Carmen McRae - When You're Away (2024 Digital Remaster) (2024)

I find that few jazz fans put Carmen at the top of their jazz vocal list. I do. I believe she was the best female jazz vocalist ever but regrettably for a relatively short period. Unlike Sarah Vaughan who got better as she got older and never declined, Carmen barely made it out of the 60s before she started to lose the qualities that had shone through her first near 20 years. This album found her at her peak. Listen to the verse for I’m Glad There Is You. For many these are just words. For Carmen they are ideas and she makes beautiful sense out of this complex passage. Whenever she improvised on melody, she improved it. Her way with lyrics were always about ideas but delivered with clarity, perfect diction and sensitivity. She has been gone for 50 years yet I listen to her almost every day. I heard her and visited with her probably 10 times and have a signed record from her dated 1956. Dave Frishberg once shared, having worked with Carmen for a year, that he did not know what made her so angry and bitter but it was those things, in my view that spurred her descent. With all the qualities that she had in voice, improvisation and magic with words, it was her superior intellect that fueled these magnificent performances, many captured here. If you want one number to reveal all the skill and passion and intellect, find and try Georgia Rose.