Skip to main content

Sassy Sings

Sassy Sings is a 1966 compilation LP collecting tracks by the great Sarah Vaughan recorded in 1946 and '47. Given those dates, it's not surprising that the sound quality isn't the best. 'September Song', which in all likelihood would have sounded exquisite to those lucky few present at the time, presents those of us in posterity with a need to make allowances for something that sounds like it was taped in a subway tunnel. The closing track - 'The One I Love (Belongs To Somebody Else)' - gives one the impression that the microphones were in a room across the hall from the one where the musicians were playing. The recording quality of some of the other tracks isn't so bad, but the fidelity is never high. Moreover, my copy of the record is hardly in pristine condition, and the pops & crackles from it don't help matters.

Despite all that, some of the tremendous amount of light & warmth in these performances does still frequently shine through. Vaughan's voice is of course a marvel - at this point, her use of vibrato seems less marked than it would become (I sometimes find it an obtrusive aspect of her later recordings). She's accompanied by bands big & small, with Kenny Clarke and Bud Powell among the few names I recognised from the credited musicians. 

This album was my introduction to the song 'You're Blasé', which has since become a great favourite - though I've latterly come to prefer Shirley Horn's rendition of it. 'Tenderly' is very lovely, and 'If You Could See Me Now', composed for Vaughan by Tadd Dameron, might be the one of all her songs I love most. The version of 'Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child' included here is the odd-one-out on the record, with Vaughan deploying only the upper reaches of her range in it, to striking, almost operatic effect.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more