Skip to main content

Crazy He Calls Me

After I'd accumulated a couple of dozen excellent LPs by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Nat 'King' Cole and Frank Sinatra, it occurred to me to wonder who else had been signing in similar styles in the '50s and '60s whose names were less well-remembered. I went looking on-line and thereby found my way to singers I ought to have heard of, like Nancy Wilson, and to more obscure performers such as Ethel Ennis and Dakota Staton.

Staton was blessed with a clear & bright voice capable of near-operatic power. She comes across as an ebullient performer. Her diction was excellent, even if, to my taste, she was sometimes prone to over-enunciate and over-act a lyric. I suspect that, given the opportunity, she could have shone in musical theatre. Crazy He Calls Me is one of no fewer than three LPs Capitol Records released under her name in 1959. Unlike the others it's a compilation of newly-recorded tracks and of material pre-dating her '57 breakthrough hit 'The Late Late Show'. Some of the numbers are taken from from her very first recording sessions in '54 and '55.

In that earlier material, her singing is marked by the influence of Ruth Brown and of Ruth Jones (aka Dinah Washington). My favourite track on the album 'Can't Live Without Him Any More' is one of those, a number Staton belts out with infectious relish, very ably backed by Howard Biggs and his band. Her take on 'No Moon At All', on the other hand (one of the tracks newly-recorded for the LP), is a model of cool restraint & exquisite phrasing. Not everything else on it is as good, but the odds-and-ends mixture makes for a pleasingly varied listening experience.

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

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