(FORTUNE Magazine) – I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty certain that Dave Frishberg is the only composer/lyricist who has ever found a rhyme for the phrase "counterfeit debentures." He tucked this nugget into his classic "My Attorney Bernie," and it's nearly as nice as some of the lyric riffs he's spun elsewhere on fax machines, Sammy Davis Jr., or the L.A. Dodgers.

As a comic ironist, Frishberg is matchless; the bonus is that he happens to play tons and tons of piano too, deploying a musical talent as capacious as his wit. And when he's serious...well, I once heard him sing his exquisite "Dear Departed Past" in a New York club, and thin, reedy voice and all, the man actually made my eyes well up.

You're likely to be secure from such public embarrassment if you listen to Frishberg at home, on disks like Can't Take You Nowhere (Fantasy), Classics (Concord), or--for Frishberg at his pianistic best--By Himself (Arbors).

--Daniel Okrent