Track Listing

1. I Didn't Know What Time It Was
2. That's All
3. Autumn Leaves
4. Love Dance
5. The Island
6. Seasons
7. In Love In Vain
8. You Are Too Beautiful

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53680 in Music
• Published on: 1982
• Released on: 1991-07-01
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Amazon.com essential recording
You want to know why her nickname was "Sassy"? Listen to this. This is the essential Sarah Vaughan, a self-produced, small-combo session from 1982, featuring Joe Pass on guitar. She picked the musicians, she picked the songs, and the result is Sassy at her purest--undiluted by slick orchestrations or studio enhancements. The atmosphere is loose and lively, Vaughan's voice at its ripest--and she's recorded nice and close so you can almost feel the warmth of her breath coming through the speakers. Her scatting scatters "Autumn Leaves" like a whirlwind, and on my favorite track ("In Love in Vain") she stretches and bends the melody as if it were saltwater taffy. --Jim Emerson

Customer Reviews

Vaughan's jazziest and most brilliant album.
Though Sarah Vaughan had many pop hits and recorded a number of songs from the Great American Songbook, she is, at heart, a jazz singer, and this is her jazziest, and, I think, best album. Choosing musicians Roland Hanna on piano, Joe Pass on guitar, Harold Jones on drums, and Andy Simpkins on bass as her backup, Sarah produced this album herself in 1982, when her control and musicianship were at their peak, her voice had taken on some of its deeper tones, and her range was enormous. These eight songs, some of them new, are among the best and most unusual tracks she ever recorded, reflecting a variety of moods and a daring in interpretation that comes from having to answer to no one in this recording.

"Autumn Leaves" is so "out there," with Joe Pass on guitar and Andy Simkins on bass and Vaughan singing scat, that it is difficult even to recognize Johnny Mercer's basic melody, and with Vaughan taking full advantage of her range and power, the song loses any sense of the saccharine sweetness so common to other recordings of it. In the David Rose song "The Island," previously unfamiliar to me, Vaughan sings very slowly with a "la-la" scat and minor tones, creating a haunting song of great mystery, full of key changes and switches from major to minor and back, until by the end she is full of passion and wailing. The "prettiest" song on the CD is "Seasons," composed by pianist Roland Hanna for Vaughan, a moody, romantic song with lush piano interpretations and long piano solo, and Vaughan singing "pure" as she thinks about family, nature, and winter, while awaiting "summer's embrace."

Ranging from ballad to swing to full-out jazz, Vaughan is at her best here, choosing every song herself and surrounding herself with musicians with whom she is comfortable and who share her interpretations. Every track here is a knockout, from the intimacy of "Love Dance" through "In Love in Vain" and "You Are Too Beautiful," for which Vaughan gives an interpretation that Rodgers and Hart would never have imagined. Of all Vaughan's albums, this is the one on which she is most truly herself--the best Vaughan album I've ever heard. Mary Whipple

It doesn't get any better
If I was showing a Martian around Planet Earth and I wanted to show him something of which Man can be truly proud, I would sit him down and put this record on. Then I would bore him to death putting on more Sarah Vaughan and then some more...

To me Sarah Vaughan is the last word in vocals. Her technique is breathtaking but I also feel her humanity through her singing in a way which touches me like no other singer.

If you don't own one of her records, do yourself a favor and add this to the Shopping Cart ( plus a live album ).

50 stars! An incredibly swinging gorgeous performance
Every track on this CD is spectacular. This Vaughan-produced recording may be the greatest vocal jazz album ever. The wordless Autumn Leaves, In Love and Vain , That's All and I Didn't Know What Time it Was swing so hard they hurt. However, the ballads on this date will heal all wounds.

The Island is perhaps the most erotic ballad ever sung and it joins Love Dance as a newly emerging jazz standard.

Andy Simpkins, Sir Roland Hanna, Joe Pass and Grady Tate are a terrific rhythm section who keep up valiantly with the Divine One.

You will cherish this CD for a lifetime!