometimes the same color palette as its cover, well-structured and marked with the individual voices of Tim Hauser, Alan Paul, Janis Siegel and Cheryl Bentyne.  I think my love for vocals and distaste for instrumental music might have begun with this album.  I was to be told years and years later by a friend that "he couldn't fucking stand vocalese, because it was all pretty pretty vocals on the forefront, and he'd much rather have instruments do the talking."  But the voices, ah, the voices that took the lead, receded, almost scat-sang in unison sometimes blew me away.

I never did find the same flavor of this album in other offerings made by the Manhattan Transfer, though I do remember that I had given Brasil (1987) a go upon my mother's insistence.  It is, apparently, her favourite Manhattan Transfer album.

The Offbeat of Avenues was symptomatic of my musical taste: I adored the indescribable "spark" contained in that album, but eventhough it was by the same people driving it, I never quite got into their other works.  There are artists who managed to break through, but some never do.  The Manhattan Transfer never did, but who knows..?