Skip to main content

Ethel Ennis

In an era rich with exquisite voices, Ethel Ennis' was one of the finest. Praised by Sinatra as 'my kind of singer', and congratulated on the release of her debut album by fellow-Baltimorean Billie Holliday, she could have been a major star. Her recording career was, however, sporadic, and, after a stint touring Europe with Benny Goodman, she apparently took a dislike to life on the road, seldom performing outside her home city thereafter. This self-titled LP is a budget re-issue of her 1955 debut album Lullabies for Losers with the track-listing re-ordered, and with one song ('Love For Sale') omitted.

The songs on Lullabies for Losers were recorded in a single session with a four-piece band - uncredited here, but listed elsewhere as Hank Jones (piano), Eddie Briggs (guitar), Abie Baker (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums). Despite the re-jigged running order, with the tracks all sharing a common nocturnal mood and the same air of necessary spontaneity, the re-issue still works very well as an album.

By rights, the wistful 'Lullaby for Losers' (the song) ought to have become a well-worn standard, but Ennis' version of it is still the only one I've heard. Other highlights for me are the limpid 'Dreamer-Dreamer'; 'Casually' and 'You'd Better Go Now'. It's a very lovely set of torch songs and ballads, ideal for late-night listening.

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

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

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more