Ahmad Jamal with Voices - The Bright, The Blue And The Beautiful (1968) [24bit FLAC]

The Bright, the Blue and the Beautiful is an album by American jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal featuring performances recorded in 1968 and released on the Cadet label.Take a jazz pianist of supremely vast talent, harness him to a pop choir that sounds like a laboratory of berserk Doris Day clones, and the result is the kind of thing you won't soon forget. Jamal's playing -- the only thing to recommend this travesty -- is of minor interest, drowned as it is in lungfuls of saccharine. Grafted onto the authentic black art of Jamal is a sound like anxious muzak, the bland vocalists trying hard to inject something spirited into their craft as they race uncomfortably to keep up with his arrangements: a very unpleasant valley sunday it is, too. This is Frankenstein jazz, the component pieces stitched together into a staggering, electrode-popping whole. I suppose this crossover idea appealed to an industry watching jazz sales decline. (One thinks of Verve around the same time mutilating the late Wes Montgomery's Willow Weep for Me in similar, if far less histrionic fashion.) A bad turn, but Jamal would quickly return to form with the brilliant The Awakening.