Mark Murphy- Genius or annoying?

[Jimmy blue note]

I love him, the way he uses his voice is so instrumental. When people ask me about playing lyrically, I always get into vocalists: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennet, Leon Thomas, Mel Torme, Leo Bleckmann, and right near the top is Mark Murphy.
Have to admit that when I was starting out, I didn't get it, but the better I became as a guitarist, the more I learned from great vocalists and Mark is without a doubt near the top of my vocalists list.

He's the real deal

[sgcim]

Genius or annoying? I find the premise rather suspect. Geniuses can be annoying so what's your point? MM was an uncompromising artist. Whether some listeners find him annoying or not is besides the point. I happen to appreciate and enjoy his artistry. To my ears he's the real thing and I love his music.

My point was my reason for reading the book. I.m very picky about the timbre of male vocalists. This is subjective, and I find the sound of Tony Bennett insufferable, while I find MM, Sinatra, Kenny Rankin, and Jack Jones very pleasing. But that's not enough; it's what the singer does with the song that matters most in the end, and add to that the choice of material he chooses to sing, and how the song is arranged, and you wind up with endless variables.
I didn't want to go through all of MM's recordings without some type of guide to weed out wheat from the chaff.
This book by Peter Jones seemed to be a good tool for this, being that Jones is a jazz singer himself (good or bad, I don't know).

It did give good info that helped, such as that MM himself considered anything he sang before the age of 40 to be inferior. It gave insight into how MM arranged his tunes, how he chose to interpret them, which accompanists he preferred, and the conditions the powers that be affected his performance. MM very rarely had free choice on his musical situation (especially in his early recordings), and even when he did have free choice, like when he recorded for Muse, Joe Fields (Muse's owner) only gave you six hours to make an entire album!
His musicians didn't like this condition, especially a great musician like Bill Mays, who needed time to come up with arrangements of some of the tunes, and found that guys like Bruce Forman were great improvisers, but not very good readers. MM never had rehearsals.

However, no matter what a writer thinks, it doesn't mean it's going to agree with what you think.
When Jones raved about MM's version of "All the Sad Young Men", I didn't like anything about it, and found myself preferring versions by Roberta Flack and Boz Scaggs over MM's. I don't give a crap about what an "uncompromising artist" he was,sometimes a song with basically diatonic changes, and striking melody like that one, is just going to sound like a mess, unless you just sing the melody. Like Bobby Hackett's advice, "Just Play the Melody!"
Individual artists are not "the real thing", great great music/performances,arrangements, taste, imagination etc... is the real thing, and are judged on an individual basis.