Late Lady

With the arrival of Delta Lady: The Rita Coolidge Anthology, one can only remark: what took so long? No other singer – not Maria Muldaur, Bette Midler, Bonnie Bramlett, Carly Simon, or Linda Ronstadt – more perfectly embodied the wide range of changes that popular music underwent from the late '60s through the mid-'80s, and continues to seek new means of expression today. This two-disc anthology on Hip-O offers the first complete portrait of this complex and multivalent talent on CD (though a box set would have been nice). Rita Coolidge scored her first chart hit with friend Donna Weiss' "Turn Around and Love You" in 1969. That song earned her a studio spot where she fell in with Delaney & Bonnie, Leon Russell, and a huge cast of musicians. Being a background vocalist on Delaney & Bonnie's classic Accept No Substitute earned her a place on Russell and Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs & Englishmen revue and the rest is history, including a handful of chart hits and guest appearances that stagger the mind.

The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing.

Swedish band GIN LADY was formed in early 2011, around the same time that the majority of the members of this new band were free of obligations as their former band Black Bonzo decided to take a break….

All admirers of lush, late-romantic tone poems should find plenty to enjoy in this release. Vítezslav Novák (1870-1949) is underrepresented in the catalogs, and this disc marks an important step in his evaluation. The sound-world is lush and saturated, an atmosphere captured well by Chandos's spacious recording. Straussian opulence with a soft Slav accent would be an apt description of these pieces. Throughout, Pesek exhibits an indigenous understanding of the Bohemian musical language, and the BBC Philharmonic responds passionately. The tenderness of Lady Godiva (written in 1907 and apparently composed in two days) is touchingly portrayed, while the imaginative orchestration of Toman and the Wood Nymph (1906-07), more daring than that of Godiva, is relished to the full. The later De Profundis (1941) proceeds in grand gestures on a journey from its initial subterranean rumblings to its organ-drenched, upliftingly triumphant conclusion. Warmly recommended.

Colin Clarke

Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett sang before 2014's Cheek to Cheek – she popped up on his 2011 collection Duets II – so this standards album isn't exactly out of the blue. Furthermore, the two aren't such an odd pair…