Sheara Murphy

Mark Murphy's 2005 Verve album, Once to Every Heart, focused on the veteran jazz vocalist's rare, even singular ability with ballads and torch songs. Produced by Till Brönner, the great flügelhorn player, it was an album that brought Murphy's name back toward - if not into - the jazz mainstream and offered another side of his work to the ever hip European DJs who revere his catalog. Love Is What Stays is a deeply satisfying and, in places, even astonishing reflection on time and its passage. Memory, reverie, regrets, victories, hipster mysticism, and wonderfully canny theatrically poetic wordplay all come to bear in these songs. Released 50 years after his debut - when he was already being hailed as one of the music's great singers - it is more adventurous and downright wily in its aims than anyone could have hoped for. And those aims? They are reached with relative ease. The group of players is no less wide ranging: Lee Konitz makes an appearance…

At age 54, Elliott Murphy has been recording albums of his original compositions regularly for 30 years, and unlike some musicians who have been at it that long (such as Neil Young, whose raucous, Crazy Horse-style guitar playing is echoed on this album's leadoff track and whose After the Gold Rush ballad "Birds" is covered under the title "Bird"), he hasn't changed much about his musical or lyrical approach in that time. The Elliott Murphy of 2003 is not very different from the Elliott Murphy of 1973. He still writes semi-autobiographical songs full of poetic imagery and literary references (The Great Gatsby and Samuel Beckett are favorites), and he still sets them to folk-rock arrangements that call to mind Bob Dylan.

After nearly forty years of musical and personal camaraderie, drummer and producer Bob Christina began studio work with Matt "Guitar" Murphy on what would become Murphy's final project. After he passed in June of 2018, the fate of the unfinished project was placed in Christina's hands. He began outreach to musicians who were friends of Murphy, played with him, or were otherwise influenced by him. The response was overwhelming.