"Liza! Liza!" is the debut studio album by American singer and actress Liza Minnelli, released in September 1964, on the Capitol Records label.
Minnelli recorded the songs for the album when she was still a teenager. At just 17 years old, she had already starred in the Off-Broadway play "Best Foot Forward," for which she had recorded songs for the soundtrack. A year later, she would win her first Tony Award for her performance in the Broadway musical "Flora the Red Menace."
The publicity generated by her vocal and acting abilities led to appearances on TV and the recording of a single, "You Are For Loving." With relative success, Capitol Records signed her and gradually released singles and later a full album. The record label planned to mold her into a younger version of her mother and fellow label mate Judy Garland, as well as a potential rival to compete with the new star of Columbia Records, Barbra Streisand. To do so, they hired arranger and conductor Peter Matz, who had worked with Streisand, to produce a similar repertoire, namely obscure songs from the Great American Songbook with inventive new arrangements.
The tracklist consists of 12 songs with interpretations of popular tunes. The recordings took place in June 1964 at the Capitol Records studio in New York and lasted about three months. Like Matz's work with Streisand, the arrangements were creative with occasional touches of humor, which can be heard in tracks like "Together (Wherever We Go)," "Blue Moon," and "I'm All I've Got."
The album marked the first time the singer would work with composers John Kander and Fred Ebb on one of her albums. The duo went on to compose several songs for Minnelli throughout much of her career in the following years. "Maybe This Time," one of their compositions, would become Minnelli's signature song when it was interpolated into the soundtrack of the 1972 film version of "Cabaret."
Although it was never released individually in CD format, all twelve tracks in their entirety (and in the original order) appeared on three compilations released by Capitol Records: "The Capitol Years" in 2001 (which was reissued as "Essential" in 2003), "The Complete Capitol Collection" in 2006, adopting the original "Liza! Liza!" album cover, and in 2009, in the compilation "Finest."
This User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; Source: Last.fm.