Skip to main content

Blossom Dearie

I don't know why I should have been so surprised that a Mr. & Mrs. Dearie named their daughter Blossom, and that no, it wasn't a nickname or stage-name, but I was. What we have here is a 1996 compilation, no. 51 in a series of Verve Jazz Masters releases, which brings together a selection of material recorded between 1956-60 and previously dispersed over half a dozen LPs. I found it in my local charity shop in a boxful of light jazz and easy listening CDs, all with a yellowish nicotine patina and a faint residual aroma of tobacco smoke.


Dearie's is a disarmingly small and girlish-sounding voice, but she makes of it a versatile instrument despite its limited power. An accomplished pianist, she accompanies herself on all but one of the tracks included here, joined by musicians such as Kenny Burrell, Ray Brown and Jo Jones. What stands out most are her thoughtful and effective arrangements, notably taking old chestnuts like 'Tea for Two' and 'Surrey With the Fringe on Top' and slowing them right down to a leisurely amble, meanwhile coaxing fresh life from their well-worn lyrics. Miles Davis was reportedly an admirer of her way with an unhurried tempo.

Conversely, she takes 'Down With Love', often sung slowly, at a very brisk pace, dispatching the whole thing in ninety-seven delightful seconds. Other highlights, for me, include the opener - 'They Say It's Sping' - and 'Bang Goes the Drum', both of which beautifully encapsulate the giddy feeling of falling in love.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...
Post a Comment
Read more