Barnes & Noble
When she displayed her multi-octave vocal range on the concert stage, she was The Divine One. When she stopped her nightclub act cold with her playful humor, she was Sassy. They were both endearing nicknames for Sarah Vaughan, who went from Divine to Sassy without missing a beat. No matter which she was called, she was proclaimed the most vocally gifted jazz performer of all time. Vaughan's more than forty-year recording career encompassed classic jazz dates with the greatest instrumentalists as well as pop sessions where she first recorded other people's hit songs, then created her own. And she was singing with world-class symphony orchestras by the Eighties, when she attained diva status - a status to which some say she had actually been born.
All Music Guide
With cooperation from the Verve and Columbia Legacy catalogs, the Ken Burns Jazz series on CD individually spotlights the musical excellence of 22 jazz originators whose careers and influence are explored in Burns' PBS documentary Jazz. Sarah Vaughan is in the elite triumvirate of 20th century jazz and popular music vocalists, matched by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday in creativity and vocal ability. Vaughan spent the majority of her career as a soloist, accompanied through the years by various orchestras under the direction of George Threadwell, Ernie Wilkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Tadd Dameron, Hal Mooney, and Quincy Jones, all briefly represented on this disc. These 16 tracks, recorded for an assortment of labels including Mercury, Pablo, EmArcy, Musicraft, and Columbia, move from early bop-oriented material ("Interlude") to middle-of-the-road pop/jazz ("Misty," "I Feel Pretty"), concluding with a 1985 version of "Send in the Clowns." Sarah Vaughan maintained her miraculous voice throughout a career spanning five decades. While it's impossible to sum up Vaughan's history on a single disc, the highlights on Ken Burns Jazz retain enough interest for the listener to continue searching out more of her material. Les Campbell