For Barbra, Love Is The Answer

MANILA, Philippines - Barbra Streisand (photo) releases Love Is The Answer — her new album of jazz standards and classics. The first full-length collection of new studio recordings from the eight-time Grammy award winner since 2005’s Guilty Pleasures, and the first new Streisand album since Live In Concert 2006, Love Is The Answer presents the artist as a cabaret and jazz singer of emotional clarity, depth and maturity, offering a warm and intimate selection of late-night meditations on love’s powers, heartbreaks and solaces.

Love Is The Answer provided an opportunity for Streisand to work for the first time with Grammy-winning Canadian jazz artist Diana Krall (piano) and her quartet (guitar, bass, drums) who brought a refined, sensual poignancy to the album’s spare and subtle accompaniments.

Rounding out the album’s smoky after hours ambience with his sublime orchestrations is legendary songwriter and arranger Johnny Mandel (who worked with Streisand on her 1993 Back to Broadway album and arranged/co-produced Krall’s 1998 Grammy-winning When I Look In Your Eyes).

The deluxe version of Love Is The Answer is a two-disc package that features the Mandel arranged orchestra versions on disc one and quartet arrangements of the songs on disc two featuring Streisand accompanied only by quartet (piano, bass, guitar and drums).

Among the album’s highlights are Make Someone Happy, a song from the ‘60s musical Do Re Mi, with lyrics by Comden and Green and music by Jule Styne, who wrote the music for Streisand’s breakout performance in Funny Girl; In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning, the jazz standard closely associated with Frank Sinatra; If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas), a quintessential version of the Jacques Brel standard performed in English and French; Spring Can Really Hang You Up, a song Streisand first sang in a St. Louis Club at 18; Gentle Rain, a bossa nova from Black Orpheus, the motion picture which introduced the world to Brazilian music; Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, the quintessential dreamy standard, originally written as a show tune by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach for the 1933 operetta Roberta, covered by Nat King Cole and the Platters; and Some Other Time, a rarely-covered gem composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Comden and Green from the 1944 musical On The Town.

Love Is The Answer is out in CDs under Sony Music.