Irene Kral - In the Name of Love (2017)

Tracklist

01. Comes Love
02. It's a Wonderful World
03. The Night We Called It a Day
04. Rock Me to Sleep
05. Detour Ahead
06. I Let a Song Go out of My Heart
07. The Meaning of the Blues
08. It Isn't so Good
09. Lazy Afternoon
10. What's Right for You
11. Guess I'll Hang My Tears out to Dry
12. This Little Love of Ours
13. Something to Remember You By
14. Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most
15. I'd Know You Anywhere
16. This Is Always
17. Better Than Anything
18. The Touch of Your Lips
19. Memphis in June
20. Nobody Else but Me
21. Passing By
22. No More
23. Everybody Knew but Me
24. Just Friends



Irene Kral (January 18, 1932 – August 15, 1978) was an American jazz singer who was born to Czechoslovakian parents in Chicago, Illinois, and settled in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. She died, due to breast cancer, in Encino, California.

Kral's older brother, Roy Kral, was a successful musician when she started singing professionally as a teenager. She sang with bands on tours led by Woody Herman and Chubby Jackson, former Herman bass player. She joined Maynard Ferguson's band in the late 1950s and sang with groups led by Stan Kenton and Shelly Manne. She then started a solo career until her death at 46 years of age. She was a ballad singer who stated that Carmen McRae was one of her inspirations. She became more famous posthumously when Clint Eastwood used her recordings in his 1995 movie The Bridges of Madison County.

Her style has been compared to that of Carmen McRae (the two singers were friends). Dana Countryman quotes from Lorraine Dahl's 1984 book on women in jazz, Stormy Weather: "Irene Kral had a lovely, resonant voice with a discreet vibrato, flawless diction and intonation, and a slight, attractive nasality and shaping of phrases that resembled Carmen McRae's. But where McRae's readings tend to the astringent, Kral's melt like butter. She was a master of quiet understatement and good taste.

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