(Jazz,Musicals,Broadway)[2LP][24/96] Ray Charles & Cleo Laine – Porgy & Bess - 1976, FLAC (image+.cue)

Ray Charles & Cleo Laine – Porgy & BessArranged and Conducted by Frank DeVol Жанр: Jazz,Musicals,Broadway Год выпуска: 1976 Лейбл: RCA ( CPL 2-1831 ) Страна-производитель: US Аудио кодек: FLAC Тип рипа: image+.cue Формат записи: 32/96 Формат раздачи: 24/96 Продолжительность: 41:00+42:11Треклист:A1 Summertime (Instrumental) A2 Summertime A3 My Man's Gone Now A4 A Woman Is A Sometime Thing A5 They Pass By Singin'B1 What You Want Wid Bess? B2 I Got Plenty O' Nuttin' (Instrumental) B3 I Got Plenty O' Nuttin' B4 Buzzard Song B5 Bess, You Is My Woman B6 Oh, Doctor JesusC1 Crab Man C2 Here Come De Honey Man C3 Strawberry Woman (Instrumental) C4 Strawberry Woman C5 It Ain't Necessarily So (Instrumental) C6 It Ain't Necessarily So C7 There's A Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon For New York C8 There's A Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon For New York (Instrumental)D1 I Loves You, Porgy (Instrumental) D2 I Loves You, Porgy D3 Oh, Bess, Oh Where's My Bess (Instrumental) D4 Oh, Bess, Oh Where's My Bess D5 Oh Lord, I'm On My WayConductor – Frank De Vol Rhythm Section accompanying-Ray Charles Jimmy Smith-Drums Scotty Edwards-Fender Bass Ray Parker-Electric Guitar Choir—The Reverend James Cleveland Singers  BookletIn 1935 when the first public performance of "Porgy and Bess" took place, the immediate result was a cultural con¬fusion which would have been comical had it not also been unfortunate for its performers and costly for those who had invested in its finances. It was also acutely disappointing for its composer, who never lived long enough to enjoy the eventual vindication of the work, although perhaps we need not feel too badly on that account, for George Gershwin, buttressed by an impregnable and wholly justified self-esteem when it came to his own work, appears to have known perfectly well that the ultimate survival of the opera was a foregone conclusion. Unlike a great many composers whose premature death has sadly anticipated the belated acceptance of their work, Gershwin is utterly lacking in that pathos which comes from unjustifiable rejection. On the contrary, the ghost of that confident Gershwin smile, wreathed in cirrus clouds of cigar smoke, seems to preside over every performance of "Porgy and Bess',' just as the Cheshire Cat's did over Wonderland. Gershwin could afford to smile, because he knew what he was bequeathing to us. The critics, however, did not know. Their disarray on the morning after the New York premiere of "Porgy and Bess" may reasonably be described as prodigious. Virgil Thomson described what he had half-heard as "crooked opera and halfway folklore',' while Olin Downes in The New York Times grumbled that "the style is at one moment of opera and another of operetta or sheer Broadway entertainment'.' no doubt leaving the opera-lovers dismayed at his implica¬tion that opera can never be entertaining. Of course every creative artist worth his salt has to endure this sort of twaddle, and Gershwin, having paid his tormentors a tribute that none of them deserved, by answering their com¬plaints in an article in The New York Times, got on with his next score. Later the critics, shamelessly continuing to conduct their own education in public, recanted. Thomson decided that the crooked opera was in fact "a beautiful piece of music whose melodic invention is abundant and pretty distinguished,' while Mr. Downes, by now mysteri¬ously reconciled to hybrid strains in the work, revealed that "Gershwin has taken a substantial step, and advanced the cause of native opera." But the critical structure which really gave the game away was one by a Mr. Gilman of the Herald Tribune, who wrote, apparently with a perfectly straight face, that the tunes in Gershwin's opera were too good. Bringing the mighty engines of his musical intellect to bear on the problem of "Porgy and Bess" Mr. Gilman decided that though Gershwin had incorporated into his score some song hits "which will doubtless enhance his fame and popularity;' it had been mistaken of the composer to do so, for, so far as these song"hits were concerned, "they mar the work. They are its cardinal weakness. They are the blemish on its musical integrity." Happy world, in which the thematic balance of an operatic score might so easily be adjusted by a mere telephone call to the offices of The Herald Tribune. Fortunately for posterity, Gershwin omitted to ask Gilman's advice before finalising his score, and no more was ever heard on the subject from that perceptive gentleman — which is a great pity, for it was Gilman, who, for all his carping foolishness, had touched on the heart of the mat¬ter. In retrospect we can sympathise with a critic whose sensibilities have become so benumbed by constant exposure to legitimate opera devoid of melody that the sudden confrontation with a hybrid opera bubbling over with it should prove too rich a dish for his enfeebled musi¬cal digestion to cope with. Gilman's predicament, which may be taken as representative of classical criticism in general, is enough to make a cat laugh. Having learned to live with musicians who possessed every attribute of the great composer except the ability to write a good tune, the Gilmans of this world had actually conditioned themselves to the point where the presence in a musical-dramatic work of a good tune actually disqualified it from inclusion in the operatic category altogether. The false syllogism of the Gilman school of criticism ran as follows: X is a much ven¬erated opera of the modern school; X has no discernible melodies; therefore no venerated opera of the modern school must possess any discernible melodies. It was as though the British Admiralty, having noticed how well Lord Nelson was doing with one eye, were to cashier every officer with two. Gershwin, however, had been raised in the toughest of all schools, where you either came up with a good tune or you went out and found a job. That is the vital fact about his background which separates him from every other operatic composer who ever lived. When you were selling a song like "Swanee" there was no tenor's rich vibrato and throbbing jugular to help the demonstration, no lush orchestral effects to prop up the structure, no pretentious wedding of plot and characterisation to excuse a hackneyed harmonic pattern. Most significant of all, your singer was performing in English, so there was not even the mysticism of an incomprehensible foreign language to cow the lis¬tener into humble respect. All you had was your melody, and it had better be a good one. These ethics of the song-plugger's booth are as remote from the European world of opera as the isles of the Hesperides, but that is not to say that Tin Pan Alley writers remained in total ignorance of the world of so-called classical achievement. Gershwin as a child had been sandbagged by Rubinstein's Melody in F, just as Harry Warren as a juvenile had been stunned into reverence bv the arias of Puccini. It was Gershwin, how ever, who became the first, and also the last, gifted popular songwriter to aspire to the classical form without paying the price of his own melodic vitality. Now at the time of the composition of "Porgy and Bess" the American public at large had little interest in or under¬standing of conventional classical opera. Sensing the funda¬mental absurdity of a heroine complaining that she is dying of consumption when it is plain to see that she is thirty five pounds overweight, and bravely refusing to be browbeaten into an enthusiasm it did not feel by the oro-tundities of operatic Italian, America stayed away in its millions. There was, of course, the occasional exception to opera's lack of verisimilitude; when Enrico Caruso appeared at the Met in"Tosca" in 1906, the New York World reported next morning that "so great was the realism in the torture scene that a man in one of the orchestra stalls fainted. The auditorium was in darkness and the affair caused some commotion. When the usher started to drag the man out someone attempted to help him, but in his excitement he grabbed the usher's leg and threw him. Finally the victim of his emotions became conscious and peace was restored!' As for the German variety of operatic inscrutability, in this regard the American public was as one with the Englishman in the Wodehouse story who, stumbling into a dark room where a stolen prize pig has been hidden, runs out screaming, "There's a man in there. And he's speaking German." In fact, so resolutely was the popular face turned away from opera that its more out¬rageous absurdities became a target for the Philistines. In 1936, the very year in which "Porgy and Bess'' was fighting for its artistic life, the continent rocked with laughter when Otis B. Driftwood, alias Groucho Marx, discovering that a great operatic tenor might get paid as much as a thousand dollars a night, replies incredulously, "A thousand dollars a night? Just to sing? Why, for seventy five cents you can get a record of Minnie the Moocher. For a buck and a quar¬ter you can get Minnie'.' The essence of that joke is that Gershwin belonged in the same huckstering world as Drill-wood, and yet was now attempting to cross over. The attempt cost him considerable professional heart¬burn, for apart from the difficulty of selling the opera itself, Gershwin soon found that he had compromised his own commercial standing with the Driftwoods of showbiz with whom he was obliged to parley. In that same year of 1935, the RKO producer Pandro S. Berman had attempted to make Lily Pons a popular movie star. The attempt failed because, as Berman later observed, "I don't think the bulk of the American public ever listens to opera. Opera has never made any money on the stage, it's always been sup¬ported by the community. The songs aren't popular and the people who do them are not attractive enough for the most part". Berman's quixotic campaign to launch Miss Pons on screen ran concurrent with his production of the Astaire-Rogers movies which ushered in a new era of screen musicals and rescued his studio from insolvency. And Berman was a fanatical fancier of the great school of American songwriters. He had recruited Porter, Berlin and Kern, and when the time came for him to desist from Miss Pons and make the picture which eventually became "Shall We Dance',' he wanted the Gershwin brothers very badly. He wanted them simply because he revered them and knew what they were capable of. But now, in 1936, the existence of "Porgy and Bess" stood like a giant impediment across the path of the plan. There were people in California who believed that once you write an opera you become artis¬tically damned. Producers and moneymen actually sat down and asked each other whether Gershwin had now become too esoteric a writer for Hollywood to trade with any longer. That was the extent to which opera was con¬sidered to be an utterly un-American, minority interest. In retrospect we contemplate the score of "Porgy and Bess" and wonder what the moguls were worried about. Above all we wonder what Gershwin felt. On the one hand the Gilmans of this world admonished him for putting hits in an opera; and on the other, movie people admonished him with equal solemnity for not having put enough hits in? Who was right? Gershwin was right, as always. What¬ever the virtues and demerits of "Porgy and Bess" as an operatic work—and its acceptance across the world was con-firmed a generation ago—we can see that when he came to write his score Gershwin brought to the task all the won¬derful thematic inventiveness which had for the past fifteen years been elevating the popular song form to a kind of art. No wonder the mixture was too heady for the sober¬sides of musical criticism. Till now operatic writing had come from the conservatory side of the great divide but now, for the first time, an opera appeared which came from a world where the melody was the beginning and end of musical life. America was, of course, extremely fortunate to get a George Gershwin, someone capable of synthesising the classical European tradition with indigenous American styles. "Porgy and Bess" and "Rhapsody in Blue" are to American music what "Huckleberry Finn" and "Life on the Mississippi" are to American literature, a sign of the emer¬gent native school. And just as Twain's novels have come to enjoy a dual life, as works of art and as repositories of the best jokes and the deepest compassion, so Gershwin's opera has also come to enjoy two independent careers, as a work of art and as a repository of some of the loveliest bal¬lads and wittiest up-tempo swingers that he ever achieved. All of which means that the material of "Porgy and Bess" has two faces; it is familiar to people in the dramatic con¬text of DuBose Heyward's folk tale, and it is familiar also to quite a different set of people as part of the repertoire of performers who have no intention of reading DuBose Heyward's novel, and probably wouldn't approve if they did. What has happened to the opera is that its main themes exist today not only as arias but also as songs, and before somebody complains that "aria" means "song", let us acknowledge yet again the cultural gulf between the two words; one stands for an imported culture executed in an alien style; the other for an American form expressed in a colloquial style. No greater difference could ever exist between two synonyms, and the most eloquent proof of that is to place the score of "Porgy and Bess" alongside that of, say, Puccini's "Girl of the Golden West'' a bizarre attempt by an Italian to put Bret Harte to music. Both are valid works of art; both are tuneful operas; both look like passing into the traditional repertoire. But the contrast between them is so profound that the writer despairs of ever finding a metaphor to express it — until he remembers the simplest metaphor of all. "Porgy and Bess" is the stuff of which memorable recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday are made; "Girl of the Golden West" is not. I have no desire to slaughter Puccini to make a Gershwin holiday; for one thing, Harry Warren would never forgive me. In any case, the two works are not rivals for my affection, or indeed for anyone's. But what is significant if we are to grasp the enormity of what Gershwin was attempting when he wrote his opera, is that they are utterly different, and that it did not take the popular singers and instrumentalists of America very long to grasp the nature of that difference, and its vital importance to them. The process which culminates in the music on this album began as early as July 10, 1936, only nine months after "Porgy and Bess's" New York opening. On that day a small group of jazz musicians, known in the vernacular as a pickup group, gathered to accompany Billie Holiday to cut four sides. One of the four was a blues, and two of the others were the work of that highly gifted and unde¬servedly forgotten songwriting contemporary of Gershwin's, Walter Donaldson; the fourth item was "Summertime'.' The session is famous enough today, but what has been over¬looked about it is that not only was it the first session ever in which an accepted jazz artist plucked one of the themes from "Porgy and Bess" out of its context and re-cast it in a jazz mould, but also that this was the first Gershwin song Billie Holiday had ever recorded. Clearly to her, and to the musicians who accompanied her, who included Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw and Joe Bushkin, something in the mood and structure of "Summertime ' had commended itself to their essentially jazz view of things. At the time Billie Holiday made that recording, Gershwin was in Hollywood, blithely dismissing the doubts of the moguls as to his commercial talent by writing two of the prettiest arias of his life, "Foggy Day" and "They Can't Take That Away From Me" (for two different productions), and it would be instructive to know if Gershwin ever heard that recording, and if he did, what he made of it. We know that he was not only sympathetic towards improvisations based on his songs, but also flattered by them, and that he considered that when Art Tatum played "Liza" it was a great compliment to the song. But what, one wonders, would he have made of the drastic amendment to his work which the jazz performers had undertaken? For the Holiday recording of "Summertime" is. in its way. one of the most eloquent testimonies to the univer-sality of Gershwin's music that was ever offered. From the first bar it is obvious that this is not Catfish Row or any¬thing remotely like it. Any lullaby connotations have van¬ished. The tempo is up, and the interpretation, to use an old phrase of Don Redman's, hot and anxious. The instru¬mentalists, particularly Berigan, revel in the climacteric of the song's melodic line which comes on the "hush little baby" phrase, as the song is suddenly uplifted from the minor to the major tonality. What Holiday, Berigan and company had done was to put Gershwin's work to the only honest lest there can ever be for any work of art. that is. to look it straight in the eye and ignore all the extraneous social factors; they had dismissed from their minds any thought of the portentous issues of native American opera, of the red plush and chandeliers of the archetypal opera house, of composers with alien names and beards like horses' tails; they had chased all that mumbo-jumbo from their minds and discovered what the music itself actually sounded like. Today we tend to forget that a beautiful theme like "Summertime" ever required to be prised out of its operatic setting in order to be rediscovered by jazz per¬formers. But in 1936 that simple act of aesthetic justice must have looked like the most wilful heresy. "Summertime ' blazed the trail, and as the years went by and more and more successful revivals of the opera took place, other items followed into the popular repertoire. "I Got Plenty ()' Nuttin" was next, and then "It Ain't Necessarily So!' For the sumptuous rhetoric of the love ballads to seep into the mass consciousness, rather more time was required. "Bess. You Is My Woman',' "My Man's Gone Now," "I Loves You, Porgy," ballads as tender and as compassionate as any the Gershwin brothers ever created, became widely known much more gradually. How such specialised items passed into the standard heritage is uncertain, except that in such cases, where the material is good enough, a kind of musical osmosis always seems to come joyously into operation. Per¬haps it was a matter of the occasional enlightened night¬club singer or ambitious jazz vocalist slipping one of the "Porgy" items into an act somewhere; perhaps fragments were heard on radio or glimpsed on television sets. But whatever the process, today it is complete; forty years after the New York opening, the bulk of the score of "Porgy and Bess" is intimately familiar to millions of people who would not step inside an opera house if you paid them Musicians' Union scale for sitting there. Since the introduction of the long-playing record made it practicable to release at one time a substantial proportion of the work, there have been several jazz or pseudo-jazz ver¬sions, only two of which seem to have had much impor¬tance. Both were collaborations, and both were interesting" for the way they jettisoned the DuBose Hey ward aspect of "Porgy" the plot and dialogue aspect, in favour of an exam¬ination of the quality of the songs. The first of these was the orchestral exhibition which Gil Evans once staged for the benefit of Miles Davis; the other, very much more ger¬mane to the present discussion, was the album in which Norman Granz brought together the two greatest jazz singers of the age, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. What was enlightening about both the Davis-Evans and the Louis-Ella versions was the way they demonstrated that there are as many ways of interpreting "Summert ime" and "It Ain't Necessarily So" as there are artists prepared to attempt them. The connoisseur may revel in the Louis-Ella album without feeling in the slightest that by doing so he is thereby compromising his own reaction to the opera in its conventional form. In the same way, there is no reason why the Louis-Ella version should be considered the last word on the subject, and for some time the idea of a Ray Charles-Cleo Laine partnership had been in the wind. Nobody will be surprised by the choice of Ray Charles, who of all male singers today is the one whose idiosyn-crasies of style and diction are perhaps best suited to the treatment of the songs from the opera. The grainy quality in Charles' voice a kind of vocal chiaroscuro which makes it so easy to identify, is especially well suited to themes originally written for characters who lived life so desper¬ately close to the bone and who were no strangers to wretchedness as well as to exultation. In fact, Charles' per¬formance recalls the point which was first raised all those years ago by Billie Holiday's "Summertime. ( Gershwin in had written his material so that it might eventually be filtered through the conservatory correctitude of singers like Todd Duncan, the original Porgy, a man so steeped in the opera¬tic attitude that when the invitation to sing for Gershwin first arrived, he refused: "I just wasn't very interested. I was teaching in a university in Washington, and I thought of George Gershwin as being Tin Pan Alley and something beneath me". But once the jazz performers got hold of the material, and began to sing and play it without the con¬straints of dramatic situations, which faction was then inter¬preting Gershwin's music the more appropriately? I remember that years ago, when I was a working musician, there was a general feeling among my fellow-players that there was a certain incongruity about the meticulous pro¬nunciations and the unbending textual readings of the score as rendered by conventional opera singers; we used to wonder how far the process of exactitude might not go, and whether one day we would wake to hear some musical purist "improving" "It Ain't Necessarily So" to the point where it had become "It Is Not Necessarily Thus!' We sus¬pected that it was Billie and Ella and Louis who were being truer to Gershwin's operatic muse than he ever knew, and that it was performers like them —and Ray Charles —and not the academy-grilled voices from the operatic schools who really brought the characters of Catfish Row to vibrant life. Were we right to think that? Or were we just display¬ing the cultural bigotry of which young jazz musicians, over-eager to compensate for the scandalous neglect of their art, are often guilty? A fascinating question, but the duality of "Porgy's" reputation renders it unanswerable. Both approaches are valid, and both work, but I do feel that the versions by Louis and Ray Charles have enriched my understanding of the music Gershwin wrote for the opera. Now that Charles has actually clone the job, it seems inevitable that he should eventually have had a shot at it. The case of Gleo Laine, however, is very different indeed. You might call it unique. If one wanted to find a locale as far as possible spiritually as well as geographically from Catfish Row, Southall in the county of Middlesex in the south of England would not be a bad choice. That was where Cleo was born, and where the vowel sounds of her small-talk acquired that slight but delightfully whimsical flattened effect which is the hallmark of the true cockney. For more than twenty years before she made this album Cleo had been working steadily, at first in London jazz clubs, then in British dance halls, later on television and across Europe. Her marriage to her boss, composer-bandleader form Dankworth had much to do with the fact that through the 1960s she began extending her repertoire in the most unorthodox way, adding to the usual items like "Riding High" "I Got Rhythm" and "Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe" certain works by gentlemen not previ¬ously acknowledged as effective songwriters. These included T. S. Eliot. W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy and William Shakespeare. There arrived a juncture at one highly prestigious music festival when everything was ready for a performance of Kurt Weill's "Seven Deadly Sins" except the proximity of the lady supposed to sing it, Miss Lotte Lenya. Cleo deputised, and has retained that difficult work in her repertoire ever since, where it jostles with Ellington and Schoenberg, Marie Lloyd and Gershwin, in the most variegated corpus of material ever assembled by a vocal artist. There is an extent to which she has remained a prophet unsung in her own country, at least comparatively speak¬ing, because although she has been acknowledged in Britain for many years as by far the most gifted specialist in her field, and also as an actress whose ability was for a long time neglected by purblind, tone deaf impresarios, it is in the United States over the last few years that some¬thing like a popular understanding of her singing has come about. To the challenge of the songs from "Porgy and Bess" she brings several qualities which are rare and one or two which are surely unique. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of her vocal equipment is its range, over several octaves, and the apparent ease with which she is able to navigate its upper limits. Because this is an album devoted not to the opera but to transcriptions from the opera, the sacred texts of the songs have no more been strictly observed than the text of "Body and Soul" was strictly observed when Coleman Hawkins played it. At a juncture like the last cadenza when Cleo sings "My man is dead", the voice soars above the written text in a way which is highly dramatic as well as musical, for up to this point the listener has not suspected the extent to which Cleo is liber¬ated in her singing from any of the conventional worries about range. The same effect is created in her second verse of "Summertime',' and again and again after that right across the entire album. Perhaps the most moving use of range is to be found in "Bess, You Is My Woman',' where Charles and Cleo. possessors of two highly individual and subjec¬tive styles, arrive at a fusion which gives that most lovely song one of its loveliest readings ever. As the cardinal truth about improvisation is that in order to justify its intrusive presence it must always improve on the original, the question arises about the degree to which the two singers have succeeded in bringing to "Porgy and Bess" anything which singers of the Todd Duncan-Anne Brown school were unable to give it. The shortest answer is the Ray Charles version of "There's a Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon For New York!' From the moment that he foreshortens the word "leaving" and makes "soon" a syncopated accent, Gershwin's design undergoes a rigorous amendment with¬out its texture being damaged by so much as a single blemish. If a word like "swing" has not by now been mud¬died by misuse to the point where it ceases to have any meaning at all. then it could be applied to this track. In fact, the "Boat Dat's Leavin'" is part of a group of three songs, with "It Ain't Necessarily So" and "I Got Plenty ()' Nuttin!" which brought to the original score, whether Gershwin meant them to or not, the unadulterated spirit of jazz music, which is why in the past those musicians I spoke of always felt slightly unsure of their own reactions to strictly correct operatic renderings of the opera. On the other hand, the popularising of fragments from "Porgy and Bess" has occasionally been done at the expense of some of the best lyrics. Through an accident of circumstance "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin"' has generally come to be regarded as a man's song, so that when once again we are reminded of the woman's part in the original setting, as we are in this album, then we realise that some of the lyrics which Cleo sings are not only excellent but hardly ever heard outside an opera house. Operas are not like sheaves of songs or even like musical comedies. They are musical works whose calculated arti¬ficiality is based on the convention that there is a world in which nobody ever says anything without singing it. This means that in addition to the songs or arias, there are always Iragments which have been composed for the expres¬sion of small or passing thoughts, or fragmentary observa¬tions by the characters. When you are a Gershwin, possessed of such profligate melodic invention, you are always likely to fling away the most priceless thoughts on some of the most transient moments in your libretto. It is virtually impossible for a popular singer to record a performance of "Honey Man" or "Strawberries" or "Crab Man"; they are altogether too brief and too nebulous to sustain such a treatment. But in the context of any treatment of "Porgy and Bess" they emerge as they do here, as brilliant minia¬tures of the composer's art, which contribute to the conjur¬ing of the Catfish Row mood out of all proportion to their fleeting brevity. Even more valuable, because much less well known, is the theme which Cleo sings, "They Pass By Singin!" When this album was being prepared, Ira Gersh¬win suggested to Norman Granz that this small musical moment, utterly overlooked whenever discussion of the opera has been mounted, might bear a close examination. It does indeed; in a world where the recording companies waited forty years after that New York opening before releasing any complete operatic version of "Porgy and Bess"—imagine Puccini and company being kept waiting half as long—the presence on this album of "They Pass By Singin" is at once a bonus for the listener and a salutary reminder that when dealing with a great creative artist it is never wise to assume that there remains nothing of his work with which we are not familiar. Even the most blase Gershwin buff is likely to be reduced to tremulous adoles-cent excitement by the brief episode of "They Pass By Singin!" There remains the question of improvised music, of the kind which so intrigued and delighted Gershwin whenever he heard it. Unlike several of his fellow com¬posers, Gershwin took no offense when jazz musicians borrowed his themes to use them as a pretext for impro¬visation; instead, he took the juxtaposition of jazz and his own songs as a high compliment, which indeed it was. And just as in the original Louis-Ella version of Porgy and Bess Louis played the dual role of singer-instrumentalist, so in this new version Ray Charles the singer gives way at regular intervals to Charles the instrumentalist, with two important differences from the Louis-Ella session. One of those differences constitutes an innovation of great importance in the method of presentation. Per-formances where a singer-musician plays both roles with¬in the compass of a single performance are common enough; ever since Louis popularized that combination and men like Teagarden followed his example, we have become accustomed to the jazz man who lays aside his instrument to sing a chorus or two. In this version of Porgy and Bess, instrumental jazz has been used in a rev¬olutionary new way. Instead of singing and playing on the same track Charles reserves his keyboard interludes lor separate independent tracks which, intervening be-tween the vocal tracks, have the effect either of telegraph¬ing the nature of Gershwin's raw material so that when the vocal version arrives we are already conversant with its contours; or alternatively following the vocal version to show us what remains of Gershwin's operatic achieve¬ment when the words are subtracted from the equation. The outcome is both enjoyable for the quality of Charles's playing and extremely revealing so far as Gershwin's melodic innovation is concerned. When themes like "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin' " and "It Ain't Nec-essarily So" are divested of their lyrics, we can see more clearly than before how very close Gershwin managed to get, in the purely musical sense, to the ambiance of Catfish Row. For the themes from Porgy and Bess, when placed in the hands of a practiced jazz performer, are seen to be not just suitable themes for improvisation, but surpris¬ingly, themes suffused with the spirit of the blues. I say surprisingly because Catfish Row notwithstanding, Ger¬shwin was the product of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway; that he should have understood the nature of the chal¬lenge before him, and to have assimilated the essence of the characters in his opera can be seen in retrospect as one of the most astounding feats of even his astounding carrer. The other important difference between Louis' in¬strumental playing in Porgy and Bess and the playing of Ray Charles is that while Louis was restricted by the nature of his art to one instrument, Charles has been able to vary the keyboard effect of the piano by switching instruments from time to time. The appearance of the electric piano on this album is one of those fairly rare instances where its presence is not an intrusion while the choice of celeste for the "Strawberry" track has the most wonderful effect; it's rhythmic balm in the midst of per¬formances bursting with animation. It's worth in passing that in the conventional piano tracks, particularly "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin" there are several rfianneristic re¬minders that a long time ago, when he was beginning his career, Charles was a slavish admirer of Nat Cole. But such is the nature of public response to Porgy and Bess that whenever news of the opera is received the instinc¬tive reaction is to go for "Summertime',' Gershwin's marvelous simulation of a folk lullaby. Charles plays organ, and achieves a reshaping of the whole conception of the song, which somehow remains respectful to what Gershwin had in mind. Which brings me to my one reser¬vation about this whole album. The only thing seriously wrong with it is that nobody has yet discovered a way of letting George Gershwin hear it. If only he could have heard it, I think I know what his reaction would have been.PRODUCER'S NOTE:About twenty years ago I recorded Porgy and Bess with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Although there had been other attempts by pop and jazz singers and orchestras to do the opera, I think the definitive non-classic version was /heir's. Ella was at her absolute peak, and Louis' emotion, humanity and passion were reallv the Porgy the Gershwins envisaged, and I had as well the advantage of Louis 'great trumpet. After that, it was the end of Porgy and Bess recordings for me; however, two years ago I got the urge again: Ray Charles as Porgy. Not since Armstrong did I hear any singer with the passion for these great songs as with Charles and by the time I convinced Ray to do the project, I decided Cleo Laine was the logical choice opposite him. Cleo is not primarily a jazz singer, although she works much of the time with jazz material. She has the incredible technique to cope with the opera's demands and enough of the feeling, sense and pulse of jazz to invest in the material more than a straight reading. In assigning the material, instead of following the original opera, I was guided by the wav I felt each artist could best handle a particular song. For instance, you have Ray Charles doing the Blizzard Song, in the opera it's sung by a woman; in another example Cleo Laine sings They Pass By Singin.' in the original it's sung by Porgy, and so on. Another device was to get away from large orchestra, overture-type instrumentals; it seemed more appropriate (analogous to Armstrong's work on the earl¬ier album), to have Ray Charles, alone or with the rhythm sec¬tion, do them. Bearing in mind that the original Porgy and Bess takes place in Catfish Row, the almost raffish quality that Ray Charles achieves with his group, particularly the guitar work of Ray Parker, is, I think, precisely the way it might have been played by the real people upon whom the opera was based. Obviously, some material from the original opera has been omitted, but in the main I feel that this album encompasses the spirit of Porgy and Bess. Norman Granz  Tech InfoИсточник оцифровки: Оцифровка и коллекция Incognito Код класса состояния винила: VG+ Устройство воспроизведения: LYRA Helikon Предварительный усилитель: ф/к EAR 834P АЦП: RME Fireface 400 Программа-оцифровщик: Adobe Audition 3.0 Ручное удаление щелчков  Спектр,АЧХ,Уровень записи. Большое спасибо HighFiveMan за помощь в оформлении раздачи