Jazz / Ballads, Vocal Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz
Patty Waters - Piano, Liner Notes, Vocals
Allen Youngblood - Piano
Byron Coley Liner Notes
Christopher E. Stephens Translation
Chuck Stewart Photography
Don Kaplan Piano
Gary Hobish Mastering
Joe Newman Quartet Trumpet
Kearney Barton Engineer
Masaki Batoh Liner Notes
Pat Thomas Producer
Patrick Roques Producer, Design, Art Direction
Rick Wilson Digital Restoration
Steve Atkins Engineer
Susie Foot Engineer
Tom Wilson Producer
Wally Sound Pre-Production, Transfers
The Patty Waters who appears on You Thrill Me: A Musical Odyssey 1960-1979 stands in stark contrast to the free jazz maven of Sings and College Tour. The music collected here by San Francisco's Water label is previously unreleased. It is assembled from a collection of home recordings, many of which feature Waters accompanying herself on piano on her own compositions. The recording quality varies, but the quality of the performances does not. This is music from the other side of the blues. There is joy here, but it is tempered by something far more vulnerable, dark, and heartbroken. Whether she is singing the Jax beer jingle that opens the collection, Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia," or one of her own tunes (such as the title track) or the stark and lovely "At Last I Found You," the contrast between romance and regret, light and dark, optimism and acceptance is ever present in the grain of her voice. Her cover of Billie Holiday's "Fine and Mellow," with its lilting swing, is another choice moment here. The 14-and-a-half-minute "Touched By Rodin in a Paris Museum" is an anomaly in that it is a completely instrumental piece, featuring Waters' beautiful pianism which, in style and tone, is commensurate with her singing. Finally, a charming aspect of this package is in the form of brief dialogues with her recording engineer that precede some of the tracks. The package is full of photographs and liner notes by Waters, Ghost's guitarist Masaki Batoh, and Byron Coley. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
Patty Waters
Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '90s and '00s
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Avant-Garde, Ballads, Free Jazz, Vocal Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz
Largely overlooked during her brief recording career in the mid-'60s, Patty Waters has come to be appreciated as a vocal innovator in not just jazz, but contemporary music as a whole. Much of her repertoire was given over to hushed piano solo ballads, in which her voice could fade to a whisper that was barely audible. What really attracted attention were her avant-garde outings, in which she stretched and mutated her voice with contorted shrieks and wails that could be downright blood-curdling. Producing an unsettling effect that is definitely not for everybody, Waters has to be acknowledged as a vocalist who has tested the limits of what the human voice is capable of, in a similar manner as fellow pioneers Joan LaBarbara and Yoko Ono.
Waters' early influences were the fairly conventional ones of Billie Holiday, Nancy Wilson, and Anita O'Day. After moving to New York in the early '60s, she was heard in a nightclub by Albert Ayler, who recommended her to the renowned experimental jazz label ESP. The first side of her 1965 debut (Sings) was given over entirely to self-composed solo piano miniatures, leaving listeners somewhat unprepared for the second side, which consisted solely of her 13-minute interpretation of "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair." Building into hair-raising screams and vocal improvisations, augmented by a small, free jazz combo, it remains the performance for which she is most noted.
Waters, sadly, only recorded one more album, the live College Tour, just a few months later. A more determinedly avant-garde effort than her debut, it featured entirely different (and mostly self-composed) songs than her debut. Waters often eschewed words altogether for wordless moan-scats and wails, and opted for a fuller band backing, including appearances by pianists Ran Blake and Burton Greene. Aside from a subsequent appearance as a member of the Marzette Watts Ensemble on a 1968 LP, nothing else was heard from Waters on record until 1996. Her mystique was enhanced over the decades by the rarity of her two ESP discs, which have recently been reissued on CD in Germany.
---Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide |
