Dinah Jams

Recorded in a single evening on August 14, 1954 at a Hollywood studio before an invited audience, this session grew out of producer Bob Shad's plan to pair Dinah Washington, already a star of the rhythm-and-blues circuit, with the modern jazz musicians then working the West Coast clubs. The core of the horn section was drawn from the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet, newly formed and about to become one of the defining hard-bop groups of the decade, with Max Roach's drums and Richie Powell's piano anchoring the rhythm section while Maynard Ferguson, Clark Terry and Herb Geller sat in for extended stretches. Washington had spent most of the previous decade scoring blues and R&B hits for Mercury, and this loosely structured, jam-session format let her stand alongside first-rank jazz improvisers on standards rather than the shorter commercial sides that had built her reputation, a pairing that both tested and confirmed her standing as a jazz singer. The extended, multi-song medley that fills side one, built around "Alone Together," "Summertime" and "Come Rain or Come Shine," gave the horns room to stretch far beyond the three-minute single, with Clifford Brown's solo work drawing particular notice for its combination of technical control and melodic invention in the final months before his death in 1956. Critics and later listeners have singled the album out as a high point in Washington's catalogue precisely because it catches her trading phrases with musicians of Brown's and Roach's caliber on equal footing, and it is remembered today as one of the era's landmark vocal-jazz jam sessions, still cited for the chemistry between Washington's blues-rooted phrasing and the quintet's hard-bop drive.