Waiter, another round
Boxodreams | district of columbia | 10/28/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"If the English label believes there is a market here for this and the work of other jazz artists from our own illustrious and fading past, I am here to address those potential listeners. This is a smoking Carmen McCrae live session, miked hot, which creates an incredibly vivid immediacy but, as perfect sound forever fussbudgets might complain, at rare moments bleeds into distortion. Classic songbook stuff dug into by a clearly engaged McCrae, who reveals deep art in putting across the songs rather than a show, while backed by an apparently well-oiled trio, and I don't mean in a drinking sense, that I don't recognize but clearly commands the music with confidence. It's hard to sense if the atmosphere was electric, but it certainly appears involved. I first heard this disc played in-store while shopping at the terrific and venerable Melody Records in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, and I went right to the counter and told them to ring it up. It's that kind of good, particularly "Body and Soul" and "Lover Man (Where Can You Be)." McCrae intimately knows the emotional cores of these songs and reminds you why they were so arresting in the first place. In short, a master class."
A Welcome Carmen Discovery
Samuel Chell | Kenosha,, WI United States | 11/16/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This is, to my ears, Carmen's best period--she's not the Decca glamour queen smothered in strings as was the case on several of the 1950s Decca sessions, and she still maintains a lovely upper register and perfectly controlled vibrato (the loss of which she would effectively compensate for with her knowing and ironic interpretations beginning in the '70s--with the exception of a few regrettable recordings relying excessively on songs of the day that have become period pieces). This joins the recently reissued import, "Live at Sugar Hill," as one of my 3-4 favorite McCrae albums. Some of the tunes are staples that she practically insisted on doing every night ("Thou Swell," "A Foggy Day," "Body and Soul," "Star Dust"), but others are songs not replicated on other recordings by her. As usual, she remains the hippest and most dramatic of the divas of her era, including Ella and Sarah. Her line of descent stems more directly from Billie Holiday than does that of the aforementioned pair. In fact, she's sort of a Lady Day with a "sharpened edge."
Carmen, unknown to many, was accompanying herself in Harlem piano bars in the '40s, so she's in some respects a late-discovery. But she hit the ground running, aware of the sounds of bebop from the beginning and, besides being a soul-stirring singer, always respected as a first-rate "musician." Leave it to her to select some of the very best players available to serve as her rhythm section (in fact, Don Abney had recently completed an extended tour with Ella Fitzgerald, serving as her accompanist on recordings made at Newport and Carnegie Hall).
For collectors, this program will no doubt sound familiar yet be hard to pass up (the price looks nicer than some of the Spanish imports). For newbies, you could do a lot worse than this album to make the acquaintance of arguably one of the top 4-5 female jazz singers of the 20th century."
Track Listings (11) - Disc #1