Scrambling to keep up when the pop album expanded in 1955 from 10 to 12 inches, Atlantic quickly began adding singers to its roster of artists. Among them was Chris Connor, who was signed by the label in 1956 after she left Bethlehem Records that year. Between '56 and '60, she would record 15 superb albums for Atlantic, including the remarkable Sings the George Gershwin Almanac of Song.
When I interviewed Chris in 2008, she told me she personally chose all of the songs she recorded at Atlantic, often spending hours at Colony Records in New York's Brill Building running her fingers through boxes of sheet music to find great little-known tunes.
While most fans are familiar with her albums, her 45s for Atlantic are lesser known. Now all 24 sides have been collected on Chris Connor: The Complete Atlantic Singles 1956-1960 (Blue Moon). By now, long-time JazzWax readers know that Chris is my favorite jazz singer. My preference for her takes nothing away from Ella Fitzgerald, June Christy, Sarah Vaughan, Anita O'Day, Dinah Washington, Julie London and plenty of others. I just find that Chris's voice and what she does with a song speaks to me. I love her tissue-dry huskiness and hip approach on a melody, and her sense of time is superb.
When I told her so during our phone conversation back in 2008, she was taken aback. Chris never viewed herself as exceptional. She never made it into the A-league on pop-jazz singers for a variety of reasons, and I'm sure she was painfully aware that she wasn't promoted as smartly or as aggressively as, say, June Christy and her other contemporaries.
Put on a recording of Chris singing a ballad and you find yourself with the hippest voice on vinyl. If you get where she's coming from, you'll hear an extra dimension that transcends the narrative spelled out in a song's lyric. It's a place where emotional suffering and joy intersect along with reedy intonation and urbane cool. The songs will seem almost whispered to you on a rainy night.
On this album of Atlantic singles, Chris is featured with a glam collection of arrangements by Ray Ellis, Herbie Mann, Richard Wess and Stan Applebaum. Not all of the arrangements are perfect or even ideal for her, largely because the arrangers seem to have been torn between Chris's unique approach and what Atlantic wanted to achieve on the radio and in jukeboxes. But Chris overrides these few instrumental shortcomings to make the selectons timeless. Songs that work best are Go 'Way From My Window, Past the Age of Innocence, Time Out for Tears, I Won't Cry Anymore, Misty, Invitation and Leiber and Stoller's interesting I Only Want Some. And then there's my favorite on the album, Circus, which Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers would record in 1961 with the same feel. Many of these singles feature Percy Faith-like choirs found on Johnny Mathis's records of the period.
Chris Connor died in 2009. You'll find Part 1 of my five-part interview with her in 2008 here. To find subsequent parts, simply scroll up to the top of the post and look above the red date, where you'll see a link.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find Chris Connor: The Complete Atlantic Singles 1956-1960 (Blue Moon) here or here.
JazzWax clips: Here's Misty in 1959, with Herbie Mann and His Afro-Cuban Band...
Here's Past the Age of Innocence in 1956, arranged by Ray Ellis...
Here's Circus in 1958, with an uncredited arranger and orchestra, though I suspect the arranger may have been Mundell Lowe...
And here's Art Blakey's version of Circus in 1961...
