Verve Records is a label that was always considered a staunch purveyor of all things jazz, with only occasional bouts of pop and rock. After all, it was a label that, back in the sixties, released the first double album in rock and the first chance the audiences got to know the works of Frank Zappa (Freak Out, 1966), and was also the label that released the first three Velvet Underground albums, now considered absolute classics in their own right.
Yet, at that time, it seemed that Verve didn’t know how either to handle or promote music that was not jazz, and all the above albums didn’t have any commercial success at the time.
These days, Verve seems to be trying to handle music that doesn’t strictly fall within the jazz boundaries a bit better, the prime example being Too Close For Running, the debut album by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Aron!
From the artist’s moniker to his billing (“cozy-pop” originator) to the music itself, Verve is making a solid attempt, which resulted in his first EP (and its Christmas edition) creating an online buzz preceding the artist’s debut.
Actually, the music itself, that “cozy-pop” that Verve calls it, is something that might be quite close to the hearts of people at Verve, as it is quite close to what made Michael Franks such a big name back in the late seventies and in the eighties – a jazzy, Bossa nova-infused pop, almost perfectly prepared and performed. Pop with some substance, you could say.
And while Aron! himself might not be the originator Verve claims him to be, he writes and performs this version of jazzy pop almost to perfection, something that is much better than the series of Bossa nova-like cover sets that overpopulate streaming these days.
