Sarah Vaughan: Everything I Have is Yours

Sarah Vaughan
Everything I Have is Yours
Shout Factory
2009-03-03

On Everything I Have is Yours, Sarah Vaughan straddles the big band and smaller combo sounds with a loose assemblage of songs recorded throughout 1946 and ’47. The guests are prodigious and impressive: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Teddy Wilson and Buck Clayton. And while Vaughan’s tone is like smoky crystal and the sidemen all perform admirably, the bop-laced exuberance of her work with Parker and Gillespie casts a mighty shadow, and overdrawn arrangements and overripe string figures too frequently gum up the collection. Sarah Vaughan’s position in the popular imagination as the least conspicuous member of a trinity of female jazz vocalists that includes Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald might be unfair, especially given Vaughan’s unerring versatility and her unmatchable tonal clarity. But Everything I Have is Yours isn’t the best evidence in her defense.

RATING 6 / 10