Review: Ray Charles - The Genius Of Ray Charles (1959)

Tracks: 1) Let The Good Times Roll; 2) It Had To Be You; 3) Alexander’s Ragtime Band; 4) Two Years Of Torture; 5) When Your Lover Has Gone; 6) Deed I Do; 7) Just For A Thrill; 8) You Won’t Let Me Go; 9) Tell Me You’ll Wait For Me; 10) Don't Let The Sun Catch You Cryin’; 11) Am I Blue; 12) Come Rain Or Come Shine.

REVIEW

Perhaps a more apt title for Ray’s last album on the Atlantic label might have been The Genius Of Ray Charles Moves In Mysterious Ways — in fact, I’m pretty sure those Atlantic executives were considering it, but it was either spray that title all over the front sleeve and remove Ray’s photo altogether, or leave things the way they are. And you know just how beautifully the magnetic attraction of Uncle Ray’s shades works for those sales numbers... an album like this one simply couldn’t have made it into the Top 20 without them.

All right, futile attempts at humor aside, The Genius Of Ray Charles was a pretty controversial record — the equivalent of Metallica’s Black Album for its time, if you wish — that, even upon release, kept alternating between being panned and praised, and continues to split audiences up to this very day. The problem as I see it is that nobody except Ray himself is able to properly understand why he recorded it. The cynical point of view is that he substituted his classic brand of raw, sweaty soul and R&B for big band and orchestral arrangements of all those Tin Pan Alley songs in order to increase his fanbase, appealing to the musically conservative white middle-class listeners — which is at least true in terms of the overall commercial result. Amusingly, in stark contrast to his previous sales numbers, the LP charted significantly higher than the accompanying singles: people were not out there to scoop up copies of ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ (which barely made it into the Top 100) or ‘Just For A Thrill’ (which did not chart at all), but they did buy the album — and if an LP in the 1950s sold better than the singles, this means it was purchased by people who were pretty loaded, which sort of largely excludes young African-Americans, if you catch my drift.

The alternate, more generous point of view is that Ray was simply expanding his horizons. He’d already been different from all the other Atlantic artists by having at least two parallel careers — one in R&B and one in jazz — and his constant striving to cross-pollinate different styles of music (‘My Bonnie’ alone must have given out quite a sign) would sooner or later have led to something like this, if not on Atlantic, then on any other label that’d be glad to have him. Let us not forget that the late Fifties were the age of Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Great American Songbook — many black artists with their distinctly African-American styles were encroaching on «white man’s territory» not because they were sucking up to their oppressors, but because they sincerely liked that kind of music and wanted to put their own stamp on it, see what happens as a result... and yes, if it also makes them a bit of extra cash on the side, why is that even a problem?

If there is an actual problem, it is that Ray has to make certain sacrifices for this project. Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, after all, were just singers, not known for much of anything other than their vocal talent and stage presence; whether they sang the black man’s blues or the white man’s schmaltz (to paraphrase Bon Scott), they could invest in what they were doing 100%. Ray Charles, however, was also a player, an arranger, a bandleader, a composer, and a rule-breaker — and on his finest records from the 1950s, he could display all these strengths simultaneously. Placing himself squarely in the hands of Quincy Jones, responsible for the big band arrangements of Side A, and Ralph Burns, orchestrating the strings on Side B, Ray intentionally drops most of his own creativity. He still plays some piano (mostly on the ballad side), but he does not do a lot of creating here — where a song like ‘My Bonnie’ was essentially reinvented by him to fit his own paradigm of R&B, most of the songs on Genius are played in a conservative manner, certainly not in the same ways as they were performed originally, but nowhere near close to the ideals of «Atlantic R&B», either.

Essentially, it’s really all up to Ray Charles as a singer here — which, really, is almost always the deal with the Great American Songbook, about which I have written way too many times (most commonly, I think, in my old reviews of Billie Holiday) that those songs themselves are of fairly little worth outside of their individual interpretations. Here, personal and subjective taste rules supreme; on my own scale, I would probably say that these performances generally outweigh Frank Sinatra but do not quite reach the unique level of Billie Holiday — even if, intuitively, I think that Ray is more often rooting for the latter than the former (note, for instance, how his slightly sneering intonation on the word "lover" in ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’ mimics Billie’s, certainly not Frank’s). The biggest issue, however, is that Ray’s vocal talent alone, even when multiplied by the pompous brass arrangements on Side A or the swooping string flourishes on Side B, is unable to get any of these songs to either the level of frenzied ecstasy attained on ‘I Got A Woman’ or ‘What’d I Say’, or the level of bone-crushing psychological depth attained on ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ or ‘I Believe To My Soul’.

Years ago, such a judgement would be sufficient for me to take an album like this down as «bad» — I mean, I have always been and remain allergic to Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood musicals, and it wasn’t until I got interested in Billie Holiday that I even began to treat any of that material seriously. Today I know a little better than that, and I can certainly appreciate all the work that went into, say, the magnificent arrangement of ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ — it’s actually amazing how Quincy Jones goes all Vegas on us while at the same time making his band sound gritty rather than glitzy, if you catch my meaning. Likewise, I can appreciate the subtlety of backup vocal arrangements on Side B (on ‘Am I Blue?’, they sometimes develop almost psychedelic, proto-Beach Boys overtones), enough at least to say that some fairly exquisite work has been performed here, enough to elevate the record over the «average level» of the usual LP of standards as recorded by innumerable jazz vocalists in the 1950s. So in any case, it is certainly not «bad».

But neither am I going to lie and say that I frequently – or, in fact, ever – get the inclination to replay it if I’m in the mood for some Uncle Ray. ‘Let The Good Times Roll’, his swaggery tribute to Louis Jordan, is the only exception (and it is not surprising that only this and ‘Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Cryin’, the other Louis Jordan tune on Side B, would be performed by Ray and his band at Newport in 1960); its liveliness, bragginess, stop-and-start structure and monumental brass fanfare make it perhaps the most compatible tune on here with Ray’s legacy as a whole. You can easily take away the brass, if you wish, and imagine it replaced with Ray’s banging on the piano (which is, by the way, much more prominent on the live Newport version); no such thing is easily imaginable for, say, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, where Ray is almost drowned out by all the overproduction (give me Bessie Smith over this any time of day).

On the balladeering side, I cannot actually vouch for any highlights or lowlights. ‘Just For A Thrill’ and ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine’ were released as singles, but they aren’t really better or worse than any other of the melancholically tinged ballads on here. They all sound nice, and maybe, just maybe, Ray’s croaky, husky, gospel-rooted vocals give them a slightly exquisite tinge of world-weariness, but not nearly enough to mutate them into sonic crocodiles à la Tom Waits. Were we talking here about an artist of lesser caliber — a singer as such — I would be content with a vote of «pretty good, but not my thing»; with Ray, it is barely possible to perceive these recordings outside of the general context of his career, and I think that there was simply not enough work done on them to fully justify the need for such an album. At least Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music would have the «stun» effect on the listener with its bold and brash reinventions of honky tonk classics; The Genius Of Ray Charles simply tells you «hi, I’m Ray Charles, the man who brought you ‘What’d I Say’ and ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’, and I also like show tunes, just like your mama does».

Then again, it may have been necessary in 1959 to say something like that, so I certainly don’t blame him. But the fact remains that Ray recorded a ton of great stuff in his lifetime — most of it in the 1950s, but some of it in the 1960s and even later — and he recorded quite a bit of schlock as well; and the first signs of that generally boring side of his later day career appear on this very album. Only a premonition, mind you, because the arrangements are largely tasteful, and the songs... well, there’s lots of much blander songs hanging around than ‘Just For A Thrill’ or ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’. Even so, I’d trade this entire album for one copy of ‘I Believe To My Soul’ — and Atlantic didn’t even bother to package that one on an LP until two years later.

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