The Newest Sound Around

by Jeanne Lee, Ran Blake

Overview

"Third stream" may have been the bandied term, but this unjustly ignored 1962 duet set, the debut for pianist Blake and singer Lee, who worked up their act while studying at Bard College, plays blissfully free of the lumbering lugubriousness and Big Mac-thick philosophizing that mar so much of that music. The eeriness, the mystery, and the sweetness lie always in the deceptive simplicity, never more so than on the opener, "Laura," sketched by Johnny Mercer as a hazy image of loveliness, always out of reach and perhaps not even real, and she flickers in and out of existence with the strike and fade of Blake's figures, the attack and decay of Lee's intonation, now husky, now fruity, but as exacting as Miles Davis' muted trumpet. "Church on Russell Street" is Blake's alone, a gospel show for solo piano late at night, or early in the morning, when everyone but the pianist and maybe the Lord has gone home. "Where Flamingos Fly," from which Van Morrison peeled a few leaves years later, finds Lee a mournful anti-siren, losing her lover and a few members of the animal kingdom to an island that may be Aruba, Iceland, or even Alcatraz; Blake tests single notes like water drops, rumbles chords for incoming tide, stabs boldly at the not quite in tune top octave on his keyboard. "Season in the Sun" (nowhere near Terry Jacks) injects levity with bassist George Duvivier sitting in (as he does on "Evil Blues," the second dash of comic relief) and Lee dryly, slyly insinuating the brevity of her bikini. "If there's going to be an enduring 'new wave' in jazz styling...this voice, this piano may well be the beginning," reads an uncredited blurb on the cover. The record started no revolution, probably because no other two performers had such chemistry or such a distinctive reaction. As jazz styling, though, it endures unsurprisingly. You hear the set in less than one hour (four CD-only bonus tracks included). You spend decades wandering inside the sound, as you might inside a sonic Stonehenge, savoring each new vantage point discovered, and the impossibility of discovering them all. ~ Andrew Hamlin

Product Details

Release Date:	09/13/2024
Label:	Destination Moon
UPC:	8055515235500

Tracks

1. Laura
2. Blue Monk
3. Church on Russell Street
4. Where Flamingos Fly
5. Season in the Sun
6. Vanguard
7. Straight Ahead
8. Summertime
9. Lover Man
10. Evil Blues
11. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
12. When Sunny Gets Blue
13. Love Isn't Everything
14. Left Alone
15. He's Got the Whole World in His Hands

Album Credits

Performance Credits

Jeanne Lee   Primary Artist,Vocals
Ran Blake   Primary Artist,Piano
Perry Como   Primary Artist
George Duvivier   Bass

Technical Credits

Jimmy Sherman   Composer
George Avakian   Producer
George Gershwin   Composer
Ira Gershwin   Composer
DuBose Heyward   Composer
Jeanne Lee   Composer
Johnny Mercer   Composer
Jimmy Davis   Composer
Marvin Fisher   Composer
Ran Blake   Composer
Abbey Lincoln   Composer
Thelonious Monk   Composer
Gunther Schuller   Liner Notes
Mal Waldron   Composer
Jack Segal   Composer
Ed Begley   Engineer
David Raksin   Composer
Roger "Ram" Ramirez   Composer
Daniel Baumgarten   Reissue Producer,Reissue Preparation
Laurent Goddet   Liner Notes
Jean-Pierre Chalbos   Remastering
Traditional   Composer
Michel Baulot   Design Adaptation
E. Baker   Composer
Alex Dutilh   Liner Notes