five star records

Ahh, the 'Divine One'...You'll never hear a smoother singing voice than that of 'Sassy' Sarah Vaughan. Whether swinging to a jazz combo or crooning show tunes with a full orchestra as on today's LP, her unmistakable voice was like dark chocolate (the creamy European kind, not that waxy stuff they make in Pennsylvania), rich and comforting.

Born in 1924, Sarah, like so many of her peers, started singing in church, the Mount Zion Church in Newark, to be exact, where she doubled as the church organist. Those keyboard skills worked to her advantage later when she was hired by Earl Hines, who'd gotten wind of her winning an Amateur Night at the Apollo when she was a mere eighteen years old. Hines hired her to play second piano and sing the occasional song with regular vocalist Billy Eckstine, but her singing went over so well that she became a feature, and her piano playing duties were left to somebody else. It was in Hines' band that she first met Bird and Diz. Dig?

Sarah developed a lifelong professional relationship with Eckstine, moving to his band in 1944 and recording a number of duet albums with him in the years that followed. Although she never considered herself a jazz singer, 'Sassy' consistently won reader's polls in Esquire and Downbeat in the Forties and Fifties, while recording pop hits that sold to a wider audience, like “Misty” (one of my faves), “Whatever Lola Wants” and “Broken Hearted Melody”. By the late Fifties she was in a perfect position to record whatever she wanted, signing a contract with Mercury, where she put out several albums of pop tunes much like today's featured LP, along with recording classic jazz sessions featuring backing instrumentals by the likes of trumpet legend Clifford Brown and flutist Herbie Mann, all released on Mercury's sister jazz label EmArcy.

Sarah's career suffered from ups and downs, some of them financial, some personal. Not particularly lucky in love, she allowed lovers and husbands (three over the years) to run her business affairs and nearly always got burned. But she stayed the course and kept singing, her star rising through the Sixties and on into the Seventies. She sang for Presidents Johnson and Ford, won Grammys and got her own damn star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. She continued to record up until the Eighties, including a brief but notable appearance on Quincy Jones' 'Back On The Block' LP from 1989.

A lifelong smoker and drinker (and rumored pothead), Vaughan died in 1990 of lung cancer at age 65.

From 1957, “Great Songs From Hit Shows” is a double album with a gatefold cover and features more show tunes than you can shake a stick at, from Gershwin to Jerome Kern to Irving Berlin. Liner notes by jazz author and historian Leonard Feather and some nice studio snapshots of Sassy complete the package. Hal Mooney conducts an orchestra of elite Hollywood musicians.

When I bought this record some fifteen years ago it had been pressed up against another record in a stack, the lettering from the back of the other record transferring to the cover of this LP and marring the photo of Sarah in a less than desirable way. It was only two bucks. I took it home and tried several liquids to remove the mirrored lettering, beginning with water and working my way up to pure gum spirits of ever-loving turpentine, which did the trick without marring the heavily laminated, slick cardboard cover! It's worth thirty bucks in this VG condition!