Music: Here Come de Honey Man

Summertime and the livin’ is easy

Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high.

The record industry, which is not finding the livin’ in the singles market easy, hopes to ease some of its pain this summer with massive LP infusions of George Gershwin, massively publicized by a full throated chorus of movie and record company pressagents. With Samuel Goldwyn’s Porgy and Bess about to be released, the record makers have pressed nearly 30 Porgy albums, ranging in style from Overstuffed Country Club to Tubular Cool. Columbia has issued excerpts from the sound track with Cab Calloway dubbed in as Sportin’ Life in place of Sammy Davis Jr., who sings the role in the movie.* The sampling is generous, and the sound is refulgent, but most of the performances lack a properly dramatic cutting edge. Notable exceptions: Calloway and Baritone Robert McFerrin, who sings Porgy for Actor Sidney Poitier.

Listeners curious to hear how Sammy Davis might have sounded if he had been included in the sound-track album can buy a Decca collection of excerpts, with Davis assisted by Carmen McRae. Both singers have a taste for vibrato, gratuitous grunts and wailing crescendos that achieve the remarkable effect of smearing some of the most singable lines ever written. On a United Artists album, Diahann Carroll, who appears as Clara in the movie, gets a chance to sing her own part and a number of other songs with the André Previn Trio (Previn was musical director of the film). Singer Carroll’s personal Catfish Row apparently runs east from the Waldorf-Astoria’s Empire Room, but at her best—in Oh, I Can’t Sit Down and It Ain’t Necessarily So—she gives the familiar lyrics a delightfully carbonated tingle all her own. Previn and his men swing behind her as discreetly as a trio of hula dancers skating on thin ice.

All Jazz. Harry Belafonte and Lena Home seem to be naturals for Porgy, if not for Sam Goldwyn, and their failure to do better on RCA Victor’s album is chiefly due to their efforts to force a mood without really making the material into anything their own. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, on the other hand, tilt into the lyrics on a new two-LP Verve album with an infectious grace as easy as a ramble through the high cotton. The combination of Armstrong’s gravel throat and Ella’s honey-clear voice in Bess, You Is My Woman Now makes for the finest reading of the song on records.

Among no-words, all-jazz editions, Guitarist Mundell Lowe and a seven-man group are effective in a Camden album that has the musicians swinging in long, limber lines of nicely muted sound. The most imaginative Porgy is supplied by Trumpeter Miles Davis on a Columbia LP arranged by Gil Evans; in this case the Gershwin themes serve only as a departure point, usually for attenuated Davis solo nights.

All Stereo. For the listener who wants a full measure of sound, from both his stereo speakers. Rondo has whipped up a stereo disk called Porgy and Bess Suite, by Louis Shankson and his Orchestra. There are snatches here of what, purports to be Summertime, A Woman Is a Sometime Thing, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, but the sound is so garnished with banjo, cheetering strings and skittering xylophone that the effect is more like three orchestras tuning in a tiled men’s room. A much more successful stereo effect is achieved by Monty Kelly and orchestra on the Carlton label. The band is big, the sound is burnished, and some of the numbers—notably A Woman Is a Sometime Thing —allow breathing space for some ingenious trombone, trumpet and flute solos. In much the same vein, Percy Faith has recorded an expert big-band LP for Columbia that comes howling through the familiar Gershwin phrases like a highballing freight.

* Also on the sound track: Soprano Adele Addison, singing the role of Bess for Dorothy Dandridge; Pearl Bailey, singing Maria for herself; TV Singer Loulie Jean Norman, singing Clara for Diahann Carroll; Inez Matthews as Serena for Ruth Attaway.