Carmen McRae’s ‘Bird Of A Feather’ Joins Verve Vault Series
The 1958 vocal album emerges from the Verve archive on high-quality vinyl.
Carmen McRae’s 1958 album Birds Of A Feather is getting reissued in style. The bird-themed vocal album is joining the Verve Vault Series, bringing the collection of tracks to high-quality vinyl for the first time in years. Birds Of A Feather is available for pre-order now.
Released in 1958, Birds Of A Feather is oriented around a simple, obvious theme: Birds. This is clearly reflected in the album’s track list, which includes classic standards like “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Skylark,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” and “When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along).” Though the songs share a theme, Birds Of A Feather transcends gimmickry to present a range of sounds, underscored by an expert, lush orchestra. Other musicians featured on the album include tenor saxophonist Al Cohn, trumpeter Marky Markowitz, and pianist Don Abney.
The range displayed on Birds Of A Feather will be familiar to fans of Carmen McRae, who never fully identified as a jazz-specific singer. “I am jazz oriented; if it weren’t for jazz I wouldn’t be anywhere. I only want to be categorized as a good or a bad singer,” she explained years later in a 1970 interview. “I originally started as a so-called jazz singer. I was dubbed that somewhere along the line, and I never really thought about it. I really didn’t start out to be a jazz singer; I just started out to sing. But it was awfully hard, as it is for any musician, to play and not to improvise in some sort of way on the melody. If doing that made me a jazz singer, then yes, that’s what I am.”
Birds Of A Feather joins a host of other premium recordings from the Verve archive in the Verve Vault Series. Also coming soon is This Is Billy Mitchell from the saxophonist and bandleader, along with reissues from Mel Tormé, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and many more.
