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DINAH WASHINGTON - THE QUEEN

DINAH WASHINGTON/THE QUEEN

Dinah Washington was royalty in the singing world, where she ruled over real jazz, authentic blues, and Broadway standards.  She managed to make any sort of song into her own and kept herself surrounded by great players throughout her career. “Grande Dame”, “Lady of Jazz”. The American journalists and marketing people have never been miserly in handing out titles for those with powerful black voices. But even so, some record producers have thought that calling Dinah Washington “Queen of the Blues” was falling short of the mark. And the title of this album – The Queen – makes this clear, for the Blues is just one of her strengths. Standard titles from the Twenties (Back Water Blues, Trouble In Mind) and the tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic Bad Luck show how it should be done. And there’s better to come! Dinah’s All of Me swings along easily in her own style – so very different from the mass of routinely sung bar-room performances. Her version of I Remember Clifford, a ballad for Clifford Brown, a musical compatriot who died young, is probably one of the most expressive obituaries in the whole of the jazz literature. The soft, glowing timbre of her voice and the tender trumpet solo in the last few bars provide a beautiful close that can’t be rivalled.
 
Recording: 1959 at Fine Recording Inc., New York, by Hal Mooney

  1.    All of Me 
  2.    Make Me a Present of You 
  3.    Somewhere along the Line 
  4.    Show Time 
  5.    I Thought About You 
  6.    Back Water Blues 
  7.    I Remember Clifford 
  8.    A Sunday Kind of Love 
  9.    Bad Luck 
  10.    Trouble In Mind Light 
  11.    Lingering