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.

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-

Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton: Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton [1997, Verve]
Our lesson for today concerns the persistence of culture. Or perhaps the inadequacy of the organic model in matters of style and genre. Or perhaps we should start with the relativity of age. At the time of recording, the session's driving force, trumpeter Payton, was 23. Its star, trumpeter-vocalist Cheatham (now deceased, and not a damn thing relative about that), was 91. One trombonist was barely 40, the other pushing 80. Clarinetist Jack Maheu--next to the trumpeters, the pacesetter here--was almost 70, the others in their fifties. Given his softer embouchure, Cheatham's solos are a little less forthright than Payton's, but both leaders are so immersed in New Orleans style that you rarely register the difference. As rendered here by tourist-circuit revivalists, working scholars, one original, and one pomo phenom, that style isn't dead, decadent, or ironically self-conscious, retaining its spry life and interactive unpredictability even though its revolutionary irreverence is lost to history. Payton keeps his song choices on the novelty side of Tin Pan Alley, where tastemongers are too good to travel unless Berlin or Mercer leads the way, and Cheatham, who only began singing professionally in his late fifties, breathes gentle humor into everything from "Stardust" and "I Gotta Right To Sing the Blues" to "Jada" and "Save It Pretty Mama." Somebody tell Neil Young about this. He's not fool enough to try it, and it'll make him feel good. A

The Comedian Harmonists: The Comedian Harmonists [1999, Hannibal]
About 10 years ago, I fell for these Weimar pop phenoms in a five-hour documentary at the Public, where they performed American standards and trombone imitations in the vocal and sartorial regalia of the finest Lieder singers. The effect is somewhat less vivid on this, their first-ever U.S. release--although their harmonies penetrate, their comedy sometimes doesn't. But listen to them gurgle in tune before breaking into perfect German gibberish on "Kannst du pfeifen, Johanna?" and you'll get the idea. Beautywise they lived off the tenor of restaurant singer Ari Leschnikoff, likened by archivist Joe Boyd to Edith Piaf and Oum Kalsoum, though the Klezmatics' Lorin Sklamberg is more the point. A Bulgarian, he was one of the "Aryans" who got to stay in Germany when Goering deported the Jewish founder and his two fellow mongrelizers in 1935--they were too famous to kill, at least in 1935. In the film, he's a thin old man in a dreary Sofia housing project. He hasn't heard his own records in decades. He listens and weeps. 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

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-

Louis Jordan: Five Guys Named Moe: Original Decca Recordings Vol. 2 [1992, MCA]
Relativity's Five Guys Named Moe postdates the original original cast. Bear Family's boxed set is too much in more ways than one. Verve's No Moe! classes him up. And Rhino's Just Say Moe! runs out of gas when it up and leaves his Decca catalogue. But this 18-song supplement is even more fun than volume one, because it plays up the jokey side of a guy who didn't become the toast of both coasts doing dramatic readings from James Weldon Johnson. Give me "(You Died Your Hair) Chartreuse" and "Jordan for President" over a straight jump blues any time. And then there's "Jack, You're Dead," which taught Satchel Paige how to grow old, and "Look Out," which one-ups "Beware" for the ladies in the house. If MCA needs another concept, how about Moe Pie Please: Louis Jordan Feeds His Face? Start with "Hungry Man" and "Cole Slaw" and see where you end up. "Louisville Lodge Meeting." "Fat Sam From Birmingham." It could be done. A+

Nellie McKay: My Weekly Reader [2015, 429]
Once the cabaret upstart was a golden faucet of song, but since she messed up her karma in 2007 by cracking a feminism joke that men didn't find cute, not to mention understand, the originals have dried up. So as cabaret stalwarts will, she's turned to Other People's Material. Having reimagined Doris Day in 2009, she ups the ante and reimagines the '60s in 2015. And from the sublime "Sunny Afternoon" and "If I Fell" to the ridiculous "Red Rubber Ball" and "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter," from the secret class politics of Alan Price and Moby Grape to the out-there freak politics of Frank Zappa and Jefferson Airplane, she manifests more historical grasp than any psych band yet to show its hand. Songs are so much easier to hold onto than acid visions you can only dream about. A-

Frank Sinatra With the Red Norvo Quintet: Live in Australia, 1959 [1997, Blue Note]
With an official live corpus comprising little beyond Vegas dates, statuesque concert stuff, and an insensate 1962 small-group session, this cleanly remastered version of a tape legendary among the bootleggers he's served so well belongs in a canon that's already as outsized as his FBI file. True, it does sample his sense of humor, and although the economy of crack bandleader Norvo offers relief from his usual arrangers, even the greatest vibes players do inevitably play the vibraphone. Nevertheless, there's no authorized Sinatra like this. Its light, relaxed, groove-powered phrasing may not mean as much as the endless timbral subtlety of his studio work, but it gives up the fun his patter misses, as well as the spontaneous musicality those who think him "merely" pop claim isn't there. In the ebullient "Night and Day" that tops things off, he even risks undermining the lyric. He knows no more heinous sin, and the transgression becomes him. A-

Frank Sinatra With the Red Norvo Quintet: Live in Australia, 1959 [1997, Blue Note]
With an official live corpus comprising little beyond Vegas dates, statuesque concert stuff, and an insensate 1962 small-group session, this cleanly remastered version of a tape legendary among the bootleggers he's served so well belongs in a canon that's already as outsized as his FBI file. True, it does sample his sense of humor, and although the economy of crack bandleader Norvo offers relief from his usual arrangers, even the greatest vibes players do inevitably play the vibraphone. Nevertheless, there's no authorized Sinatra like this. Its light, relaxed, groove-powered phrasing may not mean as much as the endless timbral subtlety of his studio work, but it gives up the fun his patter misses, as well as the spontaneous musicality those who think him "merely" pop claim isn't there. In the ebullient "Night and Day" that tops things off, he even risks undermining the lyric. He knows no more heinous sin, and the transgression becomes him. A-

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson: The Original Cleanhead [1970, Blues Time]
A worthy introduction to one of the cleanest--and nastiest--blues voices you'll ever hear. He also plays alto sax with the solid adaptability of a territory man who's been on the road since the '40s, although not as cannily as Plas Johnson, who together with Joe Pass heads a committed supporting cast. How's that again, Cleanhead? You've been balled a long long time? A-

Ethel Waters: The Incomparable Ethel Waters [2003, Columbia/Legacy]
Born 1896 in a red-light district to a 12-year-old rape victim, Waters was the record industry's first crossover star by age 25. She made her mark distilling dirty blues through timbre and diction clear as a glass slipper--on the long-deleted Greatest Years, "My Handy Man" and "Organ Grinder Blues" are further eroticized by how supplely she restrains the hot mama inside her. But with only two tracks that predate 1930, this collection documents the Broadway fixture who'd win an Oscar nomination and back Billy Graham. Listen through her protective decorum, which takes effort after half a century of radio raunch, and you'll encounter not just a gifted vocalist but a born actress who delivers every lyric and walks off with several--most famously, "Stormy Weather." A-