Broadway is an album by American pop singer Johnny Mathis that was recorded in 1964 but not released by his then record label Mercury Records. The project first became commercially available on August 28, 2012, when Sony Music Entertainment released it as one of two albums on one compact disc, the other album being his 1965 LP Love Is Everything.[2]Broadway was also included in Sony's Mathis box set The Complete Global Albums Collection, which was released on November 17, 2014.[4]
History
After recording 16 studio albums for Columbia Records between 1956 and 1963, Mathis accepted an offer to switch to the Mercury label with one advantage being that he would have more control over his recordings. During the first 15 months at his new home, he recorded and released five LPs and began work on number six, which would be exclusively devoted to songs from musicals from the Great White Way or, as he described it, "things I was listening to because I was in New York. I would go to the theater a lot and listen to all that great music from different shows."[2] The first four of his Mercury titles had respectable chart runs in Billboard,[5] but the most recent of them, Olé was the first not to make the magazine's list of (what was now) the top 150 albums of the week[6] since his 1956 Columbia debut.
In the liner notes for the 2012 release of Broadway, James Ritz describes how "John swings unabashedly and unrelentingly thanks to Allyn Ferguson, who outdid himself with a set of wild and uninhibited arrangements."[2] Mathis has fond memories of the arranger/conductor: "Great stuff... lots of interesting rhythm patterns from Allyn. He was a taskmaster. He was very, very smart and he always put that into his music. He was very esoteric as far as his jazz was concerned. I just sort of tagged along. I enjoyed the challenge and vocally I think it worked. I was quite enamored at the time with Lena Horne and I think a lot of it reflects that."[2]AllMusic reviewer Al Campbell explains, "At the time, Mercury felt the album was too upbeat and not the type of romantic material Mathis had been so successful with during his previous tenure with Columbia."[1]
