Word: albums
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Listeners curious to hear how Sammy Davis might have sounded if he had been included in the sound-track album can buy a Decca collection of excerpts, with Davis assisted by Carmen McRae. Both singers have a taste for vibrato, gratuitous grunts and wailing crescendos that achieve the remarkable effect of smearing some of the most singable lines ever written. On a United Artists album, Diahann Carroll, who appears as Clara in the movie, gets a chance to sing her own part and a number of other songs with the André Previn Trio (Previn was musical director...
...Jazz. Harry Belafonte and Lena Home seem to be naturals for Porgy, if not for Sam Goldwyn, and their failure to do better on RCA Victor's album is chiefly due to their efforts to force a mood without really making the material into anything their own. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, on the other hand, tilt into the lyrics on a new two-LP Verve album with an infectious grace as easy as a ramble through the high cotton. The combination of Armstrong's gravel throat and Ella's honey-clear voice in Bess...
Among no-words, all-jazz editions, Guitarist Mundell Lowe and a seven-man group are effective in a Camden album that has the musicians swinging in long, limber lines of nicely muted sound. The most imaginative Porgy is supplied by Trumpeter Miles Davis on a Columbia LP arranged by Gil Evans; in this case the Gershwin themes serve only as a departure point, usually for attenuated Davis solo nights...
...littered yard between two tenements. The young man passing in the street stopped for a moment to listen, then turned into the yard and unslung the tape recorder he always carries over one shoulder. The children's voices recorded on that muggy summer afternoon are preserved in an album called New York 19 (Folkways). The man who recorded them is 35-year-old Tony Schwartz, folklorist with a passion for the sounds of his time and place...
...spectrum of moods. She can be broadly comic in How High the Moon, exuberant in No Moon at All, anguished in Morning, Noon or Night. In Can't Live Without Him Any More she hits the listener with a sound like an unmuted brass section. What makes her album a delight, though, is its sheer exuberance, suggesting that nobody is getting more kicks than Dakota herself...