Heart's Desire (feat. Kenny Barron)

SSC4996 2026-01-02

Track List

Come Rain or Come Shine - 4:15
The Sweetest Sounds - 4:13
With Every Breath I Take - 5:41
Get Out of Town - 3:44
Lucky to Be Me / I'm Just a Lucky So and So - 6:57
It's Over Now - 3:38
All I Want - 4:42
Never Let Me Go - 4:00
When Your Lover Has Gone / Lover, Come Back to Me - 4:39
Over the Rainbow - 5:32
Overjoyed - 4:42
Heart's Desire - 4:26

Musicians

Judy Niemack - vocals
Kenny Barron - piano
Erik Friedlander - cello

The simple truth is that a preponderance of songs are bathed in one sorrow or another. And Judy Niemack isn’t. What she has assembled here, for the most part, is a rare collection of purity, poignant both in composition and delivery, that isn’t mired in unrequited or lost love. She has the ability to paint words of hope and bliss with a ?tting smile, from the Arlen/Mercer classic "Come Rain or Come Shine" through Stevie Wonder’s "Overjoyed". When she deals with regret, as in "With Every Breath I Take", she dismisses it with "Get Out of Town". And she responds to the prospect of "When Your Lover Has Gone" with a bouncing "Lover Come Back to Me". // Niemack takes the pleasure principle of music to its natural extension: Joy. That breath-of—fresh—air focus is laced also with adventure, surrounded and enhanced by pianist Kenny Barron, especially in their exchanges on Richard Rodgers’s "The Sweetest Sounds". Cellist Erik Friedlander, too, enriches a number of cuts, injecting warmth and melancholy to "With Every Breath I Take" and the title song, "Heart’s Desire". And he helps Niemack to resuscitate Over the Rainbow with a bright, free attack to the verse before underpinning the lilting chorus with strumming cello. The musicianship throughout is impeccable, and all the more apparent without a plethora of instruments.