The Newest Sound Around
The Newest Sound Around | ||||
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Studio album by Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake | ||||
Released | 1962 | |||
Recorded | November 15 – December 7, 1961 | |||
Studio | RCA Victor Studio, New York City | |||
Genre | Jazz | |||
Label | RCA Victor LSP-2500 | |||
Producer | George Avakian | |||
Jeanne Lee chronology | ||||
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Ran Blake chronology | ||||
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The Newest Sound Around is an album by singer
Lee and Blake met while students at Bard College, and, as a duo, won the Wednesday night Apollo Theater amateur contest, leading to a record deal with RCA.[3][2] A followup album by the duo titled The Newest Sound You Never Heard was recorded in 1966 and 1967 but was not released until 2019.[4] Lee and Blake also recorded the album You Stepped Out of a Cloud in 1989.[5]
Reception
Review scores | |
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Source | Rating |
AllMusic | [2] |
The Penguin Guide to Jazz | [6] |
In a review for AllMusic, Andrew Hamlin wrote: "'Third stream' may have been the bandied term, but this unjustly ignored 1962 duet set... plays blissfully free of the lumbering lugubriousness and Big Mac-thick philosophizing that mar so much of that music. The eeriness, the mystery, and the sweetness lie always in the deceptive simplicity... The record started no revolution, probably because no other two performers had such chemistry or such a distinctive reaction. As jazz styling, though, it endures unsurprisingly. You hear the set in less than one hour... You spend decades wandering inside the sound, as you might inside a sonic Stonehenge, savoring each new vantage point discovered, and the impossibility of discovering them all."[2]
The authors of the
Ben Ratliff, writing for The New York Times, called the album "a cult favorite," and stated: "In jazz standards and Thelonious Monk tunes on the album, Ms. Lee and Mr. Blake subtracted swing, but added intellectual coolness, abstruse piano harmonies and vocal influences from Holiday and Washington; the record is a series of minimalist dreams."[7]
In an article for The New York Review, Adam Shatz wrote that the album "in its mélange of youthful effervescence and noir fatalism, captured the sensibility of New York bohemia as much as John Cassavetes's Shadows or James Baldwin's Another Country." He continued: "On that album... Lee and Blake approached each other not as singer and accompanist but as highly interactive improvisers, taking apart standards... and rearranging them like a pair of musical Cubists. Full of whimsical, often violent contrasts in color and dynamics, Blake's playing was an eccentric, fractured collage of twentieth-century modernism, Thelonious Monk, gospel, and film music. His spiky, unresolved style found a perfect foil in the serenity and poise of Lee's singing and in her precise, sensuous diction."[8]
Track listing
Original LP release
- "Laura" (Johnny Mercer, David Raksin) – 5:06
- "Blue Monk" (Thelonious Monk) – 4:40
- "Church On Russell Street" (Ran Blake) – 3:12
- "Where Flamingos Fly" (Elthea Peale, Harold Courlander, John Benson Brooks) – 4:17
- "Season In The Sun" (Fran Landesman, Tommy Wolf) – 2:25
- "Summertime" (DuBose Heyward, George Gershwin) – 3:30
- "Lover Man" (Jimmy Davis, Ram Ramirez, Jimmy Sherman) – 5:00
- "Evil Blues" (Ran Blake, Guy Freedman, Jeanne Lee) – 3:04
- "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" (traditional) – 2:37
- "When Sunny Gets Blue" (Jack Segal, Marvin Fisher) – 4:51
- "Love Isn't Everything" (Patty McGovern) – 1:20
Bonus tracks on 1987 CD release
- "Vanguard" (Ran Blake) – 3:12
- "Left Alone" (Billie Holiday, Mal Waldron) – 2:51
- "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" (traditional) – 2:04
- "Straight Ahead" (Abbey Lincoln, Mal Waldron) – 3:08
Personnel
- Jeanne Lee – vocals
- Ran Blake – piano
- George Duvivier – bass (tracks 5 and 8)
References
- ^ "Jeanne Lee & Ran Blake: The Newest Sound Around". Jazz Music Archives. Retrieved March 8, 2022.
- ^ a b c d Hamlin, Andrew. "Jeanne Lee & Ran Blake: The Newest Sound Around". AllMusic. Archived from the original on November 23, 2021. Retrieved March 8, 2022.
- ^ Schnabel, Tom (May 7, 2019). "The Strange and Enticing Music of Ran Blake and Jeanne Lee". KCRW. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021. Retrieved March 8, 2022.
- ^ "Jeanne Lee & Ran Blake: The Newest Sound You Never Heard". Jazz Music Archives. Archived from the original on August 4, 2020. Retrieved March 8, 2022.
- ^ "Ran Blake & Jeanne Lee: You Stepped Out of a Cloud". Jazz Music Archives. Retrieved March 8, 2022.
- ^ a b Cook, Richard; Morton, Brian (2006). The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings. Penguin Books. p. 122.
- ^ Ratliff, Ben (October 31, 2000). "Jeanne Lee, 61, Jazz Singer Who Embraced Avant-Garde". New York Times. Archived from the original on January 22, 2022. Retrieved March 8, 2022.
- ^ Shatz, Adam (June 11, 2020). "An Invitation from Jeanne Lee". New York Review. Archived from the original on June 11, 2021. Retrieved March 8, 2022.