What defines a jazz singer? A question that has long stirred the minds of fans and critics. Regarding this, it does not hurt to consult an old master, who has experienced the development of jazz fi rsthand and was in close personal contact with the greats of this music: Nat Hentoff , Grand Seigneur among jazz authors. He names three key elements, which are equally true for instrumentalists: swing (as implicit and present as the heartbeat), feeling (which one cannot learn, because it expresses how profoundly one has dealt with himself and life), and the personal sound that comes from the fi rst two factors.If this is too abstract, you only have to experience the great artists on this CD box: twenty completely diff erent individualists who, apart from range of voice and other technical factors, have found their personal voice and can easily entice listeners into their cosmos. Aretha Franklin cannot be left out with a recording from her jazz beginnings, skills which are still outstanding today, as one could witness at the great jazz concert for Barack Obama at the White House in 2016, as well as these goddesses of jazz: Ella, Billie, Sarah and Dinah. But there is also a lot of room for musical diversity and the discovery of talents, which have not made a great career for themselves for a variety of reasons - or are even forgotten today.At second glance it is worthwhile to notice how completely diff erent and individual their interpretative approaches are by comparing the songs in the various versions assembled here, be it with one of the now classic jazz standards from the Great American songbook or the then completely new songs of Oscar Brown Jr., which are presented here in fantastic interpretations by Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and Sheila Jordan, and which became the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA of the Sixties.Accompanying these great singers are equally great instrumentalists, virtuosos like Cliff ord Brown (Sarah Vaughan), Milt Jackson and Max Roach (Dinah Washington), Stanley Turrentine and Wynton Kelly (Abbey Lincoln), Jay Jay Johnson and Herbie Mann (Chris Connor), Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer and Chet Baker (Annie Ross), and the outstanding orchestral directors and arrangers Quincy Jones and Sy Oliver (Della Reese) and many others legends from this Golden Age of Jazz, which today can only be admired from a distance, by means of recordings.
