I always tend to cast a jaundiced eye towards albums in which a pop or R&B/soul star decides to redo some prime selections from the standards songbook. The misfires far outnumber the successes, often because the artist has little or no affinity for the material.
Happily, The Other Side of the Moments (1972, Stang) is one of those that does succeed, due to a combination of the group's genuine feel for the songs and the out-of-the-park arrangements by Sammy Lowe.
Lowe's roots lie in the big band era, during which he played with and arranged for the Erskine Hawkins orchestra. He would go on to arrange and conduct on one of James Brown's biggest hits, It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World (1966), and dozens of other chart singles and LPs by the likes of Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, The Tokens and Della Reese.
In 1972 came Lowe's work on The Other Side of the Moments, a New Jersey soul group who topped the R&B charts twice in the 1970s, with Love on a Two-Way Street (1970) and Look at Me (I'm in Love) (1975).
Included on the LP was Lowe's most unusual arrangement of Blues in the Night, composed in 1941 by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. The MP3 is sourced from the original LP.
Blues in the Night
The Other Side of the Moments can be had as a download from iTunes and other sources. The album has received two releases on CD, the easiest of which to obtain is a 2006 release from the Collectables label that pairs it with another Moments release, My Thing. Reasonably priced copies are available in the Amazon Marketplace.
Here's one of The Moments' chart-topping hits.
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