Live at Orchestra Hall

Product Description:

Also available in a 3-pack with HERE'S TO LIFE and FEEL THE SPIRIT.

Full performer name: Joe Williams/Count Basie Orchestra.

Producers: John Snyder, Aaron A. Woodward III, John Levy.

Recorded live at Orchestra Hall, Detroit, Michigan on November 20, 1992. Includes liner notes by Will Friedwald.

Legendary, smooth-voiced jazz-blues vocalist Williams made jazz history in 1955 when he joined forces with The Count Basie Band. Williams would sing with the Band for six years before going on to an enormously successful solo career. JOE WILLIAMS WITH THE COUNT BASIE ORCHESTRA is a reunion concert, recorded live in Chicago in 1992. This is also Williams' first recording for Telarc Records.

Williams' talent and great power of communication through song are still clearly evident in this recording. His very moving performances are filled with restraint and marked by a fine sense of fun as he effortlessly glides up and down the octaves. The gorgeous "Lover Come Back to Me" epitomizes Williams' artistry, introducing the rarely heard verse as a standard jazz ballad and swinging it from there until it's almost a 12-bar blues. Williams pulls out all the stops and just wails away on "Jimmy's Blues," a marvelously bluesy tribute to Jimmy Rushing. All the performances, which feature Frank Foster at the helm of the always-fine Count Basie Orchestra, drip with honeyed class and sophistication.