Come with me on a mythical week at the great Chicago club 'Mr.Kelly's". Think of this as your poster of the week's activities and the links are your actual shows!
"Caught live with just her piano trio at Chicago's famous now-defunct nightclub, Anita O'Day is in an ebullient mood as she tosses off a series of standards and novelties. Whether this is an accurate snapshot of her live act is open to question; the stage business in between numbers seems rather formal and one doesn't really feel the excitement of a live performance. Yet O'Day is clearly in a creative mood, whether allowing her vulnerability to show in the torchy ballads or reveling in the boppish up-tempo workouts. Her vocal on "Tea for Two" is a virtuoso deconstruction, full of satiric quotes and rhythmic shifts at a warp-speed tempo. Fleet-fingered Joe Masters decorates the fills with standard bop runs on the slightly-out-of-tune house piano."
"Ella Fitzgerald didn't lack for live recording opportunities in the late '50s, which on the surface, would make this first issue of a 1958 Chicago live club date an easy one to pass on. Verve label head Norman Granz recorded her often in the '50s with an eye to releasing live albums, which he did with her shows at Newport in 1957 and Los Angeles' Opera House in 1958 (not to mention another 1958 concert in Rome that was released 30 years later to wide acclaim). Those shows, however, differed widely from this one, which found her in front of a very small audience at Chicago's jazz Mecca Mister Kelly's (Sarah Vaughan's landmark At Mister Kelly's was recorded there four months earlier). Fitzgerald's artistry is basically a given in this situation, but much of the material recorded here was rare and obscure; "Your Red Wagon" had only been released as a single, her delightfully melodic "Across the Alley from the Alamo" never appeared elsewhere, and for a pair of Sinatra evergreens -- "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" and "Witchcraft" -- the former had never appeared, and the latter only appeared later, on a 1961 return to the site of her Berlin live landmark."
"During the mid-'50s, Sarah Vaughan spent most of her time recording songbook standards backed by a large orchestra in florid arrangements, with only the occasional breath of fresh air like her masterpiece, 1954's Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown. Four years after that milestone, another landed with the live album At Mister Kelly's. Recorded quite early in the days of the live LP, the album captured Vaughan at her best and most relaxed, stretching out on a set of late-night torch songs and ballads. With a trio including Jimmy Jones on piano, Roy Haynes on drums, and Richard Davis on bass, Vaughan is simply captivating, easily disproving the notion that, to be entertaining, singers needed inventive arrangements and multiple voices (instrumental or otherwise) behind them. Her unerring sense of rhythm carries her through every song on this set, whether the occasion calls for playfulness and wit ("Thou Swell," "Honeysuckle Rose") or a world-wise melancholia ("Willow Weep for Me"). Her accompanists are a valuable anchor, with Haynes' drumming just as precise as Sassy's vocals and Jones' piano solos adding additional vitality."
Couldn't find a review so I'll fake it! I am struck by how much she sounds like Dinah on this; it isn't something I recall thinking before, nor have I seen it in print, but I think it is unmistakable! The big difference becomes clear pretty quickly, however, because her voice has even more power behind it! This is one of those Collectables twofers so you get another nice record as well!
"Muddy Water Live (At Mr. Kelly's) shows precisely how fortuitous Muddy Waters' history with Chess Records was. With the notable exception of Bo Diddley's Beach Party, the company tended to record its top artists in concert very late or, more often, not at all. Howlin' Wolf got one concert album so late in his career that he was merely a shadow of the legend he'd established for himself, and the label's resident blues harp virtuosi Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson II were never captured in concert. Waters was luckier. This album, recorded during two June 1971 gigs at one of Chicago's top clubs, was the third full-length concert release of his career; and he had a decade of life and music still in front of him and remained very much the embodiment of his own legend. The core of the band that would work with him for the rest of the '70s was already with him, and the man himself was in excellent form -- in voice and on slide guitar -- aided by Sammy Lawhorn and Pee Wee Madison. There might not be the same sense here of a career-second-wind-in-progress that there was with his later live album for Johnny Winter's Blue Sky label -- the performance is powerful and confident, more than bold and celebratory -- but on "Strange Woman," "Blow Wind Blow," and "Country Boy," for example, the effect of hearing a master of the blues virtuoso band in action is overpowering. His takes on Williamson's "Nine Below Zero," T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday Blues," John Lee Hooker's "Boom, Boom," and Jimmy Reed's "You Don't Have to Go," all reconfigured in Muddy's own style, are also worth hearing. There might have been more flash on the later Winter-produced sides, but this LP is not to be ignored, and not just by Chess completists -- it's a hell of a lot more essential than Electric Mud, and heralds the superb Indian summer of Waters' history at Chess, during which he recorded Can't Get No Grindin' and The Woodstock Album."
