Lessee here. By the end of 2009 I had reviewed 46 albums I loved in the year (while managing to miss Cocoon Of Love), reviewed a coupla hundred albums of the decade and capped it by calling the album dead as an art form.
By 2010 I was back to listening to albums for the first two days (the Judee Sills tribute, Screaming Females and Princeton) but I am back on tracks today and what is knocking me out is the American jazz great Sarah Vaughn’s version of the Rodgers and Hart standard “Thou Swell”.
The one that’s blowing me away right now is the 1957 one with a three piece band at a club called Mister Kelly’s. Coming as it does on the heel of Ella’s Twelve Nights In Hollywood, it is hardly an insult to note she doesn’t have the range or the swing of Ella. But nobody does and this is a lovely, understated, but feeling packed version.