Review: Ray Charles - In Person (1960)

Tracks: 1) The Right Time; 2) What’d I Say; 3) Yes Indeed!; 4) The Spirit-Feel; 5) Frenesi; 6) Drown In My Own Tears; 7) Tell The Truth.

REVIEW

Unlike At Newport, Ray’s second live LP was largely a product of a sheer lucky combination of accidents. According to most sources, it was recorded on May 28, 1959, «on a rainy night in Atlanta, Georgia» (I guess some Brook Benton fan must have slipped this poetic reference into the Wikipedia page), at Herndon Stadium; with the concert sponsored by the local progressive radio station WAOK, its leading DJ Zenas "Daddy" Sears captured the performance from the audience through a single microphone. Later on, Sears sold the tapes to Atlantic, it is rumored, for enough cash to help put his twin kids through college; given that Ray continued to thrive after his move to ABC Records, Ahmet Ertegun was understandably hungry about any recordings from the backlog he could lay his hands on — and, astonishingly enough, the label probably recouped the losses, since Ray Charles In Person ultimately ended up charting higher (at #13) than any other Ray Charles LP on the Atlantic label.

My blind guess is that this may have happened about two months after the release, bluntly prompted by the smash success of ‘Georgia On My Mind’ — for a short while, Uncle Ray really was the hottest thing in the country — because the album did not exactly acquire a legendary status afterwards. In fact, it was out of print for a long time, before being re-released on CD, together with At Newport, as the double-album combo Ray Charles Live in 1987; and although just about any account of the album that you are going to read will always mention the unusually high quality of the recording (for an audience tape, that is), and the great form in which Ray and his band were on that night, I think that today only truly obstinate completionists and devoted Ray aficionados come in regular contact with the record.

It does sound pretty awesome for an audience recording in 1959, I must say, and I have a faint suspicion that they might not be telling us all there is to this story, but then again, it’s probably not that important to waste lots of time on fact-checking. (Now if, perhaps, Uncle Ray had set fire to his piano on that night or something like that, we’d be singing a totally different song here...). What is important is that this is another half-hour of music that captures Ray in his absolute prime, and that only one song here overlaps with the Newport setlist (‘The Right Time’) — although there’s also a little bit of cheating involved in that the performance of ‘Yes Indeed!’ here is actually smuggled in from the Newport outtakes, though fairly seamlessly (if you listen really hard, you can notice a subtle improvement in recording quality). The contents of the show do seem to match the constitution of the Newport program: there’s a few rabble-rousing, energetic R&B hits, a couple of instrumental numbers highlighting Ray’s passion for jazz in all of its varieties, and an extended, slowed-down, arch-soulful rendition of a deep soul ballad (‘Drown In My Own Tears’, this time in the place of ‘A Fool For You’) — but with the near-total lack of overlaps, In Person does become a perfectly respectable soulmate companion to At Newport, despite, for all of Zenas Sears’ efforts, still sounding inferior on a purely technical level.

Some sources claim that it was at this particular show that Ray first presented the finished version of ‘What’d I Say’ to a live audience, one month before the single’s official release, but this is probably an exaggeration — more accurate would be the statement that this is chronologically the very first live recording of ‘What’d I Say’ we’ll ever be able to hear. As you may guess, this one’s pretty close to the original, a little more tight and restrained than it would become at later dates, but still, already with enough subtle vocal and instrumental variations to be worth checking out.

In stark contrast, ‘Drown In My Own Tears’ here is clearly already a song that has lived long enough to deserve an extra-epic treatment — played at about 0.75 speed of the original, with the supporting brass band and Ray himself drawling out each note as if emotionally frozen in time. It’s grand, but I think I’ll still take the original tempo over this additional display of theatricality. I mean, when he sings "why don’t YOU... come on home now?", it feels as if he’s jumping down a deep well with that YOUUUUU, only to magically appear at the other end a few seconds later with the come on home, and the feeling veers dangerously on the hilarious rather than the empathetic. It is a little dangerous to overload your soulful creations with too much soul — sometimes, soul is like cholesterol, you know.

For the Ray Charles expert, the most curious numbers would probably be the instrumental ones. ‘The Spirit-Feel’ is a Milt Jackson number which, if I am not mistaken, Ray and Milt did not actually record together in the studio (despite their active collaboration in their Atlantic years); it’s a solid performance by Ray’s band, but Ray himself is only felt here as a bandleader, not actually heard, which is a pity since Milt’s original leaves plenty of space for piano playing, let alone the fact that Milt Jackson’s compositions without Milt Jackson’s vibraphone are kinda like Eric Clapton’s songs without Eric Clapton’s guitar playing — you have a social obligation to acknowledge that they have a right to exist in such a state, but you’ll always end up running to the Dark Side to bitch about how boring they are.

A bit more interesting is Ray’s take on the old Latin classic ‘Frenesí’, which he attempts to revert from its «Hollywoodish» treatment by Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller back to its Mexican roots, though without actually restoring the marimba it was originally written for by Alberto Domínguez Borrás. The «cha-cha-cha» rhythmics of the main theme contrast nicely here with the more African jazzy brass improvisations, and the overall groove is sexy and fun. If it simply weren’t the fact that the two jazz numbers, in between them, occupy about a third of the record’s already extra-short running time, I’d welcome them as nice temporary diversions from the R&B formula. But honestly? I’d rather have all these nine minutes given away to showcase the talents of Marjorie Hendricks, who is given the roaring spotlight on the three-minute long ‘Tell The Truth’ (a cover of a recent hit by The "5" Royales), and, just as she does on ‘The Right Time’, almsot manages to upstage Uncle Ray himself with her cocky manners.

In the end, I would say that In Person does really work better as a set of high-quality bonus tracks, appendable to At Newport, than it does on its own, so if you own the 1987 CD edition of Ray Charles Live, you’re all set, and if you do not, you’re not getting any major revelations about the man and his stage spirit here that you did not already get with the Newport album. Even so, it is impossible for a Ray Charles live album capturing Ray Charles in his prime years to not be enjoyable — and with the relative dearth of such material, In Person will hardly ever feel like overkill in your collection.

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