Aug 12 2012
1 Comment
By Paul
Studio Album
Blue [[2006)


“My yesterday was blue, dear…now I’m a part of you, dear…”

“I found the reels for Blue just mixed in haphazardly among dozens of Marvin Gaye tapes. Of course, within two seconds of listening I knew what we had” [[Taraborrelli 273).

Catalog producer George Solomon is credited in J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Diana Ross: A Biography with finding Blue in the Motown vaults in 1990. When it was finally released in 2006, it became Diana Ross’s first studio album of the new millennium; strange, since it’s not really a new album at all. The album is a collection of jazz standards, songs written by masters ranging from Cole Porter to George Gershwin. According to Solomon, the songs had been sitting in the vaults since the early 1970s, when Miss Ross scored her first [[and only) #1 solo album, the soundtrack to her Oscar-nominated film Lady Sings The Blues: “Some Motown executives who were around back in the seventies indicated that with the success of the Lady soundtrack, The Blue Album was intended to be the follow up LP” [[273).

Of course, Touch Me In The Morning ended up being the follow up LP, and rumors of this album remained unconfirmed until it finally showed up on store shelves, initially as a Starbucks exclusive. It shot to #2 on the Billboard Top Jazz Albums chart and #71 on the R&B album chart…not bad for a project recorded more than 30 years earlier. Reviews were also far better than anything Miss Ross had released in years; typical is this write-up from All Music Guide: “Blue is an album every bit as bold an artistic statement as her contemporaries Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, who were recording the opuses Where I’m Coming From and What’s Going On around the same time…”

Whatever the reasons for Blue being held back in the early 1970s, it was a welcome release in 2006. Diana Ross had suffered some very bad press at the beginning of the decade, and Blue brought the focus back to her music, setting her up for an even bigger return to the charts with her next album, I Love You. Because Diana had tended to recycle the songs from the Lady Sings The Blues soundtrack quite frequently in her concerts, it’s refreshing to hear her tackle “new” jazz classics here; it’s also nice to hear the songs “Smile” and “Little Girl Blue” — each of which ended up on other 70s albums — in their originally intended surroundings. But at the end of the day, the joy of Blue is that voice; there’s a great complexity to her performances here, but it’s always masked in purity and simplicity. Diana Ross’s greatest skill is making it all sound easy; her effortless delivery here is a great reminder of that.

***

1. What A Diff’rence A Day Makes: The set opens with probably its single best track, an achingly beautiful and delicate reading of the classic most closely identified with Dinah Washington [[who won a Grammy for it in 1960). This recording is so good — so perfect in every element — that it’s really quite surprising it never managed to find its way onto an album earlier; it would’ve fit well on Touch Me In The Morning, for example. Opening with swirling strings and driven by a lovely acoustic guitar similar to that featured on “Little Girl Blue,” the instrumental here is absolutely masterful; it is languid, relaxed, sophisticated, and sexy. Diana Ross’s performance here is all of those things, too; this is perhaps one of her best recorded vocals ever, a stunning mix of youthful optimism and mature wisdom. Listen, for example, to Ross begin the second verse, crooning “What a diff’rence a day makes…there’s a rainbow before me…” with a skillfully masked joy; as sluggish as the lyrics come, the listener can’t help but notice a “smile” in Diana’s voice. This transmission of emotion through tone is something Miss Ross excels at; it’s what makes her such an outstanding vocalist. She also demonstrates a pleasant playfulness around 2:45 in, as she changes up the melody while singing, “…since that moment of bliss…” — she is even more relaxed and loose here than she was on some of her Lady Sings The Blues recordings. This is such an accomplished delivery that it’s easy to forget it came so early in Diana Ross’s solo career; this cool chanteuse is light years away from the girl singing with soulful abandon on 1971′s Surrender. Though this track was also included on the 2006 Diana Ross solo compilation The Definitive Collection and released to iTunes as “single,” it should have been pushed — hard — to adult contemporary and adult R&B radio stations; artists like Rod Stewart were getting serious play out of standards-themed “songbook” albums at this time, and with a performance like this, Diana proved she did it first — and best.

2. No More: Another one of Blue’s highlights is the work turned in by Diana Ross on this song, which was recorded by Billie Holiday in 1944 [[and, according to online sources, she cited as a personal favorite). It’s interesting that this one was left off of Lady Sings The Blues – I’d wager that it was a little “too jazz” for those at Motown, who reportedly worried the soundtrack would stray too far from Diana’s pop/soul sound. “No More” is musically a much more complex composition than “Don’t Explain” or “Good Morning Heartache,” in that its structure isn’t nearly as traditional; the dark, minor key and lack of easily identifiable refrain make it a much more challenging song to follow. This, then, is the kind of song that really showcases Miss Ross’s natural affinity for singing jazz and blues; a lot of pop singers take on standards like “All Of Me,” but few could tackle a piece like this and pull it off. I think the key here is phrasing; because the musical line is a little more unorthodox, it would be easy for a singer to get “lost” along the way. Billie Holiday was famous for her phrasing, and Diana excels at it here, too; listen to her sing the words, “Woke up this morning and found and I didn’t care for you no more…” — her angular delivery and odd phrasing really do echo Holiday, maybe even more clearly than she had on the film soundtrack. Because it’s not an easy song to sing along with, “No More” doesn’t stand out as much as something like the previous track; however, it’s absolutely worth listening closely to, as it really is an impressive piece of work.