Young Man with a Horn

AMG Review of Young Man with a Horn

Bruce Eder
All Music Guide

This album should have a better reputation than it does; unfortunately, listeners who might otherwise be sympathetic to it have difficulty because they misconstrue the film for which the music was assembled as being a biography of Bix Beiderbecke; in fact, the movie was never intended as such; rather, it was a fictional story about a trumpet player that was simply patterned after some of the elements in Beiderbecke's life. It proved less important to star Kirk Douglas or music advisor/featured soundtrack player Harry James than it did to Doris Day, who acquitted herself very well in a dramatic film (one of two she did in 1950, the other being a non-singing role in Storm Warning). As a Harry James showcase, the album is flawed in the sense that he shares the stage on much of this record with Day, who is very much in her element in the ig-band musical settings of this record, far removed from the conventional pop stylings that would dominate her work later in the '50s; she comes off seductively flirty on "Pretty Baby," subdued and poignant on "Too Marvelous for Words," rapturous on "I Only Have Eyes for You," and charmingly sassy and teasing on "Lullaby of Broadway." The instrumental highlights are "Melancholy Rhapsody," a bluesy workout for James' trumpet and the reed section that should only have lasted a minute longer, and the breathlessly paced "Limehouse Blues." The rest is pleasing period pop-jazz, done in a deliberately retro style in keeping with its subject. The balance between Day and James shifted somewhat in the latter's favor with the 1999 reissue, which has been augmented with a version of "Moanin' Low," a number that appeared in the movie but not on the album, in a live recording from 1954.