Franklin Mercer

Jazz singer/pianist of "The Great American Songbook". He has absorbed the lessons of the great masters from Nat Cole through Mabel Mercer to become a master himself. His piano playing and his singing is a kind of class you do not find much anymore. "Mark Carroll sings, plays and swings with great taste, perfect musical timing, and the kind of class you don't find anymore. It's a rare treat to hear him."–- Rex Reed, New York Post columnist…

Carmen McRae - Black Magic Live (1995) {Jazz Hour ‎JHR73558 rec 1979-1981}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 302 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 148 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 10 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1979-81, 1995 Jazz Hour ‎| JHR 73558
Jazz / Vocal Jazz / Bop / Standards / Soul Jazz

Carmen McRae always had a nice voice (if not on the impossible level of an Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan) but it was her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretations of lyrics that made her most memorable. She studied piano early on and had her first important job singing with Benny Carter's big band (1944), but it would be another decade before her career had really gained much momentum. McRae married and divorced Kenny Clarke in the '40s, worked with Count Basie (briefly) and Mercer Ellington (1946-1947), and became the intermission singer and pianist at several New York clubs.

Carmen McRae always had a nice voice (if not on the impossible level of an Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan) but it was her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretations of lyrics that made her most memorable. She studied piano early on and had her first important job singing with Benny Carter's big band (1944), but it would be another decade before her career had really gained much momentum…

Filling in a gap in Frank Sinatra's history, Legacy's 2015 box A Voice on Air collects over 100 radio broadcasts recorded between 1935 and 1955. This is the first collection to chronicle this era – over 90 of its 100 tracks are previously unreleased – and it's pulled from a variety of sources, including the Sinatra estate's vaults, the Library of Congress, and the Paley Center for Media, each strand assisting in sterling re-creations of original broadcasts from Frank's bobbysocks days, World War II, and the nascent saloon singer of the '50s. Sinatra wound up singing some of these songs in the studio but not necessarily in these arrangements, a wrinkle that would be tantalizing enough but a good portion of A Voice on Air is devoted to songs he only sang on the air.