012 Catherine Howe: What A Beautiful Place

We wanted to make a really simple record. After a year of being plagued by complex compilations, multiple trips to Detroit, and a hellacious move, The Numero Group wanted an easy autumn lay up. Our office white board was overflowing with projects, the stereo crowded with LPs, 45s and spindles of little silver discs, while memorabilia sat stuffed in already too full filing cabinets. Pick one. Pre-war Ethiopian jazz? Complete field recordings of Ecorse, Michigan? We could go on and on. In Catherine Howe's case, we just loved her record.

At the time, it didn't even warrant a file. The sum of our knowledge was one CDR that sat semi-regularly wedged in the "Disc 3" position for the bulk of the summer. Slots 1 & 2 are generally reserved for current projects, but two hours into our day we would be pleasantly alarmed by the opening chimes of "What A Beautiful Place." It's jarring, almost, like something you would here at the beginning of a children's program on PBS. "Dun. Dun. Dun-dun-den. Deng," with slight reverb. And then Catherine Howe's 20 year old voice whispers post-adolescent poetry into your ear. It's a push back the chair moment.

We've never made a record like this before, but our shelves are littered with similar efforts. "Folk" might not do it justice, and "soft-pop" seems like the kind of label you might give to a contemporary Rod Stewart album. If you employ a "Jazz-folk" section in your filing scheme, now might be the time to put it to use. Tuck it in between "Bryter Layter" and "North Star Grassman And The Ravens," or more recently "Central Reservation." It's a real rainy day affair.

We're not going to paraphrase our copiously researched liners, but we will tell you a little about the history of the little orchestral English folk record that couldn't. Produced by semi-legendary jazz pianist Bobby Scott, the oft-mistaken concept album was issued by the tiny UK imprint Reflection Records in 1971. Issued to the media. Reflection went belly up before the record even hit the racks, killing the momentum created by Radio One airplay and dooming the record to an area that Numero specializes in: beyond obscurity.

The original tapes were, of course, lost. Most likely tossed out during the spring cleaning of 1985 at London's Trident Studios. We were however able to secure a clean source copy from renowned soft-psych collector Keith D'arcy, and a demo of "In The Hot Summer," which was intended to appear on the album. In addition, we conducted hours of interviews with Howe and Reflection Records owner Phil Gillin, and unearthed half a dozen unpublished photos. We sat in brutal Los Angeles rush hour traffic, ate sushi at the Santa Monica Airport, and on a related/unrelated note DJ'd a Chingy record release party. Somehow this took three months.

There are no easy records. You start out with a crude transfer of a crackly LP and see where it goes. In this case it's a jazzy British orchestral folk album, next time it might be Inuit disco rap. You never know until you pick up the phone and start making calls. You just never know.

La City Beat - January 10th 2007

It’s that strange time of year when not a lot of new albums are coming out, and the ear gravitates toward whatever offbeat material shows up in the mailbox. And so my unlikely obsession for the last week or two has been the reissue of What a Beautiful Place, an almost uncategorizable album by an English singer named Catherine Howe.

The set is due on January 30 from Numero Group, a wonderful Chicago archival label that to date has unearthed a dozen wild-ass records encompassing ultra-obscure soul, Caribbean music, gospel funk, and power pop, among other things. Howe’s collection – which essentially went unreleased back in 1971, thanks to the collapse of its label – may be the most unusual item in Numero’s eclectic catalog.

What a Beautiful Place doesn’t just exist outside its time – it was of another time at the moment it was created. In the late ’60s, Halifax-born Catherine Howe was a not unsuccessful theater and TV actress with a large portfolio of unrecorded songs. Her main writing model was Burt Bacharach; on her own website today, Howe speaks admiringly of his hit “The Look of Love,” and indeed Dusty Springfield’s 1967 recording of that tune sets the template for Howe’s composing and vocal styles.

She eventually hooked up with Reflection Records, an independent label with distribution ties to giant CBS. In 1970, What a Beautiful Place was cut in four days of hurriedly arranged recording sessions with producer Bobby Scott. A well-traveled jazz pianist in his own right, Scott had roots in an older style of pop. His sticky theme for the 1961 film A Taste of Honey had been covered by the Beatles at one of their first sessions. He had also authored the Hollies hit “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.”

The album the 20-year-old singer and the 33-year-old producer concocted could not be called a mainstream affair of its time. Made in an era when singer-songwriters were flexing their rock muscles and Carole King’s Tapestry ruled the charts, What a Beautiful Place is a lush, heavily orchestrated record that feels more a product of the early or mid-’60s. In its day, it would have sounded square, but it may be that very squareness that plays compellingly now.

It’s an off-the-wall mixture of slightly shlocky old-school pop and neo-trad English folk (though Howe denies such leanings), with some jazzy seasoning provided by Scott’s own stabbing, bluesy piano work. At its center is Howe, whose chilled, half-swallowed, vibrato-free vocals maintain a sustained, charming purity.

From a description of the music, one might imagine that What a Beautiful Place is a twee piece of work, but there’s a bracingly dark undercurrent to the album; it may not be working Nick Drake territory, but it sure isn’t Melanie, either. The tone is struck in the opening moments, when – after a six-note series of orchestral chimes that acts as a linking device throughout – Howe intones, “A tiny child knelt before a flower and he touched what he saw. Someone from a strange place stopped, saw the flower, and the petals withered and perished before his dying eyes.”

Whoa. The gloom of this opener is not dispelled in the songs that follow, which are marked by the blunt pessimism of “Nothing More Than Strangers,” the cool appraisal of a paradise lost in “What a Beautiful Place,” or the unsettling madhouse warblings of “Words Through a Locked Door.” It’s hard to say what people would have thought of this jarring blend of pop gorgeousness and interior gloom, but What a Beautiful Place never really made it into the marketplace.

Howe had a brief moment of pop success in the mid-’70s, and she emerged with a new album in 2000. I don’t know what the other work sounds like, but What a Beautiful Place indicates she’s a fitting subject for further investigation.

- Chris Morris

Uncut - March 2007

An aspiring actress who fetched up in Dr. Who and Dixon Of Dock Green, Halifax-born Howe was set to issue this debut in 1971. On the eve of release though, her Reflection label went bust, consigning a bona fide classic to obscurity. Produced by Bobby Scott (writer of "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother"), the 20-year-old Howe sounds like the lost link between Laura Nyro and Karen Carpenter. "Words Through A Locked Door" is her own stoned folk picnic, whilst the semi-orchestral arrangements and odd shifts of tempo recall the heavenly folk-baroque of Judee Sill.

London Observer -- Guardian UK
February 2007

Catherine Howe
What A Beautiful Place
Numero
*****

What a beautiful album What A Beautiful Place is: the kind of lost MOR-folk classic we all long to discover in the wake of Judee Sill, Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs and their ‘70s sisters. It’s like some missing link between Sandy Denny and Karen Carpenter, or between Ladies of the Canyon and Dusty in Memphis, and we should prostrate ourselves before Chicago’s ultracool Numero label for unearthing it.
Catherine Howe was a Kate Bush before her time, an English girl with a pretty face and an artlessly pretty voice who, through pure serendipity, was paired with eccentric American producer Bobby Scott. In less than two weeks of February 1971, 20-year-old Howe and 33-year-old Scott worked together at Soho’s Trident Studios to create this lush masterpiece. But barely had it been released when the label that released it – CBS subsidiary Reflection – went belly-up. Nobody got to hear What a Beautiful Place bar a few journalists and industry insiders.
Halifax-born Howe had touted songs around after her early training as an actress at London’s Corona Drama School. A chance encounter with Reflection’s Andrew Cameron Miller led to 1969 demos and, eventually, the sessions at Trident. Classically-trained Scott, who’d co-written the Beatles’ ‘A Taste of Honey’ and the Hollies’ ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’, was instantly smitten by the wide-eyed wonder of the girl’s songs and set to work writing the extraordinary orchestrations we hear on the album.
To these ears, the intricate strings and haunting woodwind on songs such as ‘My Child’ and ‘On a Misty Morning’ recall nothing so much as the spooky melancholy of Bergen White’s brilliant For Women Only (1969). If you love pure female voices sailing over oboes and harpsichords, look no further than What a Beautiful Place. ‘It’s Not Likely’ suggests a more ethereal Sandy Denny; ‘Words Through a Locked Door’ could be Dusty Springfield covering Joni Mitchell. ‘It Comes With the Breezes’ is a wafting samba for a summer night, the gallivanting title track a pastoral Laura Nyro. Gracing every track, moreover, are the frenetically funky piano fills of Bobby Scott himself, like some mad fusion of Erroll Garner and Nicky Hopkins.
What a Beautiful Place is a perfect artifact of its time, complete with a hazy cover image of Howe by the lake at Kenwood House. Happily, as the gorgeous bonus track ‘In the Hot Summer’ attests, Catherine survived the disappointment of her debut’s premature death and went on to record further albums for RCA and other labels. (A new one, Princelet Street, is released this month.) If you buy no other reissue in 2007, buy this.

Barney Hoskyns

The Onion - February 6th 2007

The crate-digging heroes at The Numero Group have taken one of their periodic breaks from compilations to reissue a full album, Catherine Howe's airy 1971 folk-jazz curio What A Beautiful Place. Fans of Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, The 5th Dimension, and Nick Drake should find a lot to like in Howe's gentle, windswept ballads, though deeply personal lost-love songs like "Nothing More Than Strangers," "Words Through A Locked Door," and "It's Not Likely" have their own kind of bruised integrity. These pretty, solemn songs couch hard truths in soft clothes… A-

Time Out New York - February 15th 2007

What a lovely, diverting album. Catherine Howe, an actor, singer, pianist and songwriter from northern England, was just 19 in 1970, when What a Beautiful Place was recorded. The frenetic way the sessions came to pass belies the sweeping drama and dreaminess of the music: The unknown Howe had trudged around London in 1968, songs in tow, looking for a label deal. Thwarted, she eventually gave up, but sheets of music she’d left at CBS Records fell into the hands of an independent-label owner who sometimes partnered with the bigger company. He lined up session players, including the London Symphony, and an American producer, Bobby Scott (who’d composed the Hollies’ “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”), but located Howe only three days before they were due in the studio; she’d been hanging out in a seaside town, oblivious to the cogs being turned on her behalf.

Despite the harried process, a ghostly, watercolor calm suffuses the album. Howe’s serenely yearning vocals glide through perfectly bittersweet arrangements of piano, strings and percussion, conjuring that odd nostalgia for a time and place few of us would know. The album should have made her a star; instead, the label, Reflection, went under just as it was released. (She recently returned to music after years away.) The archetypal nature of the record’s provenance and failure notwithstanding, these songs (augmented by an equally moving later demo) are simply too good to file away as just another nice reissue.