These are the first batch of jazz records I wrote up for this site.
Most of the choices below belong on a list of the Greatest LP’s Ever, in any genre, and not just as jazz albums. If you are new to jazz or an old fan there should be much to love — and debate — here. There will be many more jazz records to come, from a wider range of artists, and a deeper set of releases from some of the same artists. Do you really think you only need one Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk record in your life??? But if you are building up your record collection these are amongst the first records you should reach for.
Most of the selections won’t be shockers — the usual suspects are accounted for — Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Lady Day. But, I like melody and harmony and am not afraid of pretty music. I also have a fondness for the Cool 1950s, the alternately cerebral and earthy 1960s, and the funky 1970s. So, there is one acoustic Herbie Hancock “jazz is art” choice represented while one electric Herbie “jazz can be fun” selection makes the list. There are two Bill Evans masterpieces on here, an entire box set from Chet Baker, and I decided to write up Miles with Gil Evans before I went with Fusion Cocaine Miles (come back over time and some Fusion Miles will be on here).
But, there are also a couple of left field choices to keep things interesting. My initial Cal Tjader choices to write about are far from his greatest albums but I picked two of his sets that have never earned a compact disc reissue and are not on streaming services. This missing music is in itself a great reason to buy, and play, vinyl. Likewise, Sun Ra is bigger today than he was during his lifetime but I went with a mainstream Sun Ra record that was put out by Herb Alpert (!!!) on his A&M label. Sun Ra deserved to be lovingly recorded, and promoted, by a major label just like his peers and not just celebrated as a leftfield oddball.
Considering that both the introduction of the 12′ vinyl LP and jazz itself were stalwarts of the post WWII 20th Century that is when almost all of these records come from. I have one set from 2009 and it brilliantly updates 1950s and ’60s Miles Davis Cool for our current post-apocalyptic hell-scape with (lyrical) avant-garde explorations. There will be more 21st Century jazz coming and I often feature more recent jazz albums in my Put This On Vinyl section.
One of the joys of record collecting, and collecting jazz records in particular, is the brilliance, and feel, of the live-in-the-studio sound captured in the record grooves and the beauty of the sleeve designs. These are art objects worth having in your home even when they aren’t on your turntable.
Finally — want me to cover something I have missed so far? Send in a photo of the LP with your pet and I will review it. Find out more here.
I sold a huge part of my record collection when my son was born. Big mistake. When I started collecting again, I was thinking about only getting the greatest albums ever made. Maybe that meant 10 Miles Davis records and 1 Helen Merrill album. For, Helen Merrill, I went straight to her debut, a 1955 stunner with Clifford Brown and Quincy Jones.. I think its an example of a debut being the single greatest album in an artist’s career.
Here’s the thing — collecting is like an addiction and I have always been a collector. So, I now have dozens of Miles Davis albums and I have restocked my Helen Merrill collection with all of her records I sold. Who just wants to have only the Single Greatest Album in an artist’s career, especially when that artist had an interesting, rewarding, and even downright eccentric career. You could say it for the cult artist Helen Merrill almost as easily as you could for the iconic Miles Davis.
That brings us to Helen Merrill‘s Dream of You, what she initially saw as the follow-up album to her debut. It is a brilliantly eccentric collaboration with genius arranger Gil Evans. Its not a perfect album but it is a great one and well worth owning and diving into.
It is also an album that connects back to Miles Davis, his newly minted best-seller status at Columbia Records, and the rebirth of the career of Gil Evans. Helen Merrill really helped give the world more Gil Evans and (unknowingly) launched him into the next phase of his career while giving Miles Davis the idea for the next phase of his career.
Dream of You is an eerie, emotional experience so buckle up and prepare for a ride into a melodramatic dreamscape that often threatens to turn into a nightmare.
Art
An elegant, perfectly balanced 1950s record sleeve.
I don’t know why most everything is getting more advanced while photography and graphic design seem to be getting worse. In 1956 they knew what they were doing — this is a lovely image effortlessly matched with typography.
During the 1950s, the line between jazz and pop singing was so opaque that Helen Merrill may have been thought of as another “girl singer.” In the modern era Merrill slots nicely into The Cool School of vocalists, especially her fellow New Yorker, Chris Connor, and June Christy from Los Angeles. Visually, all three were presented as pretty but approachable, blonde girls. If anything, Helen Merrill was often pictured on her album sleeves as more alluring and glamourous then Christy or Connor. The latter two were most often photographed in casual clothes instead of vamping evening wear a la Julie London. They were presented as the realistically nice (if often depressive) girls the listener should be with and not the femme fatale that was tempting them into dangerous waters.
Helen Merrill, June Christy, and Chris Connor: 3 Cool Blondes Who Hung Out With The Jazz Guys.
The thing is, if these were the girls next door their neighbors weren’t Eisenhower Era conformists but thoroughly hip, modernist jazz musicians and counter-cultural beatniks. These were artists who sometimes put out daring, off-kilter recordings, especially Christy and Merrill. They weren’t go along to get along Girl Singers but artists who took chances. Chris Connor was steeped in the same NYC jazz scene Helen Merrill grew up in and June Christy came up in Stan Kenton’s challenging big band and was married to an underrated, well-respected saxophonist. Though Christy worked with small group jazz bands every few recordings she collaborated primarily with modernist West Coast arranger Pete Rugolo. This last gent, Rugolo, brings in another connection to Miles Davis, as he produced the Birth of the Cool sessions. That said, Chris Connor and June Christy had more commercially succesful careers in the U.S. than Helen Merrill did. If anything, MMerrill’s often otherworldly voice just made it harder for her to play “normal” the way June Christy and Chris Connor could.
You could look at the Dream of You album cover like a bait and switch for the off-kilter music within it. But, I think it helps to look at it like a David Lynch meditation on American normalcy leading to dark and twisted corners rather than a fake-out that you are going to be getting cheery, Doris Day or Rosemary Clooney style romantic optimism on the album.
Music
EmArcy was launched in 1954 as the jazz subsidiary of Mercury Records. EmArcy almost played like a mini mirror version of Verve — quality mainstream jazz aimed at a mainstream city dwelling audience. EmArcy didn’t flood the market with jazz releases but the records they did put out were Grade A choice. Legendary producer Bob Shad was given EmArcy to run. Shad had recorded much of the first wave of modern blues artists, including Lightnin’ Hopkins, and was on the ground floor of Be-Bop.
Born Jelena Ana Milcetic to Croatia immigrants, Helen Merrill had been a professional jazz singer since the age of 15. She sang with a number of artists and big bands, even recording a weird single with Earl Hines called “A Cigarette For Company” which makes it plain that her unique singing style was always locked into place. Merrill gravitated to modern jazz and was friends with many of the vanguard artists in the NYC community she grew up in, including the Birth of the Cool gang. At Emarcy she joined a small roster of elite jazzers that included vocalists Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, and Billy Eckstine as well as musicians Erroll Garner, Maynard Ferguson, and trumpeter Clifford Brown.
EmArcy knew they had a once in a lifetime genius in Clifford Brown. They first paired him with fellow trumpeters Clark Terry and Maynard Ferguson and they used him as the featured soloist on an album each with Sarah Vaughn and Helen Merrill. Both of these vocal records have become classics of the genre and are often held up as the greatest albums for each artist. Then, Bob Shad had Brown record a lush ballad LP to introduce him to a wider audience that you can read about here.
Producer’s Bob Shad’s approach for Helen Merrill worked. In an age when all jazz vocalists were basically pop singers, he pulled Merrill over to appeal to a jazz audience on her self-titled debut with Clifford Brown, arranged by Quincy Jones, and featuring a host of other talents. The LP earned great reviews and sold quite well for the mid 1950s, when success was measured in the allotments of tens of thousands of albums sold and not in multi millions.
I always place Helen Merrill in little bit of a corner as her vocal style is an acquired taste. Here’s the strange thing — she is true to herself on her debut album and she wouldn’t be changing her style on her subsequent releases. Merrill sings and sounds exactly like she would on more challenging works but for her first LP it just comes off as more approachable and charming. I am not sure why. I am not alone in thinking this. After Verve acquired the EmArcy catalog it is always the songs from this debut that ended up on a host of Verve compilations and songbook albums. When her work for this era is compiled it often has featured cuts from most of her debut album and a few tracks selected from all of her other releases. I really like Helen Merrill but she does earn the Velvet Fog nickname that Mel Torme somehow got stuck with early in his career.
Helen Merrill had a little pull after her first record beat sales expectations. Tragically, she wouldn’t go on to record with her friend Clifford Brown again. The trumpeter, already a legend with jazz musicians, was killed in a car accident, along with Richie Powell and his wife, in June of 1956.
Helen Merrill came in hard with a plan to work with arranger and friend Gil Evans, who was struggling professionally at this time. Producer Bob Shad, who seems like a sympathetic guy, said “No.” In 1956, Evans was respected by jazz musicians but almost completely unknown by the wider jazz listening public. Shad didn’t care about the arranger’s lack of name recognition. It was the fact that Gil Evans worked very slowly and his arrangements were so complex and hard for the musicians to learn that it ate up a lot of studio time. Shad didn’t like that Evans often went into overtime in the studio because of this. It was a financial decision. But, Merrill wouldn’t let Gil Evans go and she finally prevailed, with Shad balancing out her request by having her record a string ballad set first, which was viewed as the more commercial proposition.
Helen Merrill With Strings is a very good album but it didn’t sell like Merrill’s debut. I don’t think anything her or Shad could have done really would have placed her at the same level of popularity as a Dinah Washington, or even a Chris Connor. Helen Merrill is a great singer but her voice is also just innately kind of unsettling. I am not sure if she sounds haunted or like a spirit doing the haunting. June Christy could sound the same way, especially on her accurately titled album Off Beat, but she could also sound fun and carefree. Thankfully, Shad still believed in Helen Merrill and was a man of his word so recording with Gil Evans came next.
It turned out to be a great pairing because if anything Gil Evans’ work often sounds either haunting or haunted, making him a great match for Helen Merrill.
Like all arrangers on vocal dates Gil Evans couldn’t afford to have a working band learn his charts before the recording session. Thankfully, Bob Shad put together superior studio bands for EmArcy dates and didn’t disappoint here. Some standouts talents in the Gil Evans orchestra for this album include Hank Jones on piano, Art Farmer on trumpet, Barry Galbraith on guitar, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Joe Morello on drums. Morello would soon have all of his time taken up when he became the star drummer with The Dave Brubeck Quartet so its nice to see him on a session date.
Bob Shad was no slouch and was correct about the relative expense of the arranger’s work. Gil Evans did take a long time to craft the arrangements for Dream of You and he did go over time in the recording studio to get the music right, which gets expensive when you have to have an orchestra’s worth of musicians in the studio at the same time. During this era albums were usually recorded live-in-the-studio in 1 to 4 days max. I can’t find how many separate dates Dream of You was recorded in but the first session was in July 26 of 1956 and the last went into the end of February, 1957. This was very rare for the era — I don’t think I have seen an album from this era have that expansive of a recording length. I have no idea what sessions the finished songs come from but my guess is that it may have taken the band multiple attempts to get Evans’s charts right and that the final recordings come from Feb of 1957.
It wasn’t exactly that his arrangements were difficult for individual musicians to learn, it was that it was hard for the entire band to be able to play the music together in the same way. Gil Evans was supposed to be a great guy and very easy to work with — he just had his own sound and it wasn’t part of the jazz vocabulary yet. Helen Merrill has nothing but good things to say about the recording process and her time in the studio with Evans.
The final album contains a solid mix of standards from stage and screen plus numbers from the jazz world, including a handful of obscurities. Richard Rodgers is represented by both his work with Lorenz Hart (the lesser recorded “He Was Too Good To Me) and with Oscar Hammerstein (the extremely au courant “People Will Say We’re In Love.”) Frank Sinatra only wrote a handful of songs himself but Merrill does my favorite version of his “I’m A Fool To Want You” after Sinatra’s own Capitol reading — both are total noir wrist-slashers and detail his psycho-sexual relationship with Ava Gardner (it had to have been worth it).
The title track, “Dream of You,” was co-written by Sy Oliver from his time in the Jimmie Lunceford band. Bringing Sinatra back, Sy Oliver was his greatest arranger during his bow-tie Aw Shucks Big Band era. Oliver is now a sadly under-recognized artist but he is a giant in the story of jazz (I believe it was Sy Oliver who blue-printed letting a smaller ensemble inside a big band emerge before everybody comes roaring back in again; he also brought Gospel into jazz in ways that Sy Oliver fan Ray Charles now exclusively gets credited for).
while Eubie Blake’s “You’re Lucky To Me” is one of four tunes on the album I was not otherwise familiar with. The other more obscure tunes are “I’ve Never Seen,” by somebody named Don Marcotte, a dark night of the soul dazzler titled “Troubled Waters” that ends the album and “Where Flamingoes Fly.” The title of this last song may sound like an upbeat, tropical tune but this reading of it plays like the theme song to a Nicholas Ray film noir.
Gil Evans and Helen Merrill got to do their weird thing together:
Probably the most successful upbeat number on the record is Duke Ellington’s “Just A Lucky So & So,” which also highlights a completely different, more mainstream, swinging sound from Gil Evans and allows him to be himself while he gets to tip his hat to one of his heroes, Ellington, who had no trouble smuggling avant-garde influences into his work and creating a few of his own for the rest of the jazz field to follow. What a brilliant arranger Gil Evans is, and what a fine band is playing his charts. And, if you don’t think Helen Merrill can sound like she is having a good time, check her out on this number.
Combine the distinct worlds, and sonic approaches, of “Where Flamingoes Fly” and “Lucky So & So” together and you get Merrill and Evans’s reading of “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home.” Its both swinging and lugibrious; sexy and upbeat yet somehow unsettling (“somehow unsettling” might be a great description for Helen Merrill’s overall singing style). Harold Arlen may be the most under-recognized master composer of the Great Broadway & Classic Hollywood era. He was definitely the most blues/jazz based. Lyricist Johnny Mercer may have been his greatest songwriting partner.
Dream of You is always a compelling work but its also a solitary listen. Blast it around party company and you are liable to find yourself sitting alone with the balloons. Playing it for a romantic partner might result in an empty bed. Maybe only Nina Simone gets as off-kilter as Helen Merrill though Simone’s backing accompaniment usually grounds her in normalcy whereas Gil Evans is traveling in waters as troubled as his vocalist.
Helen Merrill and Gil Evans tried to go on tour together but it was a disaster. Gil Evans had yet to make a name for himself and they couldn’t afford the orchestra he had in the studio that had taken the time to learn the arrangements and gel as an ensemble. Pick-up bands couldn’t sight read Gil Evans’ very challenging charts nor get the special collective Gil Evans feel of his music down instantly. Merrill likened the resulting music as the sound of musicians crashing into each other and the tour was aborted.
Helen Merrill recorded only two more albums for EmArcy. The last one, The Nearness of You is almost up there with her brilliant debut. Five cuts on it feature pianist Bill Evans on piano and it houses fantastic versions of “Softly As a Morning Sunrise” and “Bye Bye Blackbird” (my mum’s favorite song).
Merrill would never really click in the States beyond jazz clubs and cabarets but she had very successful periods in Italy and France — she even recorded a great record in Italian during an extended stay in Europe. Her most enduring career success has been in Japan, where she lived for a number of years and where she retains a large cult following. Japanese fans refer to Merrill as the “Sigh Of New York” (as great as that nickname is listen to enough Helen Merrill and maybe Siren of New York Harbor is more accurate). There is a nice interview with her on the Jazz Wax site, where she comes across as a grounded, sensible artist as well as a beatnik free-thinker. She took a fair amount of time out of singing and touring to raise a family but her final marriage was to Torrie Zito (a solid jazz arranger himself) and her career has lasted decades. She is still with us well into her 90s — a true rarity for those living the jazz life. Or, any kind of life really.
If working with Gil Evans had very little positive impact on Helen Merrill’s immediate commercial prospects it certainly showed her a path forward. Merrill has taken on a few projects that seemed like they were stabs at a more mainstream career (like recording Country songs) but overall she has kept tight with the jazz free-thinkers, often in stripped down duet formats of one voice and one instrument. Other key recording collaborators have included Gary Peacock, John Lewis, Steve Lacy, and Ron Carter to name just a few.
And, in 1987, she revisited Dream of You on a new recording with her old friend Gil Evans. The initial plan was for them to record new material together but Evans was dying of cancer at the time. So, they ended up rerecording his charts from their original collaboration and added in “Summertime” at the top. It was a major label release on the reborn EmArcy label and, if anything, it received a lot more press and sold better than their first set together 30 years earlier ever did. The Penguin Guide to Jazz described Collaboration, the resulting release as “One of the strangest singer-and-orchestra records ever made.” They obviously had never heard Dream of You.
Helen Merrill took a big career swing with Dream of You and it ended up cementing in her place as a cherished cult singer. But, the album had a major impact on Gil Evans career. One of the friends Helen Merrill kept talking about the project to, throughout the process, was Miles Davis, who loved the resulting recordings and said he should start working with Gil again.
Gil Evans actually wrote a number of charts for Johnny Mathis’s debut LP around the same time (not realizing they had a major crossover pop star on their hands, Columbia initially surrounded Mathis with serious jazz backing). Gil’s earlier work with Miles or his charts with Mathis don’t sound like the music on Dream of You. But, Evans’s subsequent recordings with Davis, starting with Miles Ahead, are very much in the vein of his work on this Helen Merrill album. In a nice change of pace, instead of being leftfield weirdo music Gil Evans’ collaborations with Miles Davis became amongst the very best-selling jazz albums of the 1950s and early ’60s. Their most commercially successful collaboration, Sketches of Spain, is ironically the least commercial sounding. Its always nice when overestimating your audience’s taste works out.
Dream of You was the sound of Gil Evans becoming the Gil Evans who would become much listened to for the rest of his life. I have read a couple biographies of Gil Evans. Helen Merrill gets a couple sentences in each one but she, and Dream of You, deserve at least a few pages, if not a complete chapter, in a book on Gil Evans’s career.
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