Bonus Tracks on CD re-release include "Tabby The Cat," "Baltimore Oriole," and "That's How I Love the Blues"

(liner notes)

Taste is one of those words which is being battered out of shape nowadays; battered in ad copy, over-familiar essays and general criticism, to say nothing of liner notes.  Taste excuses all those things you do like and damns those things you hate.  It can be written about with forensic skill, as if the fate of the British pound sterling depended largely on one’s ecstatic appreciation of some such unworthy thing as the number of buttons on one’s blazer, or the exact it suggested by Clara Bow’s IT.  On the other hand, it has its place, however tenuous, in the more gushy style of prose where lesser things like houses and cars and objects of art are described with almost the same vapidity that is given to, say, mortuary policies.

Taste may also be described, though not by me, in such a line as the following by a sometimes too well known author – wherein he makes love to dry lines, to say the least: “Did you ever eat a peach on a beach?” That has a certain taste, of course; the line, not the peach; but, as any school boy knows, the important thing, the real test of taste, is whether you put the peach pit in the trash basket on the beach; which entails a certain respect of humankind besides.

All of which should prove that I know what I’m talking about when I use the word taste to describe Lucy Reed; at least, that I’m granting all sort of latitude to the word, but still sticking very much to my guns.  For me, and for hundreds like me, Lucy was, for several years, the one warm ray of sunshine in the sprawled city of Chicago.  She sang, then, at the Lei Aloha Club, one of those strange out-of-the-way clubs where nothing would ever be happening in any other city except Chicago.

But very much happened there.  The audience for one thing.  Chicago musicians seemed almost self-destructive in their shilling for the joint.  “Have you heard Lucy,” was the question asked every jazz traveler, and, if the answer were no, anything, including a finely detailed map, was done to get you there for the Monday and Tuesday night sessions with Lucy and pianist Dick Marx and bassist Johnny Frigo.

And if you overcame the disappointment of your first impression of the club – the horseshoe bar, the tiny tables, loud noises, blaring juke and shirt-sleeved citizens – you’d appreciate that trouble.  For, when the great lights dimmed ever further and the bartender lowered his silver shaker, a fantastic hush would fall over the entire barroom, noisy characters would be shamed still, even the air conditioner changed from its steady wheeze to a more moderate mumble.  Dick and Johnny would come onto the minute stand at the mouth of the horseshoe bar – come on, too, with a wonderful brand of humor and swing with excitement – all by their twosome.  Then, if it was your first time there, you would be surprised as the lights went out completely and a voice asked, and asked melodiously, “Love for Sale,” asked it and sang that song while skirting around the bar, ending in front of the bandstand for the last words and for a triumphant, eye-smarting focus of a baby spot, dead until then.  The regulars were used to it, of course; it didn’t happen in every show, in any case, but when it did, it had the kind of show-business validity that’s nothing but taste.

That was Lucy Reed. As a matter of fact, it is Lucy Reed, who is thirty-three years old (“That’s a bad thing to say when I’m just getting started”), who was born in Marshfield, Wisconsin, went to high school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and spent much of her life after that, traveling to Iron City (Iron Mountain), Michigan.

Lucy began as a pop singer, married a jazz drummer, listened to early Garroway shows and, finally, developed a real taste for jazz.  When her husband was killed over Germany, he went back to Iron City (Iron Mountain), still listening attentively, still very much concerned with music and with what musicians could teach her.  Then, after two years of that exile, she was booked into a Milwaukee club, then to Duluth, then into Woody Herman’s band when Woody passed through that latter city.  She left woody to join Charlie Ventura, remaining with him until he disorganized in Chicago.  There was scuffling again, of course, but Lucy finally landed a job at Chicago’s Streamliner with organist Les Strand.  It was there that she met bassist Johnny Frigo, who had just left the Softwinds.  And, when the Lei Aloha offered her a job, she turned first to Johnny and then to pianist Dick Marx:  “I heard him for the first time at the club,” she remembers, “and I just wanted to wail.”  And wail she did, so did they all, for over two years with the aforementioned warming results.

All three had the same conception, were anxious to show each other off in the best possible light.  It was a happy group and it gave the right depth – you can hear it on many of these tracks – to a woman who seemed in love with the composer and lyricist of every song she sang.  She sang then, as she does here, just what she wanted to sing and the way she wanted to sing them; songs with story-lyrics, most often; sometimes songs which were cut out of Broadway productions in their try-outs in Hartford.  To all she gave her warm, womanly voice, capable of the finest nuances, structured by her own feeling for simplicity.

You can hear something of what I’ve written – as much as records will do, at least – when the three are together here on this LP: It’s All Right with Me, It’s a Lazy Afternoon, and Flying Down to Rio.  But the best of Lucy for me is reserved for her New York group – pianist-arranger Bill Evans, guitarist Howie Collins, bassist Bob Carter and drummer Sol Gubin – and particularly, on four out of that batch: Inchworm, My Love is a Wanderer, Because We’re Kids, and My Time of Day.

There’s nothing wrong with the others, far from it; but if I’m allowed to throw my taste around, and why not, those would be my choices.  Worm and Day are two of Frank Loesser’s best, the former, his avowed favorite, the latter from Guys and Dolls.  Wanderer has a real folk music quality, hauntingly written by Bart Howard.  Kids is that wonderful, kind of philosophical song, with lyrics by Dr. Seuss and music by Frederick Hollander from the motion picture Five Thousand Fingers of Doctor T.

Certainly you’re free to pick and choose elsewhere among these tracks, and choose you will, whether it be Little Girl Blue, with it’s attractive triplet background behind the words “Now the young world has grown old/Gone are the Silver and Gold,” or Boat, for it’s engaging swing in Lucy’s voice, or You May Not Love Me, because of it’s spare melancholy.

But your choice is bound to be governed by Lucy’s particular effect on you as happy, or loving, or distraught, or whatever else you may feel from these tracks.  Unquestionably you will know that she is a woman, which is something of a novelty in the realm of the specialty stylist.  Always, you will be conscious of her warmth and grace which give a myriad of delicate shadings to the fine lyrics she sings.  And for that time, you can live in a world where there are glowing fires, mulled ale, rich understandings, and this red-haired lady to give it meaning.

BILL COSS, Editor, Metronome Magazine.