A Special Bonus Post : Catherine Russell & Sean Mason "My Ideal"

(An Album That I am Very Proud to be Involved With)

As I detail in the text below, I’ve been in love with the singing of Catherine Russell for roughly 20 years now, and I’ve written about her many times in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Sun. However, for me this is a major occasion - the first time that the great lady herself (and her wonderful husband, Paul Kahn) have invited me to pen liner notes for one of her wonderful albums. (As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t nearly enough Cat Russell albums - if only this were the early ‘60s, when artists like Peggy Lee and Nancy Wilson fave us three or four great albums a year! ) In any case, I was delighted to be asked, and I was so happy with the result that I asked Cat and Paul for permission to include this liner-note essay as a SubStack “post.” Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the notes, and the album even more so. (PS: NARAS, what the Sam Hill are you waiting for? As far as I’m concerned, this is the next Grammy-winner right here.)

Before I forget - you can order or pre-order the album (release date August 23rd) here.

The first time I heard Catherine Russell, I wanted to quit my job.

I shall explain: I have been writing about jazz, and singers in particular, for my whole career, and I always took professional pride in knowing everybody who was out there - or at least anybody who was any good. And here was this remarkable woman, who seemed to have sprung fully-formed - as if from the head of Zeus. I met her at a centennial concert honoring the legendary trumpeter Doc Cheatham - that's how I remember the year was 2005. This short, pretty woman - with a name I had never heard - climbed on the stage of the newly-opened Rose Hall and started singing. And immediately, my world was rocked. My reaction was: I’m supposed to be the guy who knows who all the great singers are, past and present. How can this woman be so cosmically great and I've never heard of her? How long has this been going on? Obviously, I am in the wrong line of work. (Now is the time to take up turkey farming.)

In my defense, I already was very familiar with both of her parents, I knew Luis Russell's music and career and I had heard Carline Ray play and sing many times. And Catherine herself somehow had managed to get to this stage in her career without ever having made a solo album, or, as far as I can tell, an important appearance in a major New York club. She had sung backup for more A-list pop stars than I can name, from Cyndi Lauper to David Bowie to Steely Dan—even to Michael Feinstein. Not long after the Cheatham Centennial concert, I went to the launch show for her debut album, Cat (2006), and she immediately joined the short list of singers whom I feel obliged to see perform every time they are working anywhere within a 500-mile radius.

Catherine Russell and Sean Mason have a lot in common from the git-go: while they both can handily and succinctly be described as jazz artists, they're both experts at handling a very wide range of music from across the African-American and American popular music spectrum, starting with the blues in all its forms - from the classic blues of the Bessie Smith idiom to the basic blues of the Mississippi Delta to the more polished R&B of Louis Jordan, to jazz in every subgenre from the 1920s to the modern era, the Great American Songbook and jazz standards, songs from Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley - I know of no singer with a potentially wider range of choice for material. And even though merely 25 years old at the time of this recording, Sean is well equipped to support her on the journey.

Since 2006, Cat has released eight "solo" albums and I prize them all, especially Send For Me (2022), on which she recorded for the first time with Sean. But My Ideal is a special project even in the very rarified strata where Catherine works; this is not only her first complete set of voice-and-piano duets, but her partner on this project is a remarkable piano prodigy, a player who has become a virtuoso even though he was barely a toddler around the time of Catherine's "emergence" 20 years ago.

Cat and Sean's album of voice & piano duets puts them in good stead with other projects in this long-venerated tradition: Ella Fitzgerald's Ella Sings Gershwin with Ellis Larkins (1950) and The Intimate Ella with Paul Smith (1960); June Christy's Duet with Stan Kenton (1955); Tony Bennett's Tony Sings for Two with Ralph Sharon (1961) and the two Tony Bennett / Bill Evans albums (1975) and (1977); Mel Tormé and George Shearing on numerous sessions; André Previn with both Doris Day and Dinah Shore; and Nina Simone and Piano (1969), among others.

Then too, any number of blues classics of the '20s were recorded with just piano accompaniment: the original 1926 disc of the little-known Caroline Johnson singing "Ain't Got Nobody To Grind My Coffee" is notable not for the singer, but more for the song, composed by Spencer Williams, author of a vast catalog of early jazz standards, and even more for the accompanist, the legendary Fats Waller. "Grind My Coffee" is a basic double-entendre song of the kind associated with Andy Razaf, to that songwriter's own dismay. Both Cat and Sean fully capture the spirit by grinding away amiably.

The Fat One's canon is represented by three songs, although coincidentally, he apparently didn't actually write any of them himself. I applaud Cat's choice particularly of "A Porter's Love Song (To A Chambermaid)" in that two of Fats's closest compadres, Andy Razaf and James P. Johnson, wrote it for a revue celebrating African American achievement (albeit in a highly specific area). Cat and Sean start rubato with the witty verse, then move into the even more witty chorus, proving that humor is not only a balm, but, in this case, a weapon.

"You Stayed Away Too Long" a rarely-revived Fats disc from 1935, illustrates the integrated nature of the music industry as a song by a Caucasian composer, Richard Whiting (the same author of the standard "My Ideal"), and an African-American lyricist, J. C. Johnson. As with Fats, Cat and Sean's version is playful, but with very sharply accented rhythm. Cat sings in a tone of mock-admonishment that seems to suggest, "Well, I may be kidding... but maybe not." The moral is simple: don't stay away too long.

If Waller was the great singer-pianist of the 1930s, the great singing keyboardist of 20 years later, the jazz-into-soul era, was Ray Charles. "I Don't Need No Doctor" and "Ain't That Love" are no less erotic than the coffee-grinding number, but they're blues of a different stripe, of a more spiritual source. The underlying harmonies that both The Genius and Sean play are clearly derived from gospel music, which in itself has a close interrelationship with the blues.

"You Can Depend On Me" could be said to come from the canon of the great singer-pianist in between Waller and Charles, Nat King Cole. This 1931 song is by Cole's major inspiration, the great pianist Earl Fatha Hines, and the definitive historical recordings are by Louis Armstrong in 1931 and Cole on his classic 1956 album After Midnight (1956). Sean and Cat shift from a double tresillo rhythm to a stride feel, and then bring it back again, as if to rather literally illustrate how they can depend on each other. Sean honors both the Fatha and the King in his piano solo.

Louis Armstrong also recorded "On The Sentimental Side," written for Bing Crosby in the 1938 movie Dr. Rhythm. Armstrong was also hired to do a number for that picture, which was filmed and recorded, but the scene was deleted and the footage lost. Still, "Sentimental Side" is a first-rate song by Crosby's longtime scribe Johnny Burke; Cat and Sean's interpretation is more melancholy than sentimental.

"The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing" also comes from a Bing Crosby movie, White Christmas (1954) although it was introduced by Danny Kaye and Vera Ellen. Irving Berlin wrote dozens of songs about dancing, but this is one of the few that wasn't inspired by Fred Astaire. Cat and Sean's reading illustrates how a voice-and-piano duet is a very specific kind of a dance unto itself. Sean tellingly adjusts the rhythmic phrasing behind Cat in the bridge, and gets more strident in his instrumental break. The twosome keep it simple, in the true spirit of Berlin, complete with a witty piano tag.

"My Ideal" is also simple and sincere; Cat's vocal is effectively understated, and Sean puts in all the work necessary to both support her and stay out of her way - which is much more difficult than it sounds. Sean tinkles out a subtle melodic variation in the treble and in general plays with the authority of a musician many years older.

Frank Sinatra introduced "South To  a Warmer Place" by musical sage Alec Wilder and North Carolina-based composer Loonis McGlohon on his last great album, She Shot Me Down (1981). Cat recorded it beautifully on her second album, Sentimental Streak (2008), but I prefer this newer version, in which she perfectly captures the stealth humor of the text and Sean knowingly adjusts the musical temperature from cooler to warmer behind her.

"Waitin' For The Train To Come In," one of Peggy Lee's earliest "solo" (post-Benny Goodman) recordings, is part of a short-lived genre of "end of war" songs, very specific to the year 1945. Cat and Sean's performance is full of anticipation, and concludes the album perfectly as it wryly suggests that something great is about to happen. Having just listened to all eleven songs on My Ideal, we are well aware that something great has already happened.

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coming next:
The Dinah Washington Centennial -
A Complete Annotated Filmography

Part One:
The Showtime at the Apollo Films (1954)

Part Two:
Bandstand Revue (1955)
Crescendo (1957)

Part Three:
Jazz on a Summer’s Day (filmed 1957, released 1958)

Part Four
Here’s Duffy (CBC 1959)
The Singin’, Swingin’ Years (1960)

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Very special thanks to the fabulous Ms. Elizabeth Zimmer, for expert proofreading of this page, and scanning for typos, mistakes, and other assorted boo-boos!

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Sing! Sing! Sing! : My tagline is, “Celebrating the great jazz - and jazz-adjacent - singers, as well as the composers, lyricists, arrangers, soloists, and sidemen, who help to make them great.”
A production of KSDS heard Saturdays at 10:00 AM Pacific; 1:00PM Eastern.
To listen to KSDS via the internet (current and recent shows are available for streaming.) click here.
The whole series is also listenable on Podbean.com; click here.

SING! SING! SING!

June 29 - Americana - For the Fourth of July - Songs of Civil Rights & The African American Experience
July 6 - The Four Freshmen & Other Great Jazz Vocal Groups of the 1950s
July 13 - Bastille Day: Guest Co-Host ERIC COMSTOCK shares his favorite French songs! Formidable!
July 20 - The Margaret Whiting Centennial: “Happy Birthday Maggie!”
July 27 - “Calypso Blues” OR “It’s The New Calypso Bebop!”
August 3 - The Tony Bennett Birthday Special: Tony Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
August 10 - “A Little Moonlight & A Little Tenderness: The Harry Woods Songbook”
August 17 - “Fat Daddies & Skinny Mamas: The Body Positive Show”
August 24 -”The Dinah Washington Centennial: Back to The Blues”
August 31 - “Nautical But Nice - Songs in the Key of Sea”

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SLOUCHING TOWARDS BIRDLAND is a subStack newsletter by Will Friedwald.  The best way to support my work is with a paid subscription, for which I am asking either $5 a month or $50 per year.  Thank you for considering. (Thanks as always to Beth Naji & Arlen Schumer for special graphics.) Word up, peace out, go forth and sin no more! (And always remember: “A man is born, but he’s no good no how, without a song.”)

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