Random A-List for Set: Jazz/Vocals

Jazz and popular (pre-rock) vocals.

Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Jazz/Vocals. Use your Reload button to get more.

Chet Baker: The Best of Chet Baker [2004, Riverside]
Baker was the genius journeyman for whom Dave Hickey devised the freelancer's epitaph: "If This Dude Wasn't Dead, He Could Still Get Work." He recorded some 60 albums, and although I know I slightly prefer this 15-track '50s selection to Hickey's "all-time favorite record" Chet Baker Sings, and much prefer it to Bluebird's jazzier 1962 Chet Is Back!, I'm not about to explore them all. His adore-the-melody trick has its limits unless his white Oklahoman affect touches you like it does Hickey, the white Texan son of a swing musician with bebop dreams. So this is ideal. As someone who's always preferred Baker's singing to his trumpet, I was surprised to find that three vocals were only one short of what I would have preferred (words on "It Never Entered My Mind" later on, please), and surprised to swoon for the instrumental opener, a 1952 "My Funny Valentine" the notes claim was a hit. I was also surprised to hear more romance--and less "cool"--in this "My Funny Valentine"'s lyricism, sensuality, and bassline than in the contemporaneous version that opens Miles Davis Plays for Lovers. Thank Baker's smooth, soft, full, breathy sound. Thank Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, and (on the two jazz compositions) Johnny Griffin. Thank Paul Chambers. Thank the melodies. A

Boulevard of Broken Dreams: It's the Talk of the Town and Other Sad Songs [1989, Hannibal]
In which 16 Netherlanders pay pomo tribute to near-tragic pop like "I Cover the Waterfront," "I Get Along Without You Very Well," and "A Cottage for Sale." About half the songs (the earliest from 1927, the latest from 1949) are new to me, and if I'd grown up with the originals, I might find the conceptual distancing a distortion, even a sacrilege. But at this late date it's their salvation. The four vocalists, who betray just enough accent to remind you where they're coming from, honor the era's well-enunciated conventions with care, and Roland Brunt's jazzy sax undercuts the violins without patting itself on the chops. If they were French they'd overdo the camp or the sincerity, but the Dutch have the mercantilist knack of respecting a culture for its natural resources. In fact, at this remove they probably understand it better than we do. A-

Bing Crosby: A Centennial Anthology of His Decca Recordings [2003, MCA/Decca]
Three years late, I downed Gary Giddins's biography, and thus armed found it easy enough to access these 50 songs. Giddins rewrites history to make room for Crosby, an aggressively pan-ethnic everyman with a Jesuit education and a wild-oats past who had the confidence and the sense of rhythm to put his big voice to modest uses--and dominate our mass culture, movies and music both, for longer than FDR was president. Urged to be all things to all Americans by Decca's Jack Kapp, he avoided the fancy songs beboppers would soon sing changes on and the ambitious arrangers who started Frank Sinatra on the road to Art. But he never condescended to his tunes, and he picked good ones. Credit his decency and intelligence and you can comprehend the attractions of an American dream that deserves better than the exploitation to which it's still subjected by ruling-class cynics he would have seen through in a minute. A

Slim Gaillard: Laughing in Rhythm: The Best of the Verve Years [1994, Verve]
Operating so far to the left of Louis Jordan that he often passed as a weirdo, Gaillard stands as jazz's premier comedian-eccentric, the hepcat as novelty artist to end all novelty artists. Gaillard laughed in rhythm, barked in rhythm, clucked like a chicken in rhythm; he made up his own language, then adapted it to Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Incan; he was so fond of the suffix "rooney" (as in "You got the federation blues-o-rooney") that when introduced to Mickey Rooney he asked what his last name was. Although this 20-song collection from the '50s relegates "Flat Foot Floogie" to a medley and passes over "Cement Mixer (Put-Ti, Put-Ti)" and "Tutti Frutti" (o-rooney?), it swings and yucks whether the song is a remake, a new stroke, or a piece of Tin Pan Alley silliness. Having enjoyed a U.K. vogue before he died at 75 (or 80) in 1991, Gaillard is ripe. Be the first on your block. A

Billie Holiday: Ken Burns Jazz [2000, Verve]
You won't be sorry if you spring for a matched set of two-CD sets: Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years and Columbia's belated Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday. But beyond a label-bridging perfection spoiled only by the unavoidable "Strange Fruit," the advantage of this disc is how vividly it establishes the organic unity of a career customarily bifurcated into girl-singer and fallen-woman phases. Early on she digs fibbing about the moonlight, while in the end she's too ravaged to fake how far fine-and-mellow has and hasn't gotten her. But in hindsight we can hear that her commitment to good times was provisional either way. That distance was what made her singing meaningful. What made it great was a musicality that instead of transcending pain affirmed its primacy. A+

Billie Holiday + Lester Young: A Musical Romance [2002, Columbia/Legacy]
Last year's belated twofer (four repeats) sums her up, and I should mention the 10-CD box--better completist Holiday than Sinatra or Fitzgerald or George Jones. The year's other reshuffles, Lady Day Swings and Blue Billie, are useful product. But there's never been a Holiday record I've replayed as spontaneously as this one. Nor, and this is connected, have I ever found her so credible uptempo (meaning midtempo, and fast enough). Her disdain for the trifles her '30s producers fed her can be bracing but also wearing, and while none remain trifles, some remain unnecessary. Here, that's not a problem. In love or in pain, she's smiling, she's swinging, she's dealing with it, dropping so little hint of the tragedies to come you wonder whether they were inevitable after all. She just needs the support of a man as hip and confident as Prez sounds--relaxed, savvy, off-center but that just makes him more fun. On no record, including the excellent Ken Burns, will you ever hear him so unmistakably. In real life, unfortunately, guys who play that often have a mean streak and/or a dependent side. You wonder why couldn't she make do with the worldly wisdom of Teddy Wilson, the friendly sarcasm of Buck Clayton. Because here, they too keep her smiling and swinging. A+

Billie Holiday + Lester Young: A Musical Romance [2002, Columbia/Legacy]
Last year's belated twofer (four repeats) sums her up, and I should mention the 10-CD box--better completist Holiday than Sinatra or Fitzgerald or George Jones. The year's other reshuffles, Lady Day Swings and Blue Billie, are useful product. But there's never been a Holiday record I've replayed as spontaneously as this one. Nor, and this is connected, have I ever found her so credible uptempo (meaning midtempo, and fast enough). Her disdain for the trifles her '30s producers fed her can be bracing but also wearing, and while none remain trifles, some remain unnecessary. Here, that's not a problem. In love or in pain, she's smiling, she's swinging, she's dealing with it, dropping so little hint of the tragedies to come you wonder whether they were inevitable after all. She just needs the support of a man as hip and confident as Prez sounds--relaxed, savvy, off-center but that just makes him more fun. On no record, including the excellent Ken Burns, will you ever hear him so unmistakably. In real life, unfortunately, guys who play that often have a mean streak and/or a dependent side. You wonder why couldn't she make do with the worldly wisdom of Teddy Wilson, the friendly sarcasm of Buck Clayton. Because here, they too keep her smiling and swinging. A+

Betty Hutton: Spotlight on . . . Betty Hutton [1995, Capitol]
Her father walked out when she was two and killed himself soon enough; her mother was a factory worker turned bootlegger turned alcoholic. She joined Vincent Lopez's band at 15, threw him over a couple of years later, and signed with Hollywood's newly formed Capitol label in 1942 at age 21. She cut all 17 of these tracks in the '40s, and although her career extended into the '60s, what with drugs, booze, bankruptcy, a failed suicide, and, eventually, God, it didn't get better. People who think slow signifies serious compliment Hutton's ballads, but then, people who think brass signifies class praise Paul Weston's horns. What endures in her music is its kid's pizzazz--sassy spunk and uptempo jive that wisecrack right past the melody sometimes. With special help from Frank Loesser's vernacular, she's the cornfed blonde next door as backslapping joker-around, and she buys no bullshit. She makes fun of factory work, motherhood, marriage; she spoofs Shakespeare, barely respects Irving Berlin, and has a ball with "Papa Don't Preach to Me." So what if she was a movie star? Paul Weston notwithstanding, she's as rock and roll as Ruth Brown or Ella Mae Morse--and she has better material. A-

Al Jolson: Let Me Sing and I'm Happy: Al Jolson at Warner Bros. 1926-1936 [1996, Turner Classic Movies/Rhino]
It's hard now to grasp that, generation gap aside, this native of Lithuania was nothing less than the Elvis of the first half of the 20th century. But fame was fleeting in that trendy, technology-driven era, and by the mid-'30s, as foolish kids and fickle oldsters embraced the big-band fad and "crooning" style, "The World's Greatest Entertainer" was slipping badly. While it's true enough that his emotionality was too cornball for an emerging generation of pseudosophisticates, the biggest problem was his resistance to new media--his radio shows were spotty, and much worse for history, his studio recordings were stiff. As anyone who screens The Jazz Singer learns, however, movies were the exception. Hollywood let him roll his eyes and shake his fanny in front of onlookers who could feed him the approval he craved. Whether he's wearing burnt cork or pancake makeup, appropriating Irving Berlin or an Oedipal kiss from his mammy, his verve, spontaneity, and sexual magnetism are as startling as, well, Elvis's. A-

Nellie McKay: Get Away From Me [2004, Columbia]
Hidden smack in the middle of each of these two nine-track CDs are two forgettable songs, leaving 16 of 18 that are memorable melodically, lyrically, or both, which would be an accomplishment for Randy Newman himself. Not counting Stephin Merritt, no other under-40 approaches McKay's gift for cabaret. The worst you can say is that her satire is shallow--dissing yuppies in the '00s is the precise terminological equivalent of dissing hippies in the '80s. But "Work Song" (bosses), "Inner Peace" (New Ageism), "It's a Pose" ("God you went to Oxford/Head still in your boxers") feel something like classic, and personal notes like the fond "Manhattan Avenue" and the fonder "Dog Song" suggest that soon her egomania will yield emotional complexities worthy of her talent. A-

The Mills Brothers: All Time Greatest Hits [1997, MCA]
Far blander than Decca's other prerock crossovers, the Ink Spots, these sons of the barbershop cultivated normality whether they were guesting for Bing, accompanying Ella, or bringing ditties to market. The 16 songs here are as anonymous as they are memorable, just like the close blend of brothers who shared so much DNA that on record they could almost be one Mills plus overdubs. None of their army of imitators ever got near their generic sound. A-