Since I got my hands on the reissue of Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” in the early 2000s, the songwriter and singer Leon Ware has also been well known to me. No wonder, after all, the musician, born in Detroit in 1940, wrote the most songs for this album – and what song calibers!
Since then I’ve been a fan of this songwriter, who succeeded like hardly anybody else in the harmonious marriage of jazz and soul and was also a charismatic singer. But it was never enough for his great solo career, he remained an insider’s tip all his life. Thanks to his many compositions, the source of royalties should still have bubbled over. But the album “Candlelight” released in 2001, which he recorded for the most part only with the jazz pianist and producer Don Grusin, probably dropped less: a potpourri of jazz and bossa nova classics such as “Red Top”, “My Funny Valentine”, “How Insensitive” or “Skylark”. But Leon Ware wrote the strongest song on the CD – and that means something for this competitor – himself: “Let Go” – a wonderful Jazz-Bossa-Nova, in which besides Ware and Grusin Oscar Castro-Neves on the acoustic guitar and Efrain Toro on the percussions are involved: highest level of playfulness, great harmonies, almost provocatively relaxed atmosphere – and the sparsely purring bedroom voice of the soul veteran, who unfortunately died in 2017. The Caipirinha mixes itself with these sounds.
