Music: New Jazz Records

Too-hoo-hoo

I am just a little girl

Who’s looking for a little boy

Who’s looking for a girl to love.

The voice is full-bodied and rich, the diction faultless, the rhythm and phrasing reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald. To a casual record store browser it might signify the most exciting new popular singing talent to come along in years. But the voice is not new. It belongs to a great lieder singer, a standout oratorio performer (Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Handel’s Messiah), and a star of such operas as La Gioconda and Medea. The singer: Eileen Farrell. probably the finest dramatic soprano in the U.S., who will make her Met debut next season in Gluck’s Alceste.

Soprano Farrell’s first venture into popular recording occurs in a Columbia album titled I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues!—issued simultaneously with two other Farrell albums, a collection of Puccini arias and a recital featuring Schubert, Schumann, Debussy and Poulenc. Soprano Farrell was a jazz fan long before she became a serious singer—back in the days when she was getting vocal encouragement from her parents, who once toured the nation as “The Singing O’Farrells.” In the ’40s she used to sing the blues occasionally on radio shows, and at her Community Concert recitals she would precede a Gluck aria with Lover and Spring Is Here.

In her first “blues” album (actually more pop than blues), Farrell displays many of the qualities that shine forth on the concert stage: the easy flexibility, the tonal purity, the subtle sense of pitch that enables her to put her voice within the heart of every tone. The selections scarcely call for her full power, but they summon humor, a swinging beat and dramatic conviction. As Farrell alternately becomes the raucously betrayed woman (Blues In the Night), the languorous lady of experience (Old Devil Moon), the world-weary floozy (Ten Cents a Dance), even the weariest lines emerge fresh and endlessly inventive. If she ever quits serious music, she might become the country’s best jazz singer.

Other jazz records:

Dr. Souchon Recalls Early New Orleans Minstrel Days and Blues (Golden Crest). During the day Dr. Edward Souchon, 67, functions as a surgeon and as director of a New Orleans life insurance firm. At night he can be found strumming a jazz guitar with the Banjo Bums or the Six and Seven-Eighths Band. In his first LP starring role, Jazz Authority Souchon offers some rambling recollections of pre-World War I New Orleans music and provides a few choice examples—Sweet Baby Doll, Animules Ball—in a gravelly, sowbelly voice that has the unvarnished ring of authenticity.

This Here Is Bobby Timmons (Riverside). The pianist-composer whose This Here has made him something of a modern jazz folk hero pushes resolutely through a number of songs in a densely thicketed style out of which notes come spraying like water off a centrifuge. The most successful selections are the standards—The Party’s Over, Ellington’s Prelude to a Kiss—and the least successful, unfortunately, Timmons’ own.

Mingus Dynasty (Charlie Mingus & His Jazz Groups; Columbia). Bass Player Mingus and men play a number of his own compositions and two by Ellington —Things Ain’t What They Used to Be and Mood Indigo—in moods alternately fumy and quietly sinuous. The most interesting track is Mingus’ propulsive, Oriental-flavored Far Wells, Mill Valley, with its slippery interweaving of the voices of trombone, saxophone and flute.

Red Allen Meets Kid Ory (Verve). The New Orleans trombonist, with Trumpeter Allen and a pickup combo, struts with a rubber-soled bounce through Tishomingo Blues, Ain’t Misbehavin’, In the Mood. No surprises, but plenty of sturdy, way-down-yonder charm and some boldly pushing trumpeting by Allen.

Billy Taylor with Four Flutes (Riverside). In this loosely swinging album. Pianist Taylor finds his support from such unlikely quarters as four flutes and a conga drum. The effect in numbers like St. Thomas and Lady Be Good is to open up the ensemble sound, giving it a light, dry and appealing airiness. The solo flute riffs on Mary Lou Williams’ Koolbongo fall on the ear like rhythmic mutterings from outer space.

Woody Herman’s Big New Herd at the Monterey Jazz Festival (Atlantic). Organized group frenzy by 18 men under the hot Monterey sun. The rhythms for the most part are brash and driving, the solo arabesques perilous, and the total effect as bracing as a sauna. The tracks include Jimmy Giuffre’s Four Brothers and Woody Herman’s Monterey Apple Tree, otherwise known as Wild Apple Honey.

Broken-Hearted Blues: Ma Rainey (Riverside). The first of the famous blues singers, and teacher of Bessie Smith, preserved in twelve recorded relics of the 1920s. Supported by veterans like Cow Cow Davenport on piano, Ma works her way through Lawd, Send Me a Man, Don’t Fish in My Sea, Those Dogs of Mine. The voice, as it survives, is firm, mellow and round, the effect a curious mingling of vaudeville stage and gospel tent.