Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74782 in Music
• Released on: 2007-09-11
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Original recording remastered, Live
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .15 pounds

From Amazon.com
In 1957, the Newport Jazz Festival presented three of the greatest jazz divas on successive nights, with the tape recorders rolling the whole time. Shortly thereafter came the original LP, Ella Fitzgerald & Billie Holiday at Newport. The constraints of vinyl, and the fact that she had not yet achieved the same stature as Holiday and Fitzgerald, kept Carmen McRae out of the picture. So the six previously unreleased McRae selections--along with three new Fitzgerald tracks--somewhat justify the new packaging of this album. But that reason doesn't really suffice. As William Ruhlman points out in his game but candid liner notes, none of the singers comes off very well here. Fitzgerald sings wonderfully, of course--when didn't she?--but her trio falls in and out of synch. Worse, the stage announcer's audible suggestion that she move closer to the microphone results in overmodulated distortion on four-fifths of the set ("Too Close for Comfort," one of the songs she sings here, is all too appropriate). Holiday, in her later years, sang with a reduced vocal range and waning energy, which she sometimes countered with sly sagacity. Here, two years before her death, she offers, alas, only a pallid version of that. Relatively few in-performance recordings of McRae exist from the 1950s, and this one offers a big, eager-to-please voice and plenty of technical fireworks. But McRae sounds almost frighteningly chipper. When she acknowledges applause with improbably bright "thank you"s, she sounds like Alvin the Chipmunk's older sister. Later "live" sets betray none of this nervousness, and you don't have to listen to too-loud Ella and too-tired Billie to get them. --Neil Tesser

Chronique amazon.fr
Réédité par Verve, cet album rend compte de concerts donnés au festival de Newport, en juin 1957, où défilèrent trois grandes dames du jazz vocal. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday et Carmen McRae se partagent les 24 titres de l'album où fleurissent nombre de standards immortels. L'enregistrement débute avec Ella Fitzgerald, au son velouté, jouant la partition avec coeur et sans déchirements excessifs, avant de poursuivre avec Billie Holiday, qui de sa voix plus aigre s'approprie les thèmes pour en redéfinir les contours. Réentendre "My Man" avec Mal Waldron au piano, c'est savourer la réharmonisation de Billie Holiday. Carmen McRae conclut l'enregistrement avec ses accents bluesy et sa voix faussement cassée, pour rejoindre, au panthéon des chanteuses, ses deux glorieuses aînées. At Newport, qui permet un survol rapide des possibilités vocales de ces trois grandes signatures du jazz vocal, se révèle un musée plein de richesses. --Jean-Michel Schlosser