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.

Comments

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...

In Heat

Having acquired the soubriquet "the walrus of love", Barry White thereafter became something of a figure of fun, something that misled me (and presumably others) into disregarding his music. Only within the last few years have I begun to pay it more attention. After picking up a copy of his '74 album Can't Get Enough last summer, which I loved, I sought out some of the music by his protegés Love Unlimited. From a Discogs seller I ordered well-used copies of Under the Influence of... ('73) and In Heat ('74) for only £6.25. The only unappealing thing about In Heat is its awful title. The songs and the singing are strong; the arrangements rich & warmly enveloping. As one would expect from White, the thematic focus is firmly fixed on amatory matters. The opening number 'Move Me No Mountain' (the only one on the record not written by White) offers a refreshing rebuttal to the kind of lyrical hyperbole in songs like 'Ain't No Mountain High E...

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...