"This Guy's in Love"
by Steve Tyrell

Steve Tyrell sings; “This Guy’s In Love”
A wonderful soulful voice bringing many well known and well 
loved songs to the ears and hearts of a world that could use a little love now more than ever.  The sound is classy and warm, like a sweater hugging you softly with the smell of an Autumn afternoon. 

This looks like a nice gift for the holiday season.

We wish to make note that Steve Tyrell’s wife, Stephanie Tyrell
has recently died and we wish the best for the Tyrell family and those that loved her. She helped produce a great album and I am sure that she will be missed by many.

(Mrs. Tyrell’s obituary is below)

Steve Tyrell's new album "This Guy's in Love" continues the traditional jazz standard bearer's remarkable return to the artistic side of a career in music that goes back to the 1960s.

Indeed, the title track cover of the Herb Alpert pop classic, which was penned by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, revitalizes Tyrell's close relationship with Bacharach, with whom Tyrell was partnered at the beginning of both their illustrious careersand whom Tyrell now specially credits for his enduring friendship and inspiration. But the entire disc, which also includes the Bacharach-David gem "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" and such stellar standards as "I've Got A Crush On You" "Georgia On My Mind," and "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To," further solidifies Tyrell's quiet but steady rise to the top of contemporary pop, as well as his acknowledged influence on those stylists who have since followed his shining example.

Many music fans, of course, were introduced to Steve Tyrell via the movies, specifically, the 1991 Steve Martin hit "Father of the Bride," in which he appeared and performed "The Way You Look Tonight" on the soundtrack, and its 1995 sequel "Father of the Bride Part II," which contained his soundtrack recordings of "Give Me the Simple Life" and "On the Sunny Side of the Street." This led to "A New Standard," Tyrell's aptly titled first album of standards, which was released on Atlantic in 1999. Peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard jazz chart, the album stayed there an incredible 84-week span and has since topped the Billboard Jazz catalog chart for another 100-plus weeks - almost entirely due to word-of-mouth promotion by those lucky enough to discover it and then pass it on to friends.

"A New Standard"'s surprisesuccess paved the way for a follow-up set, "Standard Time," which was Tyrell's 2001 Columbia label debut album. Reaching No. 2 in it's second week of release, the album remained highly ensconced on the jazz charts now two full years later. He suitably followed it last fall with the release of "This Time of the Year," an album of Christmas and holiday classics that stayed in the Top 5 even against regular non-holiday jazz fare by the likes Tony Bennett and Diana Kral. Its single, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town," was featured in the Disney hit "Santa Claus 2," and attained top 10 status on Billboard's A/C singles chart as well.

Yet even with three major album releases in the last four years, extensive touring, and a number of high-profile television appearances including last year's July 4th NBC special and the prestigious "Christmas In Washington" holiday performance for President and Mrs. Bush, Steve Tyrell has yet to enjoy the household name status of some of the newcomers to a genre in which he has so excelled.

"Everything I've accomplished over the last few years has really been a grassroots, underground sort of thing," concedes Tyrell. "I probably wouldn't even have made the first standards album if people hadn't discovered me in 'Father of the Bride' and started asking about me. In fact, my nickname should be, 'Who was that guy that was singing?' But luckily people asked and then found out and spread the word, and that's the way it's been on all my albums."

With so many people out there passionately promoting him, it would seem only a matter of time before Tyrell breaks beyond the jazz charts and into the mainstream. Based on the merits of his self-produced "This Guy's in Love," this time is now. Never has a singer sounded more comfortable with songs that, to use Tyrell's own words, are surely "the greatest songs ever written."

"People have told me over and over that they can put my albums on and just play the whole thing from start to finish, but of course, I'm singing the greatest songs ever written!" he enthuses. "I'm very cautious that each album flows from beginning to end, but what I'm most proud of is that I do something that stays true to these great songs, while at the same time goes somewhere else: Did you ever hear a Rogers & Hart song [lead track "Isn't It Romantic"] start off with electric guitar? It sounds like it could be the Doobie Brothers! Yet it's totally naturaland then Clark Terry, who was around with Rodgers & Hart, takes a trumpet solo in the middle. And I put a violin solo in 'Georgia On My Mind,' when there are very few violin solos."

Tyrell cites other album highlights in Bacharach's arrangements of the two Bacharach-David offerings, and Dave Grusin's arrangement of "Love Like Ours," which Grusin co-wrote with Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The Jule Styne-Betty Comden-Adolph Green classic "Just In Time" stands out for its novel bossa nova approach, not to mention old friend Michael Brecker's breathtaking saxophone solo.

"It's really a continuation of what I've been doing and moving on to another level," notes Tyrell. "There's a little more edge to it but at the same time there's also more orchestra. My production partners Bob Mann and Stephanie Tyrell and I always say that if we hear a song we want to do and can't think of a way to do it differently because they've all been done a thousand times then we don't do it: We don't think it's right if we can't bring something fresh to these wonderful songs that some of the greatest artists of all time have already done definitive versions of."

The definitive version of Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia On My Mind," certainly, is Ray Charles, and Ray Charles is especially noteworthy when discussing Steve Tyrell's atypical approach to pop standards.

"I knew my versions had to be different because I was never really musically influenced originally by Frank or Nat but by artists like Ray Charles and Jimmy Reed and Bobby Blue Bland." In fact, his performing roots were in Houston in the early '60s, where at the age of 16, he plied the same club circuit as B.J. Thomas, Kenny Rogers and The Jazz Crusaders, singing with both a pop band and an all black R&B band.

"I started as a singer, and had some hits in Texas," recounts Tyrell. "But even in my teens I was more interested in production and writing songs."

To briefly digress, Tyrell songs have since been recorded by the estimable likes of Ray Charles, Diana Ross, and Elvis Presley. His song "How Do You Talk To An Angel," written and produced for Aaron Spelling's Fox television series "The Heights," was a No. 1 pop hit in 1992 and earned Tyrell one of his two Emmy nominations.

As for producing, Tyrell went on to work with such diverse artists as Bonnie Raitt, Blood Sweat and Tears, Linda Ronstadt, Woody Allen, Alice Cooper, and LL Cool J., and even produced a Grammy-winning gospel album in 1998 for Andy Griffith.

Tyrell's first break as a producer came with legendary Houston producer/impresario Huey Meaux. Meaux let Tyrell produce such artists as Barbara Lynn and Sunny & the Sunglows, and hooked him up in New Orleans, where he joined forces with legendary New Orleans engineer/impresario Cosimo Matassa and worked on records by such Crescent City greats as Aaron Neville, Allen Toussaint, and Dr. John. He then moved to New York when he was 18, and got a job as staff producer with Scepter Records.

At Scepter, Tyrell worked with the Shirelles and met a pair of budding young songwriters, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who were just in the process of hitting it big with Dionne Warwick.

"I was the kid," he recalls. "I did A&R and promotion, so I'd go on the road and take Dionne's records and get them played on the radio. So I quit being an artist - but I never saw myself as a record company executive."

The Scepter job, it turned out, would be the only real job Tyrell would ever have. "I left in 1970 and made a label deal with Clive Davis at Columbia--New Design Records," he continues. "I produced a couple Blood, Sweat & Tears albums, and then partnered with Barry Mann--whom I'd signed to Scepter and to my labeland moved to California and started a music supervision company,Tyrell-Mann, long before music supervision for movie soundtracks became the big business that it is today." As Tyrell notes, he already had "good credits" in movie soundtracks having scored a hit with Warwick's version of Bacharach-David's movie titletrack "Alfie," and her No. 1 hit "The Theme From Valley Of The Dolls." Tyrell was also responsible for bringing his old Texas buddy B.J. Thomas to Scepter and promoting his huge Bacharach-David Oscar-winning hit from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head."

He quickly found success with Mann, half of the legendary Brill Building songwriting husband-and-wife team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill. After the couple wrote "Somewhere Out There" with James Horner for Steven Spielberg's animated film "An American Tail," Tyrell suggested the song be reprised for the end credits. Sure enough, his co-production of the song, as performed by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram, rocketed to No. 1 and won Grammys for "Song Of The Year" and "Best Song From A Motion Picture," and also earned an Academy Award nomination. End-credits in animated features have showcased great pop tunes ever since.

But Tyrell-Mann not only returned Tyrell to the film business. It brought his career around full circle to becoming an artist in his own right.

"I started working on a lot of movies and made a lot of demos of Barry's and my stuff--and people started to hear my voice again" he explains. "A lot of times directors and studio executives would just hire me as the singer, but I never sang a standard until I worked on 'Father of the Bride.'"

Tyrell's performance of "The Way You Look Tonight" in the movie bowled over its stars Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, its director, and preview audiences such that it was replayed over the end credits. "It became the ultimate wedding song, and will keep me up with a 20 year-old audience forever because everybody who gets married rents the movie! But what ended up happening was that the studio got tons of letters asking where they could buy my recordings, and people started saying to me that I should record a standards album."

So Tyrell began studying the standards - and fell in love with them. "But I didn't want to just pay tribute to the Great American Songbook. I also wanted to tip the hat to the wonderful musicians who made this music in the first place."

"A New Standard," then, featured the late trumpet master Harry "Sweets" Edison, who had played with Count Basie, Sinatra, and Billie Holiday, as well as "my musical godfather" Clark Terry, who had played for Basie and Duke Ellington and mentored Quincy Jones. "These guys were in their eighties, and I got to know them and feature them as soloists," says Tyrell. "They brought an elegance and dignity and authenticity to this music that modern musicians don't have."

But Tyrell takes pride, too, that other artists have shown a new respect for the music that Tyrell has done so much to bring back to the foreground.

"There's a whole new wave of artists recording this music again," he relates, citing Rod Stewart, who recorded most of his best-selling standards album in Tyrell's studio and also his old friends Linda Rondstadt and Aaron Neville, who are both recording standards albums. "I also understand Bette Midler has recorded 'A Tribute To Rosemary Clooney.' Rosemary heard me sing in 'Father Of The Bride' and was one of the first people to encourage me to record my own standards albums! And of course, let's not forget to mention the great Boz Scaggs, who has an album of standards out now doing quite well, too."

But Tyrell also makes note of such well-received newcomers as Michael Buble, who recorded "The Way You Look Tonight" on his acclaimed debut album, he told Tyrell, because his mother is a huge Tyrell fan and insisted that he record it.

Tyrell still works on select movie projects. "I couldn't resist working with Jack Nicholson on his new Christmas release, especially when I heard he wanted me to produce a track of him singing a standard," he says, having also just completed producing the entire soundtrack for a new John Grisham film entitled "Mickey," which stars Harry Connick, Jr.

"Nothing makes me happier than to see this music coming back," concludes Tyrell on the eve of "This Guy's In Love"'s release. "It's the greatest contribution that America has made to the arts."

-Jim Bessman

   Stephanie Georgia Manteris Tyrell, beautiful and beloved wife and mother, passed away on Monday, October 27th 2003 at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 54. An accomplished artist, songwriter, poet, and record producer, Stephanie was a Cable Ace award winner, Emmy nominee, and lyricist of over 200 songs and poems. Her song "How Do You Talk To An Angel" reached Number One in Billboards' Hot 100 in 1992 and at the time was the most successful song ever written for a television series. Some notable artists who have recorded Stephanie Tyrell lyrics include Ray Charles, Diana Ross and James Ingram. Her lyric of "Remember The Dream", the theme of Black Entertainment Television, was chosen by Coretta Scott King to be sung at the grave of Dr. Martin Luther King on the 25th anniversary of his death in 1993. Her songs and productions have been featured in such notable films as "Father of the Bride", "The Client," Santa Claus II", "Mystic Pizza", "The Brady Bunch" and the upcoming Jack Nicholson film "Something's Gotta Give."

   Her incredible beauty, talent and grace were surpassed only by her remarkable courage and spirit. Stephanie made an indelible impression and was beloved by everyone she met. During her eighteen-month battle with cancer she never once lost her sense of humor and continued to be the guiding force of the family, constantly contributing to the well being of her children and producing two successful albums for her husband Steve from her hospital bed. She fought a most gallant fight against a terrible disease and kept her spirit, humor, grace and dignity in tact until the very end. She will always be remembered for her overwhelming beauty, as it emanated from every aspect of her being.

   A Rosary was recited by Saint Anne Parish on Thursday, October 30th, 2003 at 7pm in the Chapel of George H. Lewis and Sons, 1010 Bering Dr. in Houston, Texas. The funeral service will be held on Saturday, November 1st, 2003 at 11:30 in the morning at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church 3511 Yoakum Blvd. in Houston. Interment will follow in Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery.

   A Celebration of Stephanie's life in music, poetry and art will be held in Los Angeles in November.

   To make a donation in memory of Stephanie, please send checks to The Childrens Hospital Los Angeles Foundation, Childrens Center for Cancer and Blood Diseases. Attention: Elizabeth LaBorde, 4650 Sunset Blvd. #29 Los Angeles, CA 90027