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Beat Street

This week at Planet M...

Billie Holiday: My Greatest Songs MCA/Universal, CD, Rs. 295

The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Jazz at the College of the Pacific

Fantasy/Universal, CD, Rs. 395

Dave Brubeck, a living legend of jazz, recorded this album just after his 33rd birthday in December 1953, at the college where he had majored in California. One could be surprised that the music here is so superlative, since he was still some years away from his runaway hit, Paul Desmond's "Take Five", which in the popular mind was his crowning achievement.

Jazz buffs however know that he was already considered a pioneer of cool jazz, the reaction to the frenetic mood of be-bop and a genre in which for the first time many white musicians — including of course Brubeck and Desmond — achieved as much aesthetically as their forerunners had commercially.

Brubeck on piano and Desmond on alto saxophone are supported by Joe Dodge on drums and Ron Crotty on bass on this album, whose quality makes up for its length, just under the 40-minute limit of LPs. All the pieces are hits of American popular music, mostly ballads even though the tempos of some are medium rather than slow, showcases of the kind of substantial reworking that jazz musicians did with pop.

Except for the short "Laura", a soft and slow piece that Desmond sits out, the other five tracks are five to ten minutes long and have enough room for well-developed solo improvisations by Desmond and Brubeck, who generally also take the lead on the themes as well.

An interesting series of solo exchanges between Brubeck and Dodge on "Lullaby in Rhythm" and a similar interaction between Brubeck and Crotty on "I Remember You" help to vary the pattern and shift the spotlight to bass and drums for a change. But even in quiet support — the accent is on quiet — Dodge and Crotty are no less outstanding than their more famous, later much more famous, colleagues.

Billie Holiday: My Greatest Songs

MCA/Universal, CD, Rs. 295

Here's another budget album that seems to confirm my recently expressed belief in these columns that the most expensive part of a CD is the inlay card. Here it tells us only that Billie Holiday sings all 16 tracks (it also implies that they are her personal selections), one of them being a vocal duet with Louis Armstrong. Since Holiday's voice doesn't have the rasping quality that it acquired, largely because of drug and alcohol abuse, in the '50s, one can speculate that these recordings date from the decade before. But that would have to be a guess in the absence of concrete information.

The duet with Armstrong (both the pairing and the number are practically unknown), "My Sweet Hunk o' Trash", is the kind of comic piece Armstrong was famous for but is quite surprising for Holiday. It shows a side of her that might have blossomed but for her typecasting in plaintive, tragic songs that her own life increasingly echoed. Armstrong is of course in top form on it, but Holiday is surprisingly almost as good. The track also has some good trumpet work which doesn't sound enough like Armstrong to rule out crediting it to someone else — Armstrong was known to have sometimes laid his instrument aside after he became a star.

Holiday was generally known for the high quality of the jazz instrumentation backing her, supplying solo improvisation that was, technically speaking, absent from her own singing, which concentrated on interpretative phrasing and emotional depth for its distinctness. We do have some good solos here, especially trumpet, trombone and tenor saxophone on "Them There Eyes", and trumpet, guitar and piano on "Big Stuff".

Another entry on the credit side is that some of the songs (including the three named above) aren't plaintive. Even on the plaintive ones Holiday is somewhat more restrained than usual. On the debit side, her choice of instrumentation to include violins and other strings on tracks such as "Lover Man" and "Don't Explain" (two of her classic favourites) barely stops short of ruining them.

JAZZEBEL

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