Sarah Vaughan - The Divine One (1980 Japanese Roulette Vinyl LP)

Vaughan had come up through Earl Hines's band and Billy Eckstine's, singing alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and by 1960 she had a voice with a range and a control that no other singer in jazz could match. The problem across much of her career was what to put behind it. Labels kept reaching for strings and large orchestras, and Roulette would push her in a dozen directions over the following few years. This album, made almost immediately after she arrived at the label, gets it right by doing less. Jimmy Jones, who had been her accompanist and knew exactly how she phrased, wrote for a small group and put himself at the piano. Sweets Edison, the trumpeter whose muted style had been one of the defining sounds of the Count Basie orchestra, plays obbligato behind her rather than taking features. The two of them had already worked together on Dreamy earlier the same year, and the partnership is the reason this record works.

"Have You Met Miss Jones?" opens in under two and a half minutes with Vaughan scatting, which she did less often on record than her admirers would have liked. "Ain't No Use," a Leroy Kirkland and Sidney Wyche song that Big Maybelle recorded first and Nina Simone took up later, is taken slow and turns into the most affecting thing on side A. "Gloomy Sunday" is the Hungarian song that Billie Holiday had recorded in 1941, and Vaughan's reading is very different from Holiday's: less resigned, more controlled, the technique fully visible. "Jump for Joy" is Ellington's, sung with an exuberance that offsets everything around it. Side B holds "When Your Lover Has Gone," "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams" and Alec Wilder's "Trouble Is a Man," which closes the album.

This is the 1980 Japanese pressing on Roulette YS-7026-RO, made by Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd.