Boz Scaggs

To sing the Great American Songbook convincingly, it helps to believe in fate. All the legendary composers of standards, like George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and Harold Arlen, each had something to say about life’s serendipities. Their wistful and beautiful melodies convey the magic of happenstance and also its flipside, the capricious cruelty of fate. Their lyrics celebrate the notion that life can change in an instant, when that vision of loveliness steps out of a dream and you suddenly find yourself bewitched, bothered and bewildered.

Boz Scaggs believes in this sort of thing.

You can tell that from the opening stanzas of Speak Low, the sublime follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2003 standards collection But Beautiful. Recorded in four days with the musicians playing live together in the same room, Speak Low oozes the spontaneous essence of torch song. Here’s Scaggs, owner of one of the most distinctive voices in popular music, singing sweet and low in the thick shadows to the music of the Gil Goldstein Septet, a combo he discovered completely by chance in Greenwich Village.

The multi-dimensional singer, whose seminal 1976 breakthrough album Silk Degrees was and instant Classic and one of the landmark Pop titles of the decade, now wraps his distinctive voice around such classics as Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me,” Chet Baker’s “She Was Too Good To Me” and John Coltrane’s “I Wish I Knew.”

Though born too late for the Big Band Era, Scaggs has been associated with some of the most enduring talents of the Rock era.

After a stellar stint with the original Steve Miller Band, he started his solo recording career in 1969 with an eponymous album for Atlantic Records that featured the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section. That album has achieved cult status for the extended blues foray “Loan Me a Dime,” punctuated by the late Duane Allman’s incendiary guitar solo.

In 1970, Scaggs signed with Columbia Records. His first three efforts for the label – Moments, Boz Scaggs and Band and My Time – are loaded with insightful original songs. Slow Dancer, issued in 1974, emphasizes sleek, uptown grooves – a sound Scaggs would develop further on his commercial breakthrough, Silk Degrees, the album that spawned hit singles “Lowdown,” “Lido Shuffle,” “Georgia,” “We’re All Alone” and “It’s Over.” It reached No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, and eventually sold more than 4 million copies. It also brought Scaggs a Grammy Award for Best R&B Song.for “Lowdown,” which he co-wrote with David Paich.

Scaggs resurfaced with David Paich and Danny Kortchmar on Dig (2001), followed by But Beautiful, in 2003, which rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz chart. Scaggs credits the musicians on Speak Low – Goldstein, percussionist Alex Acuna (Weather Report), bassist Scott Colley, vibraphonist Mike Mainieri (Steps Ahead) and saxophonist Bob Sheppard (Steely Dan), plus a small studio orchestra, with helping him realize the sound he heard in his head. “I’m so incredibly lucky to work with players of this caliber,” Scaggs says. “On really every tune, we’d try different things, and they always landed in a really interesting pocket.”