New Reissues: Gene Austin, Barbara Dane & Earl Hines, Nancy Harrow, Laurindo Almeida & Bud Shank

We discuss today four of the latest CD reissues of which we have had notice. We begin with a recent two-fer that includes two Gene Austin albums from late in his career. Then, there is an outstanding album that the always exciting Barbara Dane cut with Earl Hines in the 1950s and that has been re-released in a Hines 4-CD set, although it was already previously available on a better release. Also, he Spanish label Fresh Sounds has recently put two albums by the vastly underrated vocalist Nancy Harrow together on one CD, and finally, Jasmine Records has made available Laurindo Almeida and Bud Shank's pioneering collaborations from the 1950s on an essential single CD. Let us look at these reissues a little more in depth!

Helped enormously by the introduction of the microphone, sweet-voiced crooner Gene Austin enjoyed spectacular success in the twenties and thirties with his sentimental ballads sung in a rather high-pitched voice, which turned him into a star on records and radio. Born in Gainesville, Texas, in 1900, Austin was steeped in jazz, blues, and cowboy music, and he was also an adept songwriter and later in his life would publish a very interesting autobiography, Gene Austin's Ol' Buddy. Although his recording output is rather meager throughout the forties and fifties, in 1957 NBC broadcast The Gene Austin Story, a TV movie based on his life, and this briefly revived interest in his music. Thus, Austin went into the RCA studios to cut a new album, Restless Heart, made out of both old songs, such as "Memories of You," "Where the Shy Little Violets Grow," and "Sharecroppin' Blues," and new tunes, such as Rodgers and Hart's "I Could Write a Book." The disc also aimed to showcase Austin's songwriting, and many of the tracks are self-penned—"My Restless Heart," "The More I See of Somebody Else," "Take Your Shoes Off Baby," and "There's a New Blue Heaven in the Sky," among others. He also attempts some pseudo-blues ("Wise Guys") and purposefully does not overlook his country side, and the result is a very pleasant album that finds Austin's voice sounding much lower and mellow that on his records from the twenties.

A younger Gene Austin

Austin's recording career was not over with this RCA album, though, and three years later he cut yet another one, this time for Dot Records. Entitled Gene Austin's Great Hits in Stereo, it delivers on its title's promise, offering new readings of twelve of his old classics in stereo with backing from an orchestra conducted by Billy Vaughn. The only song written by Austin here is "Lonesome Road," the focus not being on his songwriting but on his vintage hits, such as "Ramona," "Girl of My Dreams," "How Am I to Know," and of course, his career-defining "My Blue Heaven." The British label Sepia Records has joined these two albums on a single CD that is up to Sepia's usual high standards of sound and packaging, although we would have liked some background information on the recordings rather than just an excerpt from the liner notes of the Dot set. The CD also offers four medleys made in 1954 for RCA that, according to Michael Pitts and Frank Hoffman in the book The Rise of the Crooners, feature Austin himself on piano backed by George Barnes on guitar and Frank Carroll on bass. These include such classics as "She's Funny That Way," "How Come You Do Me Like You Do," "One Sweet Letter from You," and "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi," among others, and find Austin exploring his jazzier side aided by Barnes's stellar guitar playing, and proving that he could also swing when he wanted to. The medleys are definitely the gems of the set, and while this Sepia CD does not replace collections of Austin's twenties and thirties recordings such as Take Two's A Time to Relax, it does work well as a companion release.

When Leonard Feather said that Barbara Dane was "Bessie Smith in stereo," he was not exaggerating in the least; if anything, such an assessment of Dane's artistry sounds rather reductionist, considering that Dane is comfortable singing not only the blues, but also jazz and folk music. Her family roots lay in Arkansas, but Dane was raised in Detroit and by the late forties had moved to San Francisco, where she sang with Turk Murphy and Kid Ory, among many others. Throughout her long career, Dane has performed with some of the greatest names in jazz and blues, including Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim, Lightnin' Hopkins, Jack Teagarden, Art Hodes, and Louis Armstrong, to name but a few. Though all her recordings are worth a listen, the best of them all may well be Livin' with the Blues, the album she cut with Earl Hines in 1959 for Dot Records. It showcases her gift for singing jazz on well-known tunes such as "If I Could Be with You," "Why Don't You Do Right," and "Bye Bye Blackbird," and even attempts ballads like the Jack Teagarden-associated "A Hundred Years from Today" and Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy." But most of all, she offers masterful interpretations of blues-inflected jazz classics such as the title track, "How Long, How Long Blues," and "In the Evenin'," ably supported by an orchestra led by the Fatha. This Dane-Hines collaboration ranks as one of the best vocal jazz albums of the 1950s and has been reissued by the European budget label Real Gone Jazz on a 4-CD set of Seven Classic Albums by Earl Hines that is very recommendable. However, it had already been made available last year on a much better Fresh Sounds release that pairs up Dane's Livin' with the Blues and On My Way, a 1962 effort for Capitol that is a more eclectic mix of folk, blues, and even gospel, but that includes some jazzier tracks such as "Crazy Blues" and "Good Old Wagon," with Kenny Whitson on cornet. Though the rest of the albums by the Fatha on the Real Gone set are also very interesting, the sound and packaging of the Fresh Sounds CD are superior. For more information on Barbara Dane, we refer you to her extremely interesting homepage.

Barely a year after Barbara Dane's collaboration with Earl Hines, Nancy Harrow went into the recording studio at Nat Hentoff's behest to cut an album for Candid Records. She was backed by Buck Clayton's Jazz Stars, a studio group that featured Clayton on trumpet, Dickie Wells on trombone, Tom Gwaltney on clarinet and alto sax, Buddy Tate on tenor sax, Danny Bank on baritone sax, Dick Wellstood on piano, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass, and Oliver Jackson on drums. With such an array of talent, it is no surprise that the band is offered plenty of room to shine, and Harrow is inspired by the company she keeps to offer her best blues-inflected jazz singing with more than a touch of Mildred Bailey. The eight tracks recorded by Harrow and the Clayton group resulted in her debut album, the excellent Wild Women Don't Have the Blues, which appropriately mixes blues numbers such as the title track, "Take Me Back Baby," "I Don't Know What Kind of Blues I've Got," and "Blues for Yesterday" with bluesy ballads ("All Too Soon") and more straight-ahead jazz tunes like "Can't We Be Friends," "On the Sunny Side of the Street," and "I've Got the World on a String." Fresh Sounds Records has recently paired this masterpiece that every jazz aficionado should own with Harrow's second album, cut for Atlantic in 1962, You Never Know. Though quite different from her debut, this is an equally outstanding LP that grows more interesting the more one listens to it. Most of the tracks were thoughtfully arranged by pianist John Lewis, who plays piano on all of them, along with Jim Hall on guitar, Richard Davis on bass, and Connie Kay on drums, with the occasional addition of Phil Woods on alto and a string orchestra. Of course, blues material is still at the heart of the album ("Confessin' the Blues," "Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do") but Lewis's beautifully sparse arangements ensure that the focus is entirely on Harrow's unaffected, expressive voice. Overall, this is yet another of the many outstanding reissues, complete with excellent sound and notes, to which the people at Fresh Sounds have accustomed us—and hopefully they will keep them coming! For more information about Nancy Harrow, it is a good idea to visit her homepage.

The fusion of jazz and bossa nova is usually credited to Stan Getz and João Gilberto's albums from the early 1960s, which introduced these new, exciting Brazilian rhythms to American audiences at large. However, in 1953 and 1954, alto saxophonist Bud Shank and Brazilian guitarist and composer Laurindo Almeida recorded a series of tracks in a quartet setting (with Harry Babasin on bass and Roy Harte on drums) that already foreshadow the innovations that would come in full force some seven years later. Almeida had arrived in Los Angeles from his native Rio de Janeiro in 1947, instantly finding a place within the Stan Kenton orchestra. The results of his collaboration with Shank were released by World Pacific on a ten-inch album entitled Brazilliance—and brazilliant it was indeed, a very appealing mixture of Brazilian folk rhythms and jazz improvisation, mostly on original tunes by Almeida and other Brazilian composers, but also on Latin American songs such as "Acércate Más" and standards, as in the case of "Speak Low" and "Stairway to the Stars." Shank himself does not consider these recordings as strictly bossa nova, yet what Getz, Gilberto, and others would develop in the sixties is somehow already present here, albeit in embryonic form. This music is not important merely for historical reasons; rather, it is the very enjoyable product of a group of musicians mixing all sorts of influences in a search for an innovative sound, and the occasional doubts and insecurities only add to the undeniable charm of what the rolling tape captured at these sessions.

Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida

Some years later, in 1958 and 1959, Almeida and Shank got together again to cut a few more tracks, accompanied this time by Gary Peacock on bass and Chuck Flores on percussion, which were subsequently released by World Pacific as Holiday in Brazil or Brazilliance, vol. 2. The concept for these sessions was not substantially different from those held in 1953-54, though the group concentrates more on Almeida and Shank compositions, and the latter's solos (on alto and flute) are noticeably longer and jazzier. "Little Girl Blue" and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" provide the more familiar tracks on here, but the true gems are originals such as "Nocturno," "Mood Antigua," and "Lonely." Jasmine Records has reissued both volumes of Brazilliance on a single CD, and though the sound is fantastic, there is almost no background information on the recordings, and the booklet only includes a brief adaptation of the original liner notes, which is not very comprehensive. The same material is also available on a single disc on the Poll Winners label released in 2012 with considerably more attractive packaging. Back in 2008, Bud Shank spoke to jazz writer Marc Myers about these groundbreaking, evocative recordings and the close relationship between jazz and bossa nova in a fascinating three-part interview that was published in Myers's JazzWax website. For anyone interested, here are the links to Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

Unsung Vocalists of the Past 1: Seger Ellis

We begin a new series of articles, spotlighting singers whose popularity has faded over the years and who, for different reasons, have unjustly fallen into obscurity. With the help of a very interesting CD released by The Old Masters and entitled Jazz in a Sentimental Mood, the first entry in the series is devoted to the lesser-known but great Houston-born vocalist/songwriter/pianist Seger Ellis.

At the outset of his career, Seger Ellis did not really want to be a singer. Rather, his main interest lay in writing songs and playing the piano, and it was indeed as a pianist with the now forgotten Lloyd Finlay Orchestra that he made his first recordings in 1925 in his native Houston for Victor. In addition to the sides he cut as part of the Finlay band, Ellis was asked to make some piano solo recordings, which were never issued due to technical difficulties during the recording process. However, Ellis would soon be summoned to Camden, New Jersey, by the label to wax his piano solos again, this time using the then newly introduced electrical recording method, and upon their release, these records were sufficiently well received by the public to persuade Ellis to launch a professional career as a recording artist in New York City. Incidentally, these early piano solos, most of which were written by Ellis himself, can be found in the excellent CD Black and White Piano, Volume 1 (Document Records, 1998), a highly recommendable collection that also includes cuts by Clarence M. James, Sidney Williams, and Lovin' Sam Theard, among other obscure 1920s pianists.

It should be noted that Ellis' intention at this stage was still to sell himself as a pianist, not as a singer. This would soon change, though, when he was encouraged by the small radio station on which he was appearing to sing as well as playing piano over the air. Thus, after his move to New York, when he made his first recordings for Columbia, the company decided to promote him as a crooner, marketing his records to rival those of Gene Austin, who was one of the foremost vocalists of the late 1920s, with smash hits such as "My Blue Heaven," "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling," and "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue." Columbia's marketing efforts most likely explain why Ellis' voice sounds so high-pitched on his Columbia and Okeh records: this was a conscious attempt to make Ellis sound like other popular crooners of the era, such as Austin, Nick Lucas, Johnny Marvin, and Little Jack Little. In his excellent liner notes for the CD Jazz in a Sentimental Mood, Allan Dodge hints at the fact that Ellis was not thrilled by the sound of his voice on these sides, but he kept cultivating that style in view of the success of the records.

One of the attractions of Ellis' recorded output for Columbia and Okeh lies in the amazing personnel that accompanied him on most of the sessions, featuring some of New York's most prominent jazz musicians of the time. It appears that Ellis was granted the power to choose the members of the studio band for his recordings, and if that is the case, he certainly had a keen ear for good jazz, since he was often backed by highly accomplished musicians like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, Rube Bloom, Manny Klein, Hoagy Carmichael, and Muggsy Spanier, many of whom would go on to greater things during the Swing Era and beyond. Ellis himself played piano on some of the dates, and Eddie Lang's guitar is heavily featured on most of these very inspired arrangements, which are often quite adventurous, as in the case of Ellis' 1928 version of "Where the Shy Little Violets Grow," with an interesting steel guitar solo by Andy Sannella. In August of 1929, Ellis' studio band even included Louis Armstrong, who was then making his legendary series of hot five and seven recordings, on trumpet, and their reading of "Ain't Misbehavin'" remains one of Ellis' most enduring recordings.

At the time of this writing, there is only one full-length CD devoted to the music of Seger Ellis: Jazz in a Sentimental Mood, produced by the reissue label The Old Masters. Its title accurately encapsulates the defining elements of Ellis' style: his recordings are often sentimental, characterized by his high-pitched voice and relaxed singing style, but there is an undeniable hotness to them, and they are full of jazzy solos by some of the most important jazz instrumentalists of the period. In my opinion, the jazzy quality of the arrangements is precisely what differentiates Ellis' recordings from those of Gene Austin, whose accompaniments were not always comparatively as jazz-oriented. Ellis' repertoire consists of some of the best pop songs written in the 1920s and '30s, and all of them are so enjoyable that it becomes rather hard to name any favorites. The collection includes sides cut over a four-year period, between 1928 and 1931, featuring gems such as "If I Can't Have You, " "Cheerful Little Earful," "I Wonder How It Feels?" and Ellis' beautiful, pensive version of "It's a Lonesome Old Town." The remastering of these old 78s is excellent, and so are Allan Dodge's informative liner notes, which provide some interesting background for the recordings.

Ellis' recording career came to an end during the early years of the Great Depression, although he did assemble a big band in the late 1930s, bearing the odd name of the Choir of Brass Orchestra and featuring his wife, Irene Taylor, as the vocalist. Interestingly, though he did not record his own songs for Columbia and Okeh, he remained active as a songwriter, composing popular songs like "Little Jack Frost Get Lost" and "You're All I Want for Christmas." He passed away in relative obscurity in Houston in 1995, but as the twenty-six songs included in Jazz in a Sentimental Mood clearly show, his very appealing, jazz-influenced singing deserves higher recognition that it has received.

Videos

There are several videos with Seger Ellis recordings available on YouTube, among which we recommend the piano solo "Shivery Stomp," "Here Am I (Broken Hearted)" (a tune also recorded by Johnnie Ray in the 1950s), "Should I?" and "Without You Sweetheart." There is even an interesting, though undated, radio interview with Seger Ellis and Smith Ballew recorded late in their careers.

Hot, Lovable, and Sweet: Annette Hanshaw and Early Female Vocal Jazz

Annette Hanshaw was one of the very first female jazz vocalists, as well as one of the most exciting singers of the 1920s and early 30s. Critic Will Friedwald, who has written extensively (and most insightfully) on jazz singing, ranks her alongside Al Bowlly as one of the few artists that “used the musical idiom of the twenties in a creative, modern way” (1). Although I believe that there were more singers other than these two that also experimented with more modern approaches to the vocal art in that era, Friedwald is certainly right concerning Hanshaw: she was well ahead of her time in that she understood the rhythmic qualities of jazz much better than most of her contemporaries and applied them to her singing in a very personal, highly inventive way. From today’s standpoint, there is no doubt that her records sound more modern and engaging than those of Helen Kane or Ruth Etting.

Born into a wealthy family in 1901 (although for many years the date was believed to be 1910), Hanshaw got her start performing at her father’s hotels. On a certain night in 1926, producer Herman “Wally” Rose (whom she would later marry) happened to be among the audience and was quick to realize her potential, subsequently signing her to a contract with Pathé. These were the years of the recording boom, when large amounts of records were produced and sold worldwide, and so Hanshaw recorded extensively, soon becoming one of the most popular artists on the label and gaining more public exposure through a series of radio spots. It did not take her long to graduate to one of the major labels, Columbia, who also put out the records of Ruth Etting, at the time one of the most popular singing stars in the country. Columbia issued Hanshaw’s efforts on subsidiary budget labels in order to prevent any kind of conflict between the two singers, but this did not affect her record sales, and even in the years following the 1929 stock market crash, Hanshaw still proved to be extremely popular with record buyers.


But despite the success of her records, Hanshaw apparently dreaded public appearances and did not exploit her image as the quintessential 1920s flapper in movies. After her marriage to Rose in 1934, she decided to put an end to her very popular radio show and stopped recording altogether around 1938. Hanshaw would live to see her records reissued in the 1970s, when she was certainly surprised to find out that there was a kind of renewed interest in her recorded output. Unfortunately, unlike other stars from the twenties such as Nick Lucas, she never really attempted to make a comeback. Her husband had passed away in 1954, and in 1975 she remarried; nobody seems to have advised her that it would have been a good idea to get back into the recording studio, and if anyone did, she did not listen. Hanshaw died in New York in 1985, leaving behind a very valuable legacy of recorded music that is highly interesting to both pop and jazz aficionados.

Her complete recordings are yet to be reissued in their entirety (a project that, like the release of Cliff Edwards’s Hot Combinations, should be undertaken by some label like Proper or JSP), but there are a couple of fine compilations on CD that serve as good introductions to her music. Lovable & Sweet (ASV / Living Era, 1997) is perhaps the best one around, and although the English reissue label seems to have gone out of business, the disc is still fairly easy to find. The material included in the collection proves, on the one hand, that Hanshaw very adeptly assimilated the jazz idiom very early on, and on the other, that her selection of material is very wide-ranging. She sings rather straight on two Hawaiian-flavored sides with Frank Ferera (“Pagan Love Song” and “Ua Like No a Like,” from 1929) but she applies her jazz inflections not only to jazz numbers like “Black Bottom” and “Six Feet of Papa,” but also to more conventional pop tunes such as “Little White Lies” and “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.” When she runs through “Everything’s Made for Love” (1926), with Irving Brodsky on piano, she sounds way hipper than crooner Gene Austin in his version of the tune recorded that same year. Two of my personal favorites on this compilation, which features tracks waxed between 1926 and 1934, are her outstanding 1930 rendition of “Body and Soul” (which even includes an accordion) and her 1934 recording of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “Let’s Fall in Love,” in which she is backed by an all-star band including Jack Teagarden and Joe Venuti.


As a matter of fact, many of her hot sides included such jazz luminaries as Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Eddie Lang, Red Nichols, Miff Mole, Manny Klein, and Adrian Rollini. These are well represented in The Twenties Sweetheart (Jasmine, 1995), a compilation that concentrates on Hanshaw’s earlier recordings, cut between 1926 and 1928. Here, Hanshaw’s vocals are at their jazziest best, bouncing along effortlessly, her voice shining atop the hot backings: these are the records that built her reputation as a jazz singer, and many of them end with her idiosyncratic “That’s all!,” used to mark the end of the record right after the last note has been played. As her records clearly show, Annette Hanshaw is an essential figure of the early stages of recorded vocal jazz. It is too bad that she decided to cut short her remarkable career, that she chose not to make any more records. But the records that she made are certainly jazz classics and prove as enjoyable more than eighty years after they were cut as when they were first released. In my opinion, no assessment of Hanshaw’s stature as an artist is more accurate than that of John Hammond, who is reported to have said about her, “I don’t think she realizes how good she is” (2). Fortunately, any jazz fan easily does.

Notes

(1) Will Friedwald. Jazz Singing. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996: page 59.

(2) Jazz Singing, page 62.



Videos

WE JUST COULDN'T SAY GOODBYE



HERE OR THERE



BODY AND SOUL



LET'S FALL IN LOVE



BLACK BOTTOM



DON'T TAKE THAT BLACK BOTTOM AWAY