Art Garfunkel still walking the walk

Art Garfunkel loves to walk. His own two feet have carried him (albeit in 40 trips) across the entire United States, from his apartment in Manhattan to the mouth of the Columbia River at the lip of the blue Pacific in Washington state.

But these days, Garfunkel is sticking indoors, taking the stage to croon songs from his latest album, "Some Enchanted Evening." It showcases Garfunkel's softly sublime countertenor, which appeared to fly in on heavenly wings in the 1960s as half of Simon and Garfunkel.

From their appearance on the soundtrack of "The Graduate" in 1967, the boys from New York went on to record such classics as "The Boxer," "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water," each of which relied heavily on Garfunkel's rare gift.

So at 66, how does he feel about his voice?

"It's a very intimate question," he says. "Nothing could be more intimate. It is my first friend, my singing voice. I noticed that I could sing in tune at 4 or 5, and it became my friend. And it was attached to my notion of God. Where did this come from? Given by who?"

He decided "there must be a larger force, and I have been -- I don't want to say the word chosen -- but if this isn't a sweet gift, I don't know what it is. I felt incumbent at age 4 or 5 to use it, to enjoy it, to steal away in private and develop it."

He grew up in a Queens, N.Y., family of "modestly serious Jews, and from the Jewish background, I got to love those minor-key songs. I got to love the big wooden room, the synagogue room, where the reverberation is lovely. Because it's wood and it's got a high ceiling. Privacy and reverb are a winning combination."

His advice to a kid who discovers in his or her own throat a similar gift?

"Find a stairwell and make sure no one's listening," he says. "And then just go to town with your ego. Get loose."

gentle covers

Some of what he sang in those early years appears on the new record. "Some Enchanted Evening" offers gentle covers of romantic classics from the 1920s to the 1960s, including Ira and George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me," Lerner and Lowe's "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" and Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do."

The new record is one of a dozen solo releases by Garfunkel, whose first was "Angel Clare" in 1973. He and Richard Perry, "my producer of Beatles fame," as the singer calls him, "with whom I made 'Breakaway' in the 1970s," are happy to have merged talents again on "Some Enchanted Evening."

While recording "I Only Have Eyes for You" for "Breakaway," the two made a discovery, which Garfunkel calls "a little production formula."

"We took an oldie that was elegant, slow dancing, and we grooved it in a rock 'n' roll modern idiom," he says. "We had the electric piano being very Zen. Pools of glass and very liquidy. We had the drummer being very modern, real fat drum sound in an unapologetic back beat.

But despite his interest in such material, cabaret has never appealed. "I'm a rock 'n' roll child," he says.