This is one of the greatest live albums I have ever heard, possibly the greatest. It is a collections of songs recorded at a Los Angeles jazz club in 1971. Carmen McRae was a spectacular, if overlooked singer who had personality in fountains and a deeply expressive and distinctive voice.

I came to this album through a circuitous route, having found Carmel – the album I wrote about previously – in the nineteen eighties. This led me to listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and beginning to explore music made well before my time. Carmen McRae is a lesser known singer who was active at the same time as Ella, Sarah and Dinah and who continued her career beyond the time that swing and big band music was popular. This album was made at the beginning of the seventies in a small jazz club and although you can hear that Carmen’s voice has aged, it has a strength and rasp that I find powerful and different from other singers of the era. Her voice is equally well alluring and suits her material very well.

The in-between song introductions are as captivating as the songs themselves and show Carmen’s personality – something that was impossible for me to know as I was not there at the time. This album captures her live performance and her personality in a way that a studio album never could. It is also impeccably recorded and sounds crisp and clear on vinyl, with just a hint of my copy’s crackle to remind me that it was made in the early seventies. If I could slip back in time for an evening, there would be one place that I would want to go – Donte’s Jazz Club, Los Angeles, November 6th 1971.