Will Friedwald - The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums

Over the decades Ive been listening to jazz and the American Songbook, its become increasingly apparent that there are certain albums that are more important than others. You can tell the standout albumssometimes even without actually listening to thembecause it seems as if all roads lead back to them. Ill frequently hear a vocalist at Birdland singing They Say Its Wonderful in such a way that there can be no doubt that he or she learned that Irving Berlin song from hearing it on John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman rather than from the Annie Get Your Gun original cast album. When pianists at Dizzys or the Jazz Standard play But Beautiful, its almost inevitable that theyll employ the same substitute chord changes used by Bill Evans on his sessions with Tony Bennett. Singers at 54 Below or the Metropolitan Room frequently do Black Coffee, and while its possible that they might have discovered the song from the recordings of either Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan, its much more likely that theyll have learned it from Peggy Lee. (In fact, Miss Lees idiosyncratic mannerisms have become so much a part of the music that one fully expects all contemporary singers to bend the note on the phrase black cof-fee the way she does.)

In jazz and pop, more than in classical music or opera, certain recordings have become a kind of textbook. Generations of musicians, singers, and listeners have grown up with these albums; music teachers have made them required listening in schools with jazz education departments. They are the gold standard, the yardstick against which all subsequent efforts have been measured. Every time theres a new edition of one of these records, fans and collectors line up to buy it. They have become a kind of canon unto themselves.

Between 2001 and 2010, when I was writing A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, I would repeatedly come across these albumsin a very real way they were at once landmarks and land mines. When talking about Rosemary Clooney, for instance, it would occur to me that her 1956 meeting with Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn stood out as a milestone apart from the other work she was doing in that period. I would suddenly realize that I had just spent six thousand words on a single album. Gradually it occurred to my editor, Robert Gottlieb, and myself that there was a need for a whole other book, one that would focus on these essential albums.

Compiling the playlist, as it were, for this current volume was for the most part remarkably straightforward: most of these albums just jumped out at us without our having to give the question a lot of soul-searching thought. We began by listing those albums that absolutely had to be in here, most of which immediately leapt to mind. What we didnt need to do was study lists of artists and proceed from there; in other words, we thought at once of Lullabies of Birdland and Mack the Knife rather than ask ourselves, What are the essential albums by Ella Fitzgerald?

When we considered our basic list, we were hardly surprised that there were two albums on it by Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee, although it was somewhat startling to realize that we had decided to go with a mere two by Frank Sinatra. (And, oddly, there are actually three by Doris Day, Jo Stafford, and Louis Armstrong.)

In a certain sense, the current work completes a trilogy that began fifteen years ago with the publication of Stardust Melodies. That book was about songs, and the subsequent book, the Biographical Guide, was about singers. This new work connects the two: how the great singers have shaped and organized collections of songs into albums. The great albums are almost invariably more than a superior singer rendering a superior set of songs: usually theres an overarching idea of some kind that links the songs together and connects the tracks on the album from the first to the last.

In some cases, these are first albums, as in Marilyn Mayes well-named Meet Marvelous Marilyn Maye, and Lambert, Hendricks & Rosss Sing a Song of Basie. In some instances, theyre the last albums, or the final works of a major artist before entering a long dry spell, as in Maxine Sullivans Memories of You: A Tribute to Andy Razaf and Jimmy Scotts The Source. In other cases, theyre the late-career summations of a so-called legacy artist moving into the long-playing era, such as Fred Astaires The Astaire Story, Bing Crosbys Bing with a Beat, Billie Holidays Lady in Satin, and all three Louis Armstrong albums.

Others represent a veteran singer turning a corner into a new phase (like Peggy Lees Black Coffee, Mel Torm with the Marty Paich Dek-Tette), or at least trying to, as in Dick Haymess Rain or Shine. Some albums are about an artist tackling a body of music that few others would attempt to address: Jo Stafford collecting American folk songs and Scottish ballads, Nat King Cole swinging and crooning the blues of W. C. Handy, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorm putting their stamp on hits of the big band era, Ray Charles rocking country and western, Jack Teagarden testifying and purging his sin-sick soul through the uncategorizable compositions of Willard Robison. Some are traditional songbooks built around a composer (Margaret Whitings Jerome Kern songbook, Bobby Troup Sings Johnny Mercer