One in a string of Carmen McCrae’s collaborations, this album joins the soulful jazz singer with one of the numerous incarnations of the big band headed by pianist Francy Boland and drummer Kenny Clarke, giving the joint sessions successful operations in moods of joy, sorrow, and mixtures of the two. Despite the size of the big band (sixteen members in all, with five on saxophones alone), the songs are kept neat and precise in their performance, with practically no improvisational tangents to be heard, and exacting deployment of supporting or underscoring lines.
The album’s stand-out track may be “Dear Death”, which finds McRae imploring death to take her to join her departed lover, with the wind instruments wrapping carefully around her longing delivery. However, all of the songs are high quality in both structuring and emoting, though a couple are so short as to seem almost out of place. Fine jazz and a great combo, but unfortunately, the eight songs together add up to less than half an hour’s worth of material.
Here’s the cover art used for the Italian reissue.
Scrambled Brains 