Welcome to Sunday and welcome to the absolutely sublime sounds of Margo Guryan. ‘Take a Picture’ is a breezy pop dreamboat and it all starts with ‘Sunday Mornin’’. Guys, we do think about this stuff…

A few weeks ago, Numero released Words and Music, a career appraisal (including unreleased recordings) of the much revered but bizarrely uncelebrated American songwriter Margo Guryan. Compiled by Numero alongside legendary record collector Geoffrey Weiss, A&R man Douglas Mcgowan and Guryan’s stepson Jonathan Rosner, the 3LP box also includes absolutely brilliant liner notes from music critic Jenn Pelly, covering a quite fascinating life in music.

They are such an engaging and highly recommended read, but we’ll paraphrase the early years into a Sunday nutshell for you…

Margo Guryan was a jazzer. She studied with piano legend Jaki Byard in Boston, led a trio that were offered a recording contract from George Wein’s Storyville label (also the founder of the famed Newport Jazz Festival) before signing to Atlantic as a songwriter at just 19 years old. She earned a scholarship to The Lenox School of Jazz - run by progressive jazz pioneers John Lewis and Gunther Schuller - with peers to include Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. As one of only two female Lenox students, she prevailed over unprecedented sexism to win the respect of revered instructors like Max Roach and Bill Evans. All of this before a fateful encounter with The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ on the wireless would change her dial to pop.

She was honestly quite miraculous.

Aside from the ingenious writing and production, Take A Picture is defined by its light and breezy flow, and Guryan’s fragile and beautiful voice. A double-tracked hum of sweet and soft angelica, with wry lyrics and such pop-smartness. Album opener ‘Sunday Mornin’’ (perhaps her most celebrated song, albeit via cover versions from sunshine pop act Spanky And Our Gang, Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell no less) has the most languorous Sunday energy; it can ease any Saturday night into the warm glow of a Sunday morning. Gentle flashes of psychedelia, saccharine pop payoffs and the first introduction to that voice. On the album’s penultimate track ‘Someone I know’, the warm organ hues wrap around Guryan’s whispers as the motif from Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ slowly comes into focus. It is so joyous (even better than the fantastic 1971 single by Apollo 100 if you ask us…) and it’s only when you really listen that you notice how wild the drumming is, a proper jazz workout. Those drums continue into the genuinely psychedelic album closer ‘Love’, a groover that could have soundtracked anything from grubby Hollywood exploitation through to the great Russ Meyer. She makes complicated sound so easy; this is composition of the very highest order.
Newly restored by Jessica Thompson from the original two-track safety masters, this beguilingly melodic 1968 pop tour-de-force has never sounded better. It’s been said before, but Take a Picture is a baroque masterpiece and is right up there with any and all of the melancholic pop sweetness that inspired it.

A proper joy. Please do enjoy your Sunday.