(liner notes)

Let us not, to begin with, get hung up on the subject of what a jazz singer is.  Not this time, anyway.  The only woman I know, in fact, who is above the semantic war, is Billie Holiday.  She even talks jazz.  Let us say about Lucy Reed that she has certainly been influenced by jazz, and that no jazz musician I can think of would feel it a drag to play with her.  She is, to end the definitions, a fine-grained, intelligent, and sensitive (without a capital S) singer.

In this, her latest collection, there is another quality – or rather, intensification of a previous quality – that makes this for me her most satisfying recital on records.  I have been bemused by Lucy since I first heard her a couple of year ago at the Village Vanguard in New York.  I had, for reasons that escaped me even then, been spending a lot of time in the “intimate” rooms and had been hearing either weary sophisticates with appalling amounts of makeup or shiny young nubiles who looked as is they had just arrived from Mount Holyoke and had probably given an English instructor there a hard time.  The sophisticates had a good repertoire, had a point of view about the lyrics (however brittle) but couldn’t sing very well.  The nubiles were remarkably energetic, knew a few good tunes along with some very special material indeed, and also couldn’t sing very well.

Lucy, slim and startlingly unaffected, was modest in dress and demeanor.  She stood at the microphone, and just sang.  Somehow she had assembled a repertoire that wasn’t entirely overfamiliar (some songs have been so perseveringly rescued from neglect that it would be refreshing if they were lost again).  Most important, of course, was that she was a singer.  She wasn’t selling sex or “personality” or wrought iron wit (to paraphrase Mort Sahl) She was telling her story, the way a jazz musician does, and she was telling it warmly and with thorough honesty.

The only quality I would have particularly liked somewhat more of – and this applies to her otherwise valuable first Fantasy LP – was more strength, more open emotion in those songs and spaces that called for outspoken heat.  She has that power now, not only in the more palpable sense, as the way she plunges into “St. Louis Blues” and “Love For Sale” here, but all through the program.  There is an added tensile strength, rhythmically and in terms of emotional projection, that puts into relief more clearly than ever before the essential fact about Lucy that she is singing what she knows, what she has learned in hurting and wanting and sometimes getting.  This is not, as is oppressively often the case, a singer imposing a “style” on her material from without and hoping to arrest the attention by the novelty of that “style” or by the “newness,” Lord help us, of her “sound.”  This is a woman who has a 14 year old son, lost a husband in the war, is married again, has scuffled long years in search of recognition and self-fulfillment, and who will never be lucratively “commercial,” because singing her own way means too much to her, is too valuable a means of self-expression for her to grasp for the hits or con herself.

“I never sing,” she told Down Beat’s Don Gold, “anything that doesn’t kill me when I hear it… I feel I go home as tired as a horn player, because I’m so closely linked, emotionally speaking, to the tunes I do.  I find songs that mean so much to me, too, because I’ve had experience, more than many of the younger chicks singing today.  I’m 35.  The tunes are meaningful to me because I’ve lived them.”

Having talked about Lucy, it might be meet to examine the perspective of the arranger who provides accompaniment for a singer of sense and sensibility.  George Russell, one of the three arrangers for this set, is better known as one of the very few modern jazz composers who really does compose and who has something individual – and with strong jazz roots – to say.

A rather ingenuous columnist for The Village Voice, a valuable Greenwich Village weekly, recently asked George the difference between an arranger and a composer.  It’s around $.95,” he answered.  “Union scale is $4.60 per four-bar page for composition and $3.65 for arrangement.  But seriously, it’s the x-factor.  In arranging, you are given something to start with, and in composition you start with a blank page.”

While the challenge is admittedly greater when composing, there are areas of arranging, George and other composers agree, that present stimulating problems to the inventive arranger.

Gil Evans recently talked about the area that is concerned with providing a vocalist with optimum background.  Gil, who is a composer, has been a vital, though largely unpublicized influence on much of modern jazz (see The Birth of the Cool, Down Beat, May 2 and May 16, 1957).  He is a deeply conscientious writer who is constantly exploring new ways of expressing the illimitable shading of meanings that are possible in music.

“For the arrangements I did for Lucy,” Gil points out, “I used a combination of instruments I’d never utilized before.  It took me a long time to decide on it.  I wanted to get a jazz feeling, but I didn’t want to use loud jazz instruments.  For body and depth, I used the bassoon and two trombones.  For the top part, I wrote in flute and violin.  I had heard Lucy’s first LP, and to get further acquainted with the way she sang, I invited her to my apartment and we went over the songs.”

Gil spoke in general term about three of the several ways to write accompaniment.  What he said applies in parts to this record, but also may orientate your listening to other vocal sets.  “There are so many possibilities for accompaniment.  The vital consideration in accompaniment, however, is the rhythm placement of a melody to fit in with the singer’s rhythm placement.  Rhythm placement determines much of a singer’s style.  The term you hear, however, usually is that her ‘time is good.’

“A singer’s style begins, of course,” Gil continued, “with her taste.  Her taste is reflected in the basic sound she originally selects and in what she does with it in terms of rhythm placement and in other ways in which she adapts her sound to the needs of the tune.  If you become a good singer, you learn to modify your basic sound to what the song calls for, to the particular feeling and idea of each song. You add or subtract, put an edge here or move it out there.

“Returning to writing accompaniment for a singer, I mean accompaniment that is designed for a particular singer.  Some records use standard accompaniments that are atrocious.  You’d swear that the singer had just come into the studio and just met the arranger.  On records like those, you don’t hear any complementary things going.

“Now,” Evans went on, “here are three ways to work out rhythm placement of the melody for a singer.  You may, for one thing, be so familiar with her style that you can place things at strategic point, things you know will fit in with her rhythm placement.  You can do this by writing complementary rhythm figures, chords, etc.  You can utilize these methods of propulsion, which is one of the reasons for accompaniment; or you can write so as to slow things down at those places that need it.  All arrangements have a certain amount of diving in and out, but all also have to come out in the clear and allow things to flow rather peacefully at times.

“Another way, if you don’t know the singer’s style that well, is to have her sing for you and notate where the rhythmic placement is, providing you’re relatively sure that’s the way the singer will do it when you record.  With that knowledge, you can write around the placement, and can work in a complex, weaving texture around her.

“A third way is to write in sustained chordal and/or linear accompaniment without much activity, and let the rhythm section, on hearing the singer at the date, take care ad lib of the vital complementary function beyond what’s written.

“I think elements of all three methods can be found in most arrangements, including the one’s I did for Lucy.”

Gil arranged and directed “Love for Sale,” “A Trout No Doubt” and “No Moon at All.”  George Russell was in charge of the backgrounds and directing for “In the Wee Small Hours,” “Born to Blow the Blues,” and “This is New.”  “There He Goes” was arranged by Jack English and Eddie Higgins charted the others.

The Evans and Russell sessions took place in New York in January, 1957.  Gil was on piano for his date with Jimmy Cleveland, trombone; Bill Pemberton, bass; Romeo Penque, alto flute and English horn; Tommy Mitchell, bass trombone; David Kurtzer, bassoon; George Russell, drums; and Harry Lookofsky playing a tenor violin (an octave lower that the usual violin) and probably the only one of it’s kind in New York.

The Higgins session was held in Chicago, also in January with Higgins on piano and William Gaeto, Verne Rammer, John Gray and Ken Soderblum completing the quintet.

George Russell played drums on his date with Art Farmer, trumpet; Romeo Penque, flute and English horn; Sol Schlinger, bass clarinet and baritone; Milt Hinton, bass; Don Abney, piano; and Barry Galbraith, guitar.