LINER NOTES: - When Toni Tennille finally realized her longstanding ambition to record an album of popular standards, she slyly chose in More Than You Know a title that conveyed layers of meaning. Her heartfelt rendition of this 1929 evergreen captured the wistfully romantic spirit of the endeavor, but it was also a subtle allusion to a new direction for her career. - As The Captain & Tennille, Toni and her husband, Daryl Dragon, emerged in the mid-‘70s as one of the most celebrated duos on the pop scene, scoring a string of hit singles that included the chart-topping million-sellers "Love Will Keep Us Together" and "Do That To Me One More Time." Such impressive Top 40 success might not seem to jibe with a yearning to explore masterworks from the golden age of Tin Pan Alley, but Toni was born with balladry in the bloodline. Her father, Frank Tennille, was a gifted tenor who performed and recorded with the Bob Crosby Orchestra in the early days of the big band era. Although he got out of show business shortly thereafter, Frank passed along his abiding love for music to Toni and her sisters. "Daddy was always bringing home new records for us to listen to," she recalled in a recent interview, "and we got to hear all the great bands." Toni soon developed a profound admiration for Ella Fitzgerald, June Christy, Joe Williams and the other vocal greats that she now whimsically characterizes as "the usual suspects." They played a major role in shaping her tastes and introducing Tennille to the many splendored world of jazz singing. - This firm grounding in the popular music of the pre-rock era was complimented by a decade of classical piano training. When Toni (who was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1943) enrolled at Auburn University, she followed in her father’s footsteps by performing with a group that he’d co-founded, a 16-piece jazz ensemble known as the Auburn Knights. In coming years the impact of these youthful experiences would begin to reassert itself, even while The Captain & Tennille were at the height of their popularity. A memorable addition to their 1976-77 ABC television variety series were the standard tunes that Toni would revisit on a weekly basis. Their 1978 A & M album Dream contained a harbinger of things to come in Toni’s moving rendition of "If There Were Time," a lovely performance arranged and conducted by the great Gordon Jenkins. She clearly had a great deal more to offer in this vein, but the executives at A & M, Casablanca, and CBS couldn’t see beyond the commercial appeal of The Captain & Tennille during their tenures at these labels. "They all said, ‘Let’s just keep making hit pop records’," she remembered. It wasn’t until Linda Rondstadt’s success in 1983 with What’s New, a collection of standards arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle, that the concept was proven economically viable, but even then Toni encountered major label resistance. "I knew it was time for me to give it a try," she later recalled, so there was nothing left to do but seize the reins and make her dream a reality. - She began by winnowing a list of over 100 standards down to the material she most wanted to record. An empathetic arranger is crucial to the success of this type of project, and Tennille couldn’t have selected a better collaborator than Sammy Nestico. "We’re so musically in tune, it’s like we were joined at the heart," she explains. Nestico’s name might be most familiar to jazz buffs for his Grammy Award-winning stint as an arranger for the Count Basie Band, but his unparalleled resume also includes associations with Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Barbara Streisand, and many other giants. To breathe life into Nestico’s inspired charts for the More Than You Know album in 1984, Toni secured the services of a 43-piece orchestra that was brimful of musical heavyweights like drummer Louie Bellson, trombone man Bill Watrous, and trumpeter Snookie Young. "We basically recorded it live in the studio," Toni recalls, "It was very much like performing in concert. I don’t think we ever did more than two takes." A particularly touching grace note was added to these proceedings by the presence of a very proud Frank Tennille, who couldn’t have been more delighted with his daughter’s bold new venture. When all the right elements finally came together in such promising fashion, Toni didn’t disappoint. The tracks from More Than You Know and her 1987 follow-up album All Of Me collected here feature a self-assured stylist with solid jazz instincts and a flair for the dramatic that must have been a revelation even to longtime admirers. - Tennille regards classic torch songs like "More Than You Know" and "Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man Of Mine" as essentially "acting pieces" with a great deal of sub text that she tries to incorporate into her performances. "I love to do songs with a story behind them that can take an audience through an emotional journey," she observes. A potent example is her rendition of "Guess Who I Saw Today?," a comparatively recent song from 1952 with a surprise twist of an ending that requires a degree of subtlety for maximum impact. A stage director once advised Toni, "Don’t play the pain, play the result of the pain," and that is precisely how she delivers the lyric’s jolting final line, heightening the overwhelming sadness through tender understatement. She does similarly well conveying the melancholy message of the 1930 Gershwin rumination "But Not For Me," observing that "everyone feels that way sometime." It’s interesting to note that the risqué sentiments of another Gershwin tune, "Do It Again" from 1922, would be closely echoed by Toni herself more than half a century later when she wrote the 1979 Captain & Tennille hit "Do That To Me One More Time." Toni feels that the urbane quality which infuses so much of Cole Porter’s best work doesn’t always mesh well with her delivery, but you’d never know it from her sprightly reading of the 1928 gem "Let’s Do It," one of the composer’s personal favorites. Her playful presentation is charmingly complimented by some rather impish writing from Nestico. - For "Our Love Is Here To Stay," the last piece of music from George Gershwin before his untimely death in 1937, Toni creates a memorable mood by delivering Ira Gershwin’s lyric to sensitive but very spare accompaniment. The remaining tracks from More Than You Know included here are a trio of Duke Ellington compositions: "I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good," "Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me," and the lushly melodic "Day Dream," which is seldom heard as a vocal performance. Our selections from the All Of Me album begin with an affectionate homage to the unforgettable 1951 Les Paul & Mary Ford recording of "How High The Moon." Toni leant a pleasant feminine touch to the 1941 gem "Easy Street," a lazy reverie usually associated with male vocalists. By any reckoning, "Moonglow" and "The Very Thought Of You" have to be numbered among the loveliest compositions in all of popular music, and Tennille does both tunes full justice. Toni’s 1986 rendition of "Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe" was transformed into a sentimental journey through a little studio wizardry. The opening segment is actually a recording of the song that Toni made in college with the Auburn Knights, singing with a husky earnestness that prompted frequent comparisons with June Christy. Tennille’s version of "All Of Me" features one of her rare recorded flirtations with scat singing. "I can do it, and I enjoy it" she notes, "but I don’t think it’s an approach that my audience wants me to indulge in very often." - There are a few standards so indelibly associated with a particular entertainer that Toni won’t perform them. Don’t expect to hear her include "Over The Rainbow" in concert, for example. Some might feel that Nat King Cole and "Nature Boy" are linked in this manner, but the song also has a mystical quality that sets it apart, and it is this aspect that Tennille explores, with the help of a suitably atmospheric Nestico arrangement. Some interesting musical flourishes also add a distinctive touch to Toni’s version of the 1934 ballad "Then I’ll Be Tired Of You." "The harmonica part was Sammy’s idea," she confides, and its inclusion is gently reminiscent of the 1976 Captain & Tennille hit "Muskrat Love." Our final selection is "Dream," which is noteworthy for being one of the few times that songwriter Johnny Mercer contributed the music as well as the lyric to a composition. Tennille is quick to point out such things, because a great deal of her affection for this music is rooted in her respect for the songwriter’s craft. "My job," she explains, "is to serve the composer’s intent." Although The Captain & Tennille still perform on special occasions, Toni spends the majority of her professional time these days exploring the Great American Songbook, frequently as a guest artist with symphony orchestras across the country. Her intimate, warm, and compelling way with a song invariably does a superb job of "serving the composer’s intent," but Toni Tennille also lends this wonderful, timeless music a very special magic all her own. - --- JOSEPH F. 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