Jackie & Roy
Jazz Classics by Charlie Ventura's Band (Savoy Jazz 0218)

Jackie Cain & Roy Kral worked their weird little niche of the jazz world for some 50 years, with the solid gimmick of being a husband-and-wife vocal bebop team. Back in 1948 they exploded onto the jazz scene with an utterly fresh approach to vocalese that, as it had to, exhausted its magic within a couple years. Their enduring appeal has as much to do with their personalities as with their talent, so it's fortunate that in both cases they're a class act.

On their first (I presume) album, Jackie & Roy perform with saxophonist Charlie Ventura's septet, not singing so much as doubling the sax lines with eerily synchronized unison vocal lines: Roy sings an octave below Jackie, and they both sing stuff like "bo-dee-oh-bwee-dee" and "baw-doo-doo-bway" and that sort of thing.

It's good-time white jazz, very nice, very unique, quite listenable, but not a classic by any means. Unlike Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross and (later) the Manhattan Transfer, this vocalese style focuses only on melody and not at all on harmony, so the vocalists are treated more as instruments than as voices replacing instruments.

So what happens is there will be 35 seconds of wonderful, interesting sound while the voices are singing along, then a minute and a half of mediocre West Coast bebop. Blame it on the band!

Highlights: "Euphoria," "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," and "Pina Colada." The rest of this 29-minute rarity is rounded out mainly by standards. The sound is fair, clearly mastered from vinyl (with audible pops in places), but fans of vocal jazz will likely delight in this, for the most part.

Unfortunately for me, I'm not stuck in the past like some people and this to me is just one more remnant of 1948. It's a relic of a bygone era—not in the way that Joe DiMaggio's uniform is, but more like one of those "Life" magazines you see at shopping mall antique shows, when the feature on the cover is something like refrigerators instead of Dwight Eisenhower.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Rich Hall II