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Habibi From Dubai
Kuber Music, Rs.99
A relatively new music company and fairly unknown singers... Still the name of the album raised expectations of some good Arabian music but it was not to be. Though the album opens well with Sanwali Hasina. Sung by Santosh Mishra, the song has got the trademark beats of the region backed by some decent lyrics by Santosh himself.
However, the rest follow the beaten track of albums that come and go every other week. Towards the end there is a Habibi song as well. It turns out to be a poor copy of the Habibi songs that Bollywood has offered down the ages.
Dinah Washington: Ballads
EMI/Virgin Records, Rs. 295
In her brief life (1924-63) cut short by an accidental overdose of sleeping pills combined with alcohol, Dinah Washington bid fair to grow into one of the legends of jazz and blues vocals, if not at the same level of popularity as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, then at least just below it.
Washington was blessed with a superb, mordant voice, full of the kind of bite that her contemporaries Carmen McRae and Betty Carter infused their singing with, and had many great sessions with jazz accompanists in the 1950s. But towards the end of her life she decided to switch to Roulette Records, owned by Frank Sinatra, and thus indicated a shift to more pop material with large orchestras backing her.
Thus, the liner notes of this album, taken from that period, with refreshing candour rather than the kind of promotion that is the usual function of liner notes, tell us that these tracks have "cushy," "string-drenched" accompaniments (of the kind, one may add, that makes one doubt whether the music on the album can justifiably be called jazz). Washington's voice is of course, superb; it always was, and never underwent the kind of degeneration that Holiday's did through alcohol and drug abuse. Also, she largely steers clear of the sentimental material that was the stock-in-trade of many pop singers of the time as well as of Holiday.
But this deficiency in sentimentality is largely made up for by the violins and violas. An occasional soft piano, guitar or trumpet standing out isn't enough to throw some jazz into the pot of this pop-boiler, since they don't take solo improvisations.
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