Carmen McRae - Carmen McRae

CARMEN McRAE
Carmen McRae
1965
256+ VBR LAME mp3
Vinyl rip & scans from Mainstream MRL 309

Bye Bye Blackbird


Here's some Sunday-mornin'-comin'-down listening for you with yet another acoustic trio set, this time in the form of a live affair backing Carmen McRae. Carmen needs no introduction to regular readers of Soundological or the shad shack as she's appeared here before and there many times, with 5 releases (all reissues) on MRL. She's also one of the pre-eminent jazz vocalists of the silver age so there's all sorts of info out there on her and to keep this post short 'n' sweet we'll just make with the discographical data...

This set was most likely taken from her month-long stint at The Village Gate in November 1965 but not necessarily so according to the Carmen McRae Discography page which lists all tracks as being recorded on Jan 1, 1966 except "My Ship," which is listed as Nov 2, 1965. Couldn't find any corroboration of the former date so filing it under "maybe" for now. All of her other 60s live recordings on Mainstream come from the November engagement and were recorded on either Nov1, Nov 2 or Nov 21: Alive!, Woman Talk, Live & Doin' It, Live & Wailing. The exception is her other live set on MRL, In Person, featuring the same line up but was recorded 9/21/63.

There's something else that makes the dates as listed seem suspect and that's Shad's sloppiness for record-keeping when it came to artists and repertoires - if he couldn't remember your name he'd just take a stab or make one up, which is how bluesman Peppermint Harris got his moniker. In this case, the track listing on the affixed labels is actually incorrect and puts "My Ship" as track 1 on side 1 when it's really track 4 on side 2, meaning all songs are off by one as indicated on the labeling. Rather than change the song sequence by placing "My Ship" first, this rip maintains the one originally pressed on the vinyl and corrects the numbering and titles. It's a bit sharp in places since a minimum of filtering was done so there's a bit of crackle when the v/u is hot.


Carmen McRae - Vocals
Norman Simmons - Piano
Stuart Martin - Drums
Victor Sproles - Bass


1 Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most
2 Bye Bye Blackbird
3 Solitude
4 I'm Gonna Laugh You Right out of My Life
5 Long Before I Knew You/Just in Time
6 'Round Midnight
7 I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)
8 My Ship


Mellow out with Carmen and Soundological HERE or HERE.