Album Title: Part 1; Carmen McRae Live in Tokyo; Double Time Jazz Collection, Vol. 1 (2004)
Artist(s) Carmen McRae, Vocals; Pat Coil, Piano; Bob Bowman, Bass; Mark Pulice, Drums
Format: DVD
Recorded: 1986 Tokyo, Japan
Label: Double Time Jazz Collection
We're taking a brief departure from our usual but sporadic reviews of various jazz CDs and performances to bring to your attention a DVD of note. It's rare to find performers with the stature of a Carmen McRae and the Manhattan Transfer on the same disc (albeit, not the same bill), especially one that contains this much pure, solid entertainment value. The experience is truly as if you had bought your tickets and somehow got yourself seated in the front row.
Carmen McRae, for all of her faults, (which we'll touch on briefly as we go) could interpret material from the Great American Songbook like no other jazz singer of her generation. She had an uncanny just-behind-the-beat phrasing ability that set her apart from your average vocalist and even the great Ella was hard-pressed to keep up. Before Ms. McRae died in 1994 at the age of 74, she had been recording for the better part of 50 years.
On this 1986 performance, Ms. McRae walks onto the stage to polite, but less than wild applause, proceeds to the piano, picks up a microphone and begins to sing. No niceties. No jokes or introductions. She opens with That Old Black Magic a Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer tune out of the forties and proceeds to promptly blow the lyrics of the first line. Thankfully, this doesn't set a pattern for the rest of the show as her succeeding numbers are performed, for the most part and as far as I could tell, flawlessly.
The song list for this performance is a delight for all of us who enjoy hearing the old standards being morphed into jazz idioms. She gives us a taste of Cole Porter (I Concentrate On You) Hoagy Carmichael (I Get Along Without You Very Well), Frank Loesser (If I Were a Bell), the Gerswin brothers (But Not for Me), Rogers and Hart (Thou Swell). There arejazz standards like Billie Holiday's Gettin' Some Fun Out of Life and What a Little Moonlight Can Do. Ellington's My Old Flame, Antonio Carlos Jobim's No More Blues, Dindi and Nat Cole's I'm Just An Errand Girl for Rhythm and Beautiful Moons Ago she concludes the show by adding some 70s pop culture with Barbra Streisand/Paul Williams' collaboration from A Star is Born, the insanely successful Evergreen and With One More Look At You. In all, there are 21 delicious tracks on this album, and every one a testament to Ms. McRae's
overpowering style and towering presence.
Her trio - Pianist, Pat Coil; Bassist, Bob Bowman; Drummer, Mark Pulice - is the perfect group to accompany Ms. McRae. They are among the very best comp backups I've ever heard, and while Coil, an extremely gifted pianist, was allowed to stretch out to some degree, I'm sure the audience would have appreciated a little more.
Carmen McRae was, as a pure jazz singer - no doubt about it - one of the premier jazz interpreters of her day, but as a performer in a live show, especially in her later years, she might have benefitted from a few 'personality' lessons. (She had a well-deserved reputation for being 'difficult' to work with) In this performance she appeared to be somewhat detached and disinterested - aloof to the point of near-arrogance. But we have to remember - she was a heavy smoker, and had been suffering for some time from emphysema (which forced her into retirement in 1991) and it's certainly understandable that her illness would have affected her on-stage attitudes and behavior. So let's give her a pass on that. On this album and on this night she shines with a clarity and a purity and a brilliance that only the brightest stars could ever hope to match.
Bravissimo!
Watch for review of the Manhattan Transfer on this same DVD. Coming soon.
About Johnny's recent CD release, The Napa Valley Register states: "Just a Man is full of lovelorn blues
and well crafted ballads. The arrangements are slick and upbeat, a real
credit to an independently produced recording project.”
