King Pleasure Sings - Annie Ross Sings

King Pleasure Sings / Annie Ross Sings brings together the two founding voices of vocalse jazz on a single album, transforming saxophone solos into songs that never needed a wind instrument.

Vocalism involves taking an improvised saxophone solo and writing lyrics that follow each note, sung as if the words had always been there. King Pleasure invented the process in the early 1950s, and Annie Ross, fresh out of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, perfected it into something more spiritual and theatrical. Combining them on the same disc was not only careful programming, it featured two very different temperaments confronting the same impossible problem, one respectful, the other mischievous.

King Pleasure's face is laid back and conversational, wandering through Red Top and Jumpin' With Symphony Sid with the confidence of a man recounting his own legend. Annie Ross takes the flip side with sharper angles: Twisted turns a therapist's couch into a comedy routine set to Wardell Gray's tenor line, timed so precisely that it still hits the mark decades later, while Parker's Mood strips away the humor, wailing in slow triplets lifted directly from Charlie Parker's blues solo.

Neither singer needed the other, but together they proved that vocalse was an idiom in its own right, not a novelty bolted on to bebop. For anyone looking for the smartest moment in jazz singing, this is where the story begins.

List of titles

Side A
1. Red Top
2. Jumpin With Symphony Sid
3. Sometimes I'm Happy
4. This is Always
5. What Can I Say (After I Say I'm Sorry)
6. Don't Get Scared

Side B
1. Parker's Mood
2. I'm Gone
3. Twisted
4. Farmer's Market
5. The Time Was Right
6. Annie's Lament