To be objective about this, Tina May's last recording only days after she so sadly left us, is impossible. I'll try to imagine I'm hearing it just after it was recorded last year but even that is difficult. The voice remains as beautiful as ever. Do I detect anguish? Maybe, maybe not. Tina could, like Billie Holiday, inject emotion into a lyric to the extent that it became impossible to separate her total immersion in the words with her own feelings. Sinatra and Billie did it, Bennett and Ella didn't. That I'm able to include Tina unapologetically with the above 'greats' speaks volumes about the company in which she belongs.
Give her the Duncan Lamont Songbook to work from and you have a musical marriage that will surely (now) be continued in Heaven.
Lamont's songs have long been, like Dave Frishberg's, a jazz 'in group' thing but, thanks to Tina and other British singers, they should surely be celebrated alongside Cole Porter, the Gershwin's, etc.
As if this wasn't enough, the backing by the Pearson Trio and Mark Nightingale's pithy contributions make this the most perfect memory of a wonderful singer - Lance
52nd Street; The Algonquin Hotel; The Apartment; Fred Astaire; The Darker Side of the Rainbow; Spring Song; Hymn For Jobim; Your Waltz; Back Through the Looking Glass; English Folk Song; Old Brazil; Camille; There ain't Nothing Like the Blues.
No comments :
Post a Comment