When singer/guitarist Frank D'Rone passed away in 2013 at age 81, his obituary in the Chicago Tribune noted that on the day that he gave his last concert, he "didn't know whether he should go to the emergency room or the concert hall." Such was indeed D'Rone's devotion to music. Born in Massachusetts in 1932 but raised in Rhode Island, D'Rone developed an early interest in the guitar, and by the 1950s, he was making a name for himself in jazz clubs around Chicago, both as a singer and as a guitarist. Nat King Cole was particularly impressed by D'Rone's musicianship, to such an extent that he took the younger singer under his wing and helped him get a record contract with Mercury.
Frank D'Rone |
Another singer who was known for novelties and pop adaptations of country material is Frankie Laine. But his album Jazz Spectacular (Columbia, 1956), which pairs him up with trumpeter Buck Clayton and an orchestra featuring, once again, Johnson and Winding, along with Urbie Green, Dickie Wells, Sir Charles Thompson, and Jo Jones, shows that jazz was clearly Laine's first love. Many of Laine's Mercury recordings, as well as his late-forties series of Standard transcriptions, already have a jazzy feel to them, but it is particularly this mid-fifties Columbia LP that best illustrates his abilities as a jazz singer. Loosely structured as a sort of jam session, with plenty of room for hot and cool solos from the musicians in the band, the album often reminds us of Billie Holiday's 1930s sessions with the likes of Teddy Wilson and Lester Young, because Laine's vocals are usually brief and underscore the fact that he should be seen merely as another soloist in the combo. In fact, Buck and the guys do "My Old Flame" as an instrumental, without the participation of Laine, who felt that this "was more of a girl's song." If the album lives up to its title, it is both because of the fantastic contributions from all these great jazzmen and because of Laine's sprightly vocals, which prove that he is perfectly at ease in this small-group context. Though there is not a single forgettable song here, high points of the set are "You Can Depend on Me," "That Old Feeling," "Stars Fell on Alabama," and "Baby, Baby All the Time." The 1999 Columbia/Legacy reissue is splendid and includes new liner notes, photos, personnel information, and a bonus track from the sessions—an instrumental version of Cole Porter's "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home to." As in Patti Page's case, it is really a pity that Frankie Laine did not make more records in this mold.
Like Frank D'Rone, Midwesterner Lucy Reed did not record extensively and never became a household name, which is unfortunate judging by the quality of the recordings she did make. Born in Wisconsin in 1921, Reed sang briefly with orchestras led by Woody Herman and Charlie Ventura in the early stages of her career, and the 1950s found her in Chicago, where she began to make the rounds of the clubs. She cut two albums for Fantasy in 1957, both of them excellent and fortunately available on CD at the time of this writing. Recorded between New York and Chicago in January of that year, This Is Lucy Reed, with its strangely somber cover, is the second of these and showcases her beautiful voice, at times powerful and at times delicate, in a small-group setting. The New York sessions have a collective personnel that features Gil Evans on piano, George Russell on drums, Art Farmer on trumpet, Milt Hinton on bass, and Barry Galbraith on guitar. Some of the arrangements include a flute, a bassoon, a tenor violin, and an English horn, which add warmth and intimacy to ballads such as "There He Goes" and "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning." At the session held in Chicago, Reed is backed by a quintet led by pianist Eddie Higgins, and the repertoire is split between extremely slow ballads ("You Don't Know What Love Is," "Easy Come, Easy Go") and more uptempo numbers ("Lucky to Be Me," "St. Louis Blues"). Finally, Reed's moving readings of "Love for Sale" and "No Moon at All" are undoubtedly among the highlights of a remarkable album that should have marked the beginning of a long, successful career for a vocalist that, in the words of critic Nat Hentoff, was "a fine-grained, intelligent, and sensitive (without a capital S) singer."
Pianist Gil Evans provided some sensitive arrangements for Lucy Reed's second album |
2 comments:
Regarding Patti Page and Tennessee Waltz, it's worth mentioning, and I wish someone with the skill to do so would comment on it from a musical point of view, the haunting Buck Clayton solo. Buck's trumpet work has always been my favorite part of the recording, and without it, the song would just be another Patti Page cut.
Dear Mr. Lownde,
Thanks for your message. I've always loved the trumpet style of the great Buck Clayton, and I own quite a few of his albums. I am familiar with Patti Page's smash hit version of Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart's "Tennessee Waltz," and I agree that the trumpet on that track has a haunting quality that is extremely beautiful. I wasn't aware, however, that it was Clayton playing trumpet on that recording, so I appreciate the information. Now that I know the identity of the man behind that beautiful introducton I like that reading of "Tennessee Waltz" even better!
Anton G.-F.
Post a Comment