Search - Dinah Washington :: For Those in Love

An Excellent Collection -- Especially if You're New to Dinah

Peter | 07/19/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Much of Dinah Washington's music was ruined in my opinion by too many strings and syrupy arrangements. This is a great collection of songs -- some ballads and others that really swing -- and most have very spare arrangements, drums, bass, piano or guitar, a couple of horn(s) and, most importantly, Dinah's vocals pure and unadulterated. Recorded in 1955 with great session players and arrangments by Quincy Jones -- these are the real deal and don't get any better."

Dinah & Quincy

Louis Alemayehu | Minneapolis/Saint Paul, MN USA | 06/16/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"When this album was being recorded Dinah and Quincy were "doin' a little housekeeping" (making good music can be like making good love).



My Aunt Mary was a big fan of Dinah. She used to come back from shows that Dinah did at Robert's Show Lounge on the Southside of Chicago and share what details she could with a kid not even close to being even a teenager. Dinah was an earthy,passionate woman with a "rich vocabulary", who liked to party. Thanks to Aunt Mary, I grew up on a steady diet of "the Queen". I drank from the Queen's well deeply and often. Still do...



One of the things I remember about Dinah from the 50's was that she had a reputation for being a "wild woman", but there was some kind a reverence people in the African American community had for her at the same time. The woman could sing some blues, but this particular album showed how she could really read the lyric of a ballad telling the stories with a great depth of emotion. When she read songs like "If I Had You", people almost reacted like it was another book of the Bible. Dinah touched you way down inside with the truth of lived experience.



If you listen to that song in particular, notice how before the first instrumental break she sings far behind the beat and then ahead of the beat and comes to rest right where she needed to! She is in total control, dancing around the established rythm and tells the story like a shared truth across the backyard fence.



Its all good on this set. Not a throw away in the bunch. Blue Gardinia. I Could Write a Book. You Don't Know What Love Is. Although she stands out, front and center, she is also like another horn in the ensemble of stand-out instrumentalists including Paul Quinichette (Vice Prez), Cecil Payne, Clark Terry and the superb Wynton Kelly on piano. Quincy Jones really pulled this together, putting Dinah in a regal setting of some the best musicians of goldern era of jazz. "Dinah Jams" is the album of her's that is listed in the NPR 100, but THIS IS THE CLASSIC!



In later days, though the arrangements were not of this high caliber, the power of Dinah's performanced lifted recordings like "Unforgetable" and "This Bitter Earth" to an elevated status in African American communities all over the U.S. She told a truth that made you throw down your hat and shout out loud: "Yeah, girl! Tell em,tell em 'bout it!""