Time: 50:12
Size: 114.9 MB
Styles: Jazz vocals
Year: 2012
Art: Front
[5:20] 1. Hello Ma Baby
[6:27] 2. I Want To Talk About You
[2:43] 3. Them There Eyes
[6:27] 4. If You Could See Me Now
[7:45] 5. In A Mellow Tone
[7:34] 6. Some Other Time
[3:38] 7. Caravan
[6:29] 8. Embraceable You
[3:44] 9. I Hear A Rhapsody
One of the greatest jazz performance challenges is playing and singing ballads slow...sometimes called "calendar slow." The trick is playing slowly without dragging or stalling. It is simple physics, the difference between velocity and momentum. Simple tempo may be understood in terms of speed (or velocity) but swing, swing has the added element of musical weight about it, ensuring that once motion is started, no matter how slow, it is properly maintained by the spirit of the delivery.
The mistress of the slow ballad was the late Shirley Horn, who trumpeter Miles Davis, after hearing her debut, Embers and Ashes (Stereo-Craft Records, 1960), told Horn he like her music, but ..."she played awfully slow."
This was no dig at Horn as Davis himself, inspired by Ahmad Jamal's "less is more" approach to piano playing, preferred a lot of "space" within which to play. Horn calmly blazed a trail in this most demanding performance form. But, while Horn was a slow ballad beacon, she was far from the last of them. Vocalists Rebecca Parris and Patti Wicks have also mastered this mercurial method and produced many fine recordings of the same.
Add to this school a voice that has been a long time coming. West Coast vocalist Cat Conner has been performing the better part of her adult life as part of her rather impressive collection of creative talents that include body art and performance art. After enduring a considerable amount of encouragement from her friends in the music industry, Conner brings her light from beneath the basket on her long overdue debut, Cat Tails. This recording is a collection of mostly 1930s and '40s standards performed with a minimum of instrumentation and haste.
Cat Tails compares only with Rebecca Parris' phenomenal My Foolish Heart for sheer ballad performance. Conner's well-structured voice and delivery beg the question of what took so long for this talent to be recorded. Thankfully, that question is moot. ~Michael Bailey
The mistress of the slow ballad was the late Shirley Horn, who trumpeter Miles Davis, after hearing her debut, Embers and Ashes (Stereo-Craft Records, 1960), told Horn he like her music, but ..."she played awfully slow."
This was no dig at Horn as Davis himself, inspired by Ahmad Jamal's "less is more" approach to piano playing, preferred a lot of "space" within which to play. Horn calmly blazed a trail in this most demanding performance form. But, while Horn was a slow ballad beacon, she was far from the last of them. Vocalists Rebecca Parris and Patti Wicks have also mastered this mercurial method and produced many fine recordings of the same.
Add to this school a voice that has been a long time coming. West Coast vocalist Cat Conner has been performing the better part of her adult life as part of her rather impressive collection of creative talents that include body art and performance art. After enduring a considerable amount of encouragement from her friends in the music industry, Conner brings her light from beneath the basket on her long overdue debut, Cat Tails. This recording is a collection of mostly 1930s and '40s standards performed with a minimum of instrumentation and haste.
Cat Tails compares only with Rebecca Parris' phenomenal My Foolish Heart for sheer ballad performance. Conner's well-structured voice and delivery beg the question of what took so long for this talent to be recorded. Thankfully, that question is moot. ~Michael Bailey
Cat Tales