Allan Harris releases Ike Joseph's songs after twenty years in a box

More than two decades ago Allan Harris recorded a batch of songs nobody had heard. They were written by the Brill Building songwriter Ike Joseph. The sessions were finished, and then Joseph died unexpectedly, and the project stopped exactly where it stood. Records like this are usually said to have been waiting for their moment. This one simply sat there — there was no longer anyone to do the waiting.

The tapes stayed lost until they turned up again recently. What came out of them is “Swingin' Love Songs”, Harris's fifteenth studio album, arriving August 28; the last one, “Kate's Soulfood”, was 2021. The first single, “How Wrong They Were”, appeared on July 17 — piano, voice and almost nothing else, the way Nat King Cole used to do this sort of thing. A second, “I'm Hooked On You”, follows on August 7.

The band is not quite what a record of love songs suggests: Miles Okazaki on guitar, Hayes Greenfield on tenor, Jesse Jones Jr. on alto, Jon Flaugher on bass, and Russell Farhang on violin. That last instrument is the one that either saves a record like this or sends it straight to a restaurant.

Harris puts the whole story in one line: great songs do not age, they wait for the right moment and the right voice. It reads like consolation offered to a writer who will not hear it. About the songs it seems to hold — twenty years in a box did them no harm at all. About Joseph it does not: the right moment arrived without him, and his name now sits on a sleeve where a living writer's name usually goes.