Thanks, and I even omitted a few I wanted to list so I'll add them here....
Anita O'Day - Pick Yourself Up with Anita O'Day
Her version of Sweet Georgia Brown was the talk of the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival. Forget about Count Basie and Duke Ellington. They were talking about Anita.
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Duke Ellington - Blues in Orbit
While Ellington certainly did a number of more artistically important albums, featured alto sax soloist Johnny Hodges just blows the roof off the joint during these two sessions of swing and blues numbers.
Mel Tormé - Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley
Mel is often forgotten or thought of merely as a jazz oriented pop singer. But there aren't too many great male jazz vocalists, and Tormé certainly qualifies.
Count Basie with Joe Williams - Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings
Singer Joe Williams stepped in to replace Jimmy Rushing when he left the Basie band to pursue a solo career. While Williams wasn't the big blues shouter that Rushing was, he had an alluring voice with a lot of range.
Alright, Okay, You Win is the signature song on this record, but Williams brings down the house with
Please Send Me Someone to Love.
Billie Holiday - All or Nothing At All
This two CD set is a compilation of two albums that Holiday did for Verve in the mid to late 1950s, a few years before she died. A lot of people tend to prefer her work for Columbia in the 1940s, but I think her Verve output is a little darker, a little more mature, and we hear her as the veteran performer that she is.
Here is a clip of her singing
Fine and Mellow, with Lester Young,
Gerry Mulligan, Coleman Hawkins, and Roy Eldridge.
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--Jerome