Dinah Washington: The Fabulous Miss D. auf 4 CDs

Dinah Washington was the undisputed Queen of the Jukeboxes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the pre-LP, pre-45s era when that title meant everything. Dinah had huge hits and sell-out shows; she was a leading lady of the new Mercury label as well as a star of the blues circuit and the new genre of rhythm & blues. Admired by the jazz community, noticed by the pop world, within a few years she conquered both.

The Fabulous Miss D! chronicles the first 10 years of her extraordinary short-lived career. This 4-CD box set includes 107 tracks: 102 of them 78-rpm singles from the Mercury label, the rest her previous singles for Keynote (later reissued on Mercury) and her one-off release for Decca as lead vocalist of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, where she got her start. This is the first time all of these original, pre-LP era singles tracks have been available in one package; acquiring them previously would have required purchasing several volumes of an earlier “Complete Mercury Recordings” box set from Japan, which is long out of print and was missing the Keynote and Decca recordings. These singles are also presented here in release sequence for the first time since their original issue.

The Fabulous Miss D! is highlighted by Dinah Washington’s biggest chart hits, including “Evil Gal Blues,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “West Side Baby,” “Am I Asking Too Much” (her first R&B chart No. 1), the two-sided smash “Baby Get Lost”/“Long John Blues,” “Trouble In Mind,” and many more. Dinah is backed by the leading lights of the studio jazz musicians in New York and Chicago, including Ray Brown, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb, Keter Betts and others. All 107 of these tracks have been significantly restored and remastered, making Dinah’s voice—one moment surging with sincerity and the next snapping like a whip—sound better than ever.

The music is housed in another fantastic Verve Select package, a slipcased set the same size as the acclaimed Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole releases, with the same standard of information and visual extras: rare original photographs, including a few never seen before; detailed annotations; a chronological rendering of Dinah’s sessions; and an alphabetical index to help fond your favorites in the set. Putting it all together is an entertaining and informative essay by Marc Myers of JazzWax, who interviewed some of Dinah’s surviving contemporaries.