Personnel:
Jennie Smith, Diana Trask (vcl), Ray Ellis, Glenn Osser (arr, cond)
Reference: FSR V110 CD
Bar code: 8427328641104
The Best Voices Time Forgot
Collectible Albums by Top Female Vocalists
· Collector's Edition
· 2 Original LPs on 1 CD
· Original Cover Art, Liner Notes
· Complete Personnel Details
· Stereo Recordings
· Newly Remastered in 24-Bit
Love Among the Young
Jennie, barely twenty years old, already had the poise and elegance of an experienced artist. She could show off not only a voice with feeling, but an ability to interpret a song with warmth and lively emotion. On this album she takes a dozen numbers and presents them in a sweet and unaffected way. She sings brilliantly and memorably of love among young people, accompanied in a most satisfactory fashion by the Ray Ellis orchestra.
Diana Trask
This album was the exciting introduction to the amazing talent of the beautiful Australian singer and TV star Diana Trask. Her arrival in the States in 1959 took the scene by storm. Listen, and you are sure to enjoy the many gifts of this lovely young singer…
"The bigger this Fresh Sound series of The Best Voices Time Forgot gets, the more it positively evokes an era which seems long passed.
That’s not to suggest female vocalists are thin on the ground these days, it’s just that these voices have now been rescued for posterity and a new audience awaits them, many of whom perhaps weren’t even born when they were made. This is only a good thing, better late than never…
Smith and Trask are on the superior pop side of things as opposed to jazz, but I for one am not fussed about the distinction, not when Trask can wring a little personal poignancy out of My Funny Valentine, where her work is markedly in sympathy with Glenn Osser’s arrangement, and which is followed up by what might once have been referred to as a swinger in the form of I Hear Music.
Arguably the album has been eclipsed as an art form in this era of playlists and shortened attention spans. If so then it throws both these albums into stark relief as they’re models of judicious programming. So Smith’s reading of Love Among The Young, recorded like the rest of the album when she was barely out of her teens, and which she sings with an authority exceeding her years, is followed by a carefree reading of Cross Your Heart, in which she wrings out of the lyric a measure of unaffected joy that’s quite out of step with the fraught times we’re living through."
Nic Jones (August 2, 2019)
https://jazzjournal.co.uk
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