Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 36

Record label: Atlantic

Produced: Sid Feller

Recorded: Hollywood, California; August 23, 1960– June 14, 1961

Released: 1961

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Ray Charles (p, v); Betty Carter (v); Jack Halloran Singers (bv); David ‘Fathead’ Newman (s); Marty Paich (ar)

Track Listening: Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye; You And I; Goodbye – We’ll Be Together Again; People Will Say We’re In Love; Cocktails For Two; Side By Side; Baby It’s Cold Outside; Together; For All We Know; It Takes Two To Tango; Alone Together; Just You Just Me

Running time: 57.27

Current CD: WEA RHI752592 adds: Ray Charles’s 1961 album Dedicated To You: Hardhearted Hannah; Nancy; Margie; Ruby; Rosetta; Stella By Starlight; Cherry; Josephine; Candy; Marie; Diane; Sweet Georgia Brown

Further listening: Ray Charles: Modern Sounds In Country And Western (1962); An Audience With Betty Carter (1979)

Further reading: Brother Ray (Ray Charles and David Ritz Da Capo, 1992); Ray Charles: Man and Music (Michael Lydon, 1999)

Download: Not currently legally available

In the late ’50s, Ray Charles was an R&B star with Atlantic records enjoying million-selling success with What’d I Say. ABC offered Charles better royalties, profit sharing, eventual ownership of his masters and, significantly, a production deal. Charles signed with them to the dismay of Atlantic. Given his own label to play with – Tangerine – Charles set about ‘trying to share something with his fellow man’, as singer Jimmy Scott remembered. Scott himself got to record Falling In Love Is Wonderful (‘the best record I ever made’) under Ray’s guidance but contractual difficulties prevented its release. No such problems for Ray’s duet album with Betty Carter.

Carter was an uncompromisingly bold jazz singer whose inventive, musical way with a song had precluded wide appeal, but recommended to him by Miles Davis, Ray took her on tour and used his new entrepreneurial leverage to heighten her profile. The arranger Marty Paich was known for his super-hip, cool-school dektette work for Mel Torme but fashioned a more straightforward set of charts for the playful, romantic setting Charles had in mind. There were even the glutinous Jack Halloran Singers on a few of the cuts – much to the chagrin of some critics – but most of the resulting album bursts with relaxed, musicianly banter and sexual chemistry. Charles is growling and suggestive, Carter squirrelly and coy, and it remains one of the all-time great duet sets.

Baby It’s Cold Outside was a massive hit and Charles went on to sustained popularity, starting with his huge-selling Hit The Road Jack. Carter enjoyed a degree of attention before temporarily retiring to bring up her family, re-emerging in the late ’60s to build a reputation as the most fearsomely inventive singer in all of jazz, while admitting to ‘fond memories’ of the easy listening album of duets with Brother Ray.