JAZZED (Vinyl)

There is something quietly extraordinary about JAZZED.

Not because it is another posthumous Eva Cassidy album. There have been many of those since her death in 1996. Nor because modern recording technology has made it possible to hear familiar performances in fresh musical settings. The remarkable thing about JAZZED is that it fulfils an idea first imagined almost thirty years ago.

Shortly after Blix Street Records released Live at Blues Alley, label owner Bill Straw prepared the draft of an album entitled The Jazz Side of Eva Cassidy. The intention was straightforward: to gather together performances that revealed Eva's natural affinity for jazz and present them as a coherent portrait of one aspect of her artist-ry. It was an attractive idea, but one that had to wait. Some of the performances that now form the backbone of JAZZED had yet to be discovered, while others were scattered across different albums. Equally important, the technology required to separate Eva's original vocals from their accompaniments and combine them convincingly with newly recorded instrumental performances simply did not exist. JAZZED is the musical descendant of that original concept, drawing together recordings made during Eva's lifetime and presenting them in a way that was impossi-ble when the idea was first conceived.

The most important immediate precedent for JAZZED was I Can Only Be Me. After eleven posthumous albums, a new concept used audio-restoration work to separate Eva's original vocals from their accompaniments and place them within arrangements by Bill Ross & Joachem van der Saag and Christopher Willis, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. Just as Linda Ron-stadt had been presented in a different light through Nelson Riddle's string arrangements in the 1980s, Eva's performances could now be heard in a new orchestral context. JAZZED uses that experience for a different purpose: not to present an orches-tral overview, but to complete the jazz album that Straw had first contemplated soon after Live at Blues Alley. The upgrade would combine Eva's timeless vocals with musical arrangement descendants of the three arrangers associated with the re-birth of Frank Sinatra's enduring Capitol Records' second career, the moody Gordon Jenkins and swinging Nelson riddle and Billy May.

The ten tracks span Eva's recording career from 1987 to 1996. Some remain in their original form, four have new band settings by Christopher Willis, and two retain the orchestral arrangements first heard on I Can Only Be Me.
Nearly thirty years after Bill Straw first imagined it, The Jazz Side of Eva Cassidy first draft is no longer just an idea. It is the fully formed JAZZED.