Donny Hathaway

Written with Leroy Hutson, his first single paints the neighborhood where he grew up in rhythm rather than words. The arranging instincts he honed in his Chicago session days come through intact.

• A bass riff repeating the same figure in the low register and an electric piano form the backbone of the track, while percussion such as congas rolls on above them without pause.
• The playing runs far longer than the singing. The voice recedes to short shouts and the refrain, and the rest is filled by keyboard improvisation and repeating rhythm.
• The pattern never changes, yet it never grows dull, because instruments enter and drop out one by one to adjust the density. This is where the arranger's hand shows most clearly.
• The version on 1972's “Live” stretches to nearly 12 minutes, and the audience joins the rhythm with clapping and shouts until the hall sounds like a single percussion instrument.

A Christmas song written with Nadine McKinnor, it passed quietly at first, but over the years it became his most widely sung song.

• In the opening, the brass (the horn section) throws open the giddy holiday mood at once with a short fanfare.
• The rhythm is closer to soul than to a carol. Drums that strike the second·fourth beats hard (the backbeat) and a thick, moving bass make it a Christmas song you can dance to.
• The voice never hurries, leaning slightly behind the beat, and that ease sounds like a warm room on a winter night.
• At the end, repeating the same phrase, he piles up improvised lines (ad-libs), lifting the mood like a church's closing hymn.

He placed Leon Russell's song at the head of his second album and made it entirely his own. It is the recording that best shows him as an interpreter.

• Before the singing begins, a solo piano passage runs on at some length. Jazzy chords mingle with classical ornaments, and the Howard-trained player shows his face first.
• He slowed the tempo from the original and made the harmony more complex. That is why the same melody sounds like a far deeper confession.
• The first line begins so low and quiet you can hear his breath, and as the song goes on the voice climbs into the high register and breaks out raw.
• At the climax comes a singing technique that winds a single syllable through many notes (melisma), used not for display but to carry the weight of feeling.
• Strings support him very carefully from behind, so the intimacy, as if only piano and voice were in the room, is never broken.

A duet with Roberta Flack, whom he had known since Howard, it reached No. 5 on the Hot 100 and won a Grammy. It was the song in which their two voices first met at the height of popular success.

• The two trade lines back and forth before merging into one on the chorus. It is worth following the moment the conversation turns into a duet.
• Flack's clear, restrained voice and Hathaway's warm, slightly rough one form a contrast, yet their timbres never push each other away.
• Light Latin-style percussion and soft strings run underneath, so although it is a song asking the questions of a parting, it never sinks into heaviness.
• A short track, just under 3 minutes. An arrangement that ends without a wasted note leaves, if anything, a longer afterglow.

The opening track of the album 「Live」, in which he reworked Marvin Gaye's socially conscious soul through his own keyboards and voice.

• In place of the original's saxophone, it opens on the chords of an electric piano. From the very start, the same song comes through in a different color.
• The keyboard improvisation that unfolds midway blends the idioms of jazz and gospel, showing that he was as much a player as a singer.
• The rhythm section holds the tempo firmly while rolling a short repeated figure (a riff), so the long improvisation never comes apart.
• The audience's applause and cheers are recorded as though they were part of the song. On the same album, Willie Weeks's bass solo in 「Voices Inside」 is also worth a listen.

A song from the period when his illness was deepening; a friend is said to have written the lyrics with his suffering in mind. Personal consolation and communal hope overlap in a single song.

• It begins with calm piano, like a church accompaniment, at a slow tempo, and moves forward one unhurried step at a time.
• He wrote the strings and brass himself; they start out far away and draw closer as the song goes on, swelling it.
• The voice moves from a soft midrange early on to a high, cracking sound toward the end. That crack sounds less like technique than like sincerity.
• The lyrics speak in a soothing tone, and the song's power lies in a two-layered address that can be heard as spoken to one person or to an entire community.

The song that reunited him with Flack after a long silence and reached No. 2 on the Hot 100, the highest chart position of his career. It was the last great success he enjoyed in his lifetime.

• Soft synthesizer and electric piano spread out wide, while a slow-tempo bass quietly supports them from below. It is the smooth ballad sound of the late 1970s.
• Flack sings first, Hathaway follows, and then the two voices merge in harmony. The song's theme of closing the distance between two people is built into its very texture.
• His voice sounds noticeably more subdued and gentler than around his debut. The passages he sings with a relaxed touch carry, if anything, more weight.
• At the song's end, the two trade improvised lines (ad-libs) and slowly fade away.