Sarah Vaughan - After Hours With Sarah Vaughan (1979 Japanese CBS/Sony Vinyl LP Mono)

Sarah Vaughan - After Hours With Sarah Vaughan | Vinyl LP Mono - 1979 Japanese CBS/Sony Reissue (20AP 1487, CBS Favorite Jazz 100)

Vaughan signed to Columbia in 1949, three years after leaving Billy Eckstine's orchestra, where she had sung alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and absorbed the harmonic thinking of the first bebop generation at close range. The four years she spent at the label produced a large body of recordings and a persistent argument, still running, about whether Columbia knew what to do with her. The commercial pressure was towards ballads and popular material, and there is a case that the jazz singer got buried under the pop singer. What this album demonstrates is that the distinction was always less clean than it sounds. "Summertime," recorded in December 1949, is sung with a control of pitch and vibrato that no popular singer of the period could approach. "Perdido," the Juan Tizol tune from the Ellington book, is taken as a vocal and swings. "Just Friends" and "I Cried For You" are handled with the phrasing of someone who had spent years standing next to Parker.

The slow material is where the album gets its title and its character. "Black Coffee," the earliest recording here from January 1949, is a torch song done without any of the theatrics the genre invites. "My Reverie," which Larry Clinton adapted from Debussy and published as a popular song in 1938, is one of two titles from a June 1951 session. "Deep Purple" comes from April 1951 and "Street of Dreams" from March 1952, the latest recording on the record. Vaughan was 24 when the first of these was cut and 28 by the last, and across those three years you can hear the instrument settling into what it would remain for the following four decades. Columbia issued the compilation in 1955, by which time she had moved to Mercury and made the album with Clifford Brown that she would name as her own favourite. No personnel or arranger credits appear on this pressing, and none appeared on the American original either.

This is the October 1979 Japanese mono reissue on CBS/Sony 20AP 1487, from the CBS Favorite Jazz 100 series.