After faculty she signed a publishing cope with John Lewis’s MJQ, a premier residence for jazz writers, and labored as a secretary at Impulse!, the producer Creed Taylor’s new jazz label. Guryan’s songs received seen; they had been recorded by Harry Belafonte, Chris Connor, Anita O’Day and others.
Among the many revelations on “Phrases and Music” are Guryan’s demos from this era, 1957 to 1966 — songs which are directly playful, emotionally potent and strikingly daring for the time. “Kiss & Inform” instructs a lover, with cool cause, go away his partner. “4 Letter Phrases,” recorded on the top of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sings a lexicon of “soiled phrases” that begins, “wars, kill, weapons, hate, damage, hurt, lifeless.”
In 1966, Guryan was residing within the West Village of Manhattan, the place David Frishberg, a kindred songwriter, dropped by with a replica of the Seashore Boys’ “Pet Sounds.” Wowed by Brian Wilson’s “God Solely Is aware of,” Guryan started writing in a brand new fashion for “Take a Image.”
Befitting its cultural second, that album is filled with love songs draped in Sgt. Pepper-ish splendor: orchestral strings, psychedelic guitar, Dixieland brass, harp, harpsichord, flutes. Guryan’s openhearted attraction, together with the songs’ melodic indestructibility, stored all the pieces afloat. One excessive level is how she weaves the Bach chorale “Jesu, Pleasure of Man’s Needing” into the swinging march of “Somebody I Know,” a reverie of hooking up with a stranger.
However the album’s poor gross sales, its songs discovered different shops within the late Sixties and early ’70s, the sneakily horny “Sunday Morning” specifically. It was a minor hit for the group Spanky and Our Gang, and received traction through rewritten lyrics in France (Marie Laforêt’s “Et Si Je T’aime”) and Israel (Shula Chen’s “Bo Habaita”).
Guryan stored writing and making new demos, which generally veered topical. A tune trilogy impressed by the Watergate hearings included “The Hum,” its title referring to the sound of the well-known tape erasures, with thinly veiled lyrics like “The A.G. mentioned he’d do something/To assist the President change into the King.”
