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In The Duo Deal
1 In other Words ... Bart Howard – 4:28
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2 Medley: Dearest, Darest I ... Jimmy Van Heusen – 2:24
Thou Swell ... Rodgers & Hart

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3 Winter Warm ... Bacharach & David – 3:41
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4 Great Indoors ... Cole Porter – 1:31
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5 If I should lose you ... Robin & Rainger – 4:19
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6 Fugue for Tinhorns ... Frank Loesser – 3:21
7 Fugue for tinhorns (ending only) – 1:06
8 The more I see you ... Mach & Harry – 3:05
9 The Trolley Song ... Ralph & Hugh – 2:05
10 God Bless the Child ... Holiday & Howard – 5:06
11 Let Me Love You ... Bart Howard – 4:06
12 Spring Can Really ... Landesman & Wolf - 5:19
13 Wonderful Guy ... Rogers & Hammerstein – 2:20
14 * Green Dolphen Street ... Bronislau Kaper – 4:11
15 * My Heart is a Hobo ... Jimmy Van Huesen – 2:33
*Available on CD version only
 

Again! Dick And Kiz Harp At The 90th Floor

The following copy, written in 1960, taken from the original LP

Dick and Kiz Harp wove their own pattern in an intricate kind of musical relationship from which subtle and sly things came. They belonged to a quasi-pops world of Bart Howard and Matt Dennis. They Injected an off-hand vigor into their following – a compound of natural shoulders, renegade high society, hipsters looking for the rock of rationality, brassy show bizzers, the inarticulate who accepted, the articulate who interpreted.

The legend of Kiz and Dick Harp was spreading by 1960. Offers from San Francisco, New York, Chicago, were being mulled. Their press agents carried such names as Marlene Dietrich, Burgess Meredith, Stan Kenton, Tony Bennett, who had departed Dallas bearing the message to the outside world. Their room was the 90th Floor in Dallas. What had been a bleak, dank unused warehouse the two had converted into a snug, attractive retreat for sane adults weary of maitre d’s, emcees, hipsters, jazz snobs, Dixieland and non-melodic musical exercises.

Their first album, “Dick and Kiz Harp at the 90th Floor” was release in late-1960. You could hear strains of it on the decent radio programs about the nation. Kiz had a fuzzy, husky kind of voice that teased like a kid in pig-tails or carried the drive of an inner sincerity. Dick’s piano slid in unobtrusively; sometimes a post for Kiz to lean on, other times a definite, intriguing personality of its own. There was a special brilliance in the team that carried through the record, the same uniqueness that captured you when you sat in the room so you forgot your drink that turned watery and the cigarette that singed your fingers.

Then suddenly on a December evening in 1960 the word got out: Kiz was dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. She passed on the next morning in her 29th year. What had been a team had been split in half. The followers were staggered. From New York Dietrich called. “Is it true?” she asked. It was and the followers sensed deeply the impression carved on a certain non-geographical community by Kiz. The musicians in the area filled in without pay to keep the room alive. There was that strange need to keep the 90th Floor active. A concert was held and receipts were used to start a Kiz Harp Musical Scholarship at North Texas State College.

This album, like the previous, has many of the tunes the Harps worked, experimented and toyed with until they found they had their own reason for doing it. They are the tunes requested night after night at the 90th Floor. The music in this album was taped at the same session as the first.

Dick Harp is back at the 90th Floor now. The spirit of the team was strong enough to linger. The relaxed jazz feeling is still there. The informal formality of a disciplined musician playing with his music and his audience still attracts the city’s faithful. Different singers fill in alongside him. The taste, intelligence and informal pursuit of the imaginative continues.

Don Safran
Columnist, Dallas Times Herald

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