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Beat Street

This week at Planet M

The Definitive Sarah Vaughan

Verve/Universal, CD, Rs. 445

When Sarah Vaughan started her career around 1940 (a little later than Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday), the versatile jazz singer who used her voice like an instrument to improvise, using nonsense syllables or "scat" singing, was an established institution. But many vocalists still sang plain pop in front of a band of talented jazz improvisers, since the dividing line between jazz and pop was not clear.

The first band in which Vaughan sang, Earl Hines's Orchestra, boasted an array of future jazz greats, some of whom developed the style of be-bop while some others adopted it enthusiastically. Vaughan too became an accomplished vocal improviser, as is evident in "Shulie a Bop", "Lullaby of Birdland", "It's Crazy" and "How High The Moon" from this compilation album.

The last of these, featuring some delectable solo exchanges between Vaughan's scat and Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone packed into about two minutes and a half, invites comparison with Fitzgerald's famous, much longer rendition of the same number, but Vaughan holds her own.

Her clear voice and perfect pitch, two attributes that could have got her a career in opera if she hadn't taken to jazz, on the other hand, often tended to sideline her evident talent as a jazz (scat) improviser.

Many of the numbers on this album, thus, are straightforward pop numbers performed with large orchestras (including, in many cases, strings), having little or no improvisation, whether by Vaughan or by others, to justify their classification as jazz.

All of them are enjoyable if one doesn't expect jazz improvisation right through the album, for one can always concentrate on the beautiful voice of the Divine One, as Vaughan was known.

John Coltrane and the Jazz Giants

EMI/Virgin, CD, Rs. 400

John Coltrane's all-too-brief career as a leader (1957-1967) followed an extended span of working under others. The legend of Coltrane, growing after his death, prompted many record companies to mine their archives for material in which he appeared either as a sideman or a not quite established leader. This compilation (dating from 1956 to 1958), the outcome of such mining, features two tracks on which he worked under Thelonious Monk, one with Miles Davis, and one under the pianist Tadd Dameron, a leading light of the be-bop revolution. There follow six on which, although he was the leader, he was thought to be taking tentative steps towards becoming one while still working under Davis for more famous recordings.

All 10 pieces show Coltrane off to best advantage, either holding his own with the other soloists or, in some cases, being dominant in that capacity. He is already developing his "sheets of sound" technique, by which he would go on playing endless lines of notes without pause, using the method of "circular breathing" to avoid the need to stop for breath. The last track, "Invitation", shows him taking a slow-paced number in a contemplative, almost spiritual mood that would within a few years become a hallmark of his music. Most of the others are fast-paced, particularly "Lover" and "Russian Lullaby", both favourites of the be-boppers, and demonstrate how well-schooled Coltrane was in this basic idiom of modern jazz.

Davis, Monk and Dameron make full use of the talented 'Trane while performing very well themselves, while the sidemen on the other tracks match up with him when called upon to do so. Donald Byrd, a talented trumpeter who later moved into jazz-pop and jazz-rock fusion, delights with samples of his early jazz work on two tracks.

JAZZEBEL

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