Billie Holiday: Solitude Songs By Billie Holiday (Number One Essentials LP 291009)
The ever-alert Norman Granz took over Billie’s (faltering) career in the 1940s, and featured her extensively in his early JATP concerts. This studio recording from 1952 (her first for Granz) set the pattern for her subsequent studio and “live” sessions for Verve. Solitude placed her in the familiar and largely congenial company of Charlie Shavers, Flip Phillips, Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel and Ray Brown. She sings (or recites) the lyrics of such Great American Songbook classics as You Go To My Head, These Foolish Things and Love For Sale. The real disappointments are Shavers’ piercing and utterly inappropriate solos on East Of The Sun and Blue Moon. But on the aptly titled Solitude he is relatively restrained. On her version of Foolish Things – echoing her 1936 recording with Johnny Hodges and Teddy Wilson – Billie receives the empathetic support of Oscar Peterson, while Love For Sale is a Holiday/Peterson duet. Welcome “bonus tracks” include appearances by Harry Edison, Ben Webster, Jimmy Rowles and Vic Dickenson.
To give credit where it’s overdue, Granz signed up Billie when her reputation was on a downward spiral. She appreciated his generosity and said “Norman will keep the studio open as long as I think I can make it. He’ll cut anything. That’s why I like working for the cat.” Surrounding her with veterans of her earlier studio recordings, Granz always let Billie choose the materials. He remembered: “There was never a doubt that I couldn’t come up with the best accompaniment.” On Solitude, he almost did.
Sarah Vaughan: Out Of This World (Supper Club LP 049)
Supper Club continues to release its well-chosen anthologies of female jazz singers of the 1950s and 1960s. This sampling of Sarah Vaughan’s mid-career recordings complements Retrospective’s Sarah Vaughan: Her 50 Finest, 1944-1962 which I reviewed in August. Rather sparse on detail, this LP features Sassy with Roland Hanna (p), Richard Davis (b) and Percy Brice (d), recorded in Los Angeles in 1961, part of a series of public-service radio broadcasts called The Navy Swings, with two earlier tracks – Alone and Sometimes I’m Happy – recorded “live” in Chicago in 1957 with Davis (b), Jimmy Jones (p) and Roy Haynes (d). The album title is tailor-made for her operatic range and unique intonation. It was covered by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Diana Krall – but this rendition is non pareil. Day In, Day Out, Serenata and All Of Me also have Sassy at her incomparable best – believe you me.
Dinah Washington Queen Of The Blues: 1943-1962 (Retrospective CD RTS4420)
Born Ruth Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Dinah Washington (1924-1963), continues to defy classification in that she was (and remains) a consummate blues interpreter, an R&B diva, a jazz vocalist and a peerless purveyor of popular standards, many of which she could have patented. Yet as Will Friedwald writes, Dinah failed to reap commercial success until she “broke out” of the black market into white songs, “accompanied, though not sung in an overly white way”. Gary Giddins has added the astute comment that “No singer ever approached a song with a greater reserve of pluck. Even in dire circumstances, her powerful wit, shining from deep inside, mitigates the obstacles.” He also affirms that if Dinah was the Queen of the Blues (a title she relished) she was also “a product of the [black] church”.
These comments are justified by most of the 52 tracks on this “centenary tribute” – a selection of her landmark recordings at various points in a long career. Digby Fairweather offers a concise and cogent summary of her first recordings with Lionel Hampton in the early 40s up to a 1992 studio date – Mad About The Boy – with Quincy Jones (that was used for a Levi jeans advert). Three of her recordings included here – What A Diff’rence A Day Made, Teach Me Tonight and Unforgettable – were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Every (?) listener will have their favourite track. Mine (at the moment) are Salty Papa Blues, I Can’t Get Started, September In The Rain and Mad About The Boy. Unfortunately, her more jazz-inflected albums – the Swingin’ Miss D (1955), and (best of all) the “live” Dinah Jams (1954) with Clifford Brown, Maynard Ferguson, Clark Terry, Harold Land, Junior Mance and Max Roach – are not on this menu. To conclude, Fairweather offers a quote from Whoopi Goldberg, as a soul-singing nun in the movie Sister Act 2 (30 years after Dinah’s death): “Whatever is in you, you sing” – a suitable epitaph for a gifted, productive and long-reigning queen.
Jimmy Smith: The Complete Sermon Sessions (Essential Jazz Classics Master Sessions 2614)
Wild Bill Davis, Milt Buckner and (to a lesser extent) Fats Waller and Count Basie first brought the organ into jazz. But Jimmy Smith (1925-2005) and his Hammond organ made it an instrument to be reckoned with. These two seminal LP sessions, now re-released in remastered sound on CD, are properly regarded as early highlights in his subsequently massive and impressive discography. Smith was initially “discovered” by Alfred Lion, who immediately signed him for the Blue Note jazz label. In these 1957/1958 recordings, he fronted a group of up-and-coming young instrumentalists including trombonist Curtis Fuller, trumpeter Lee Morgan, saxes George Coleman, Tina Brooks and Lou Donaldson, plus guitarist Kenny Burrell and drummer Art Blakey – and proved himself worthy of their company as both an imaginative and sensitive accompanist and inventive soloist.
In his original liner notes for an earlier release of The Sermon, Ira Gitler observed: “Whether he is playing his furiously swinging single line solos or backing the other soloists, Smith is always contributing to the underlying spirit of the entire session. The Sermon is one you can listen to on a Sabbath or any and all of the other six days.” It is also the longest (20.15) and certainly the best track on the album. But other delights abound, including altoist Donaldson’s solos on Au Privave and Flamingo, and Brooks’ contributions on Confirmation. Burrell, present on eight tracks, shines on his own composition Blues After All. Not least, Art Blakey, in subdued mode along with Morgan and Burrell gently propels Flamingo. ’Nuff said: these were (and remain) key performances.
