Do Not Judge This Blossom By Its Cover
Vinyl Me Please's reissue of Blossom Dearie's debut has crappy enlarged compact disc cover, but sounds great
Malachi, forgive me. Years ago, you complained that a reissue did not have a tip-on jacket, and I thought you were being petty. In fact, I was in the wrong, for not caring enough about such things. I say this while peering at the awful cover Vinyl Me, Please did for Blossom Dearie's debut record, originally released in 1956. In sonic terms it's a splendid treasure of a record, but the cover has to be one of the worst I have ever seen, worse than a bootleg.
I've been wanting to buy this release for years but it was sold out on the VMP website, and cost zany dollars on Discogs. Then last year I found an original pressing at one of the local record stores in Augusta, Georgia. Sixty dollars is near the outer limit for what I would spend on a record I've never heard, but there was something magnificent about the cover that compelled me to buy the sixty-seven year-old album. The Chuck Stewart photograph, with its stunning iconic image of Dearie at the piano intoning her breathy sultry whispery vocals, took hold of my eyes. It was love at first sight:
It was worth the sixty dollars. I loved the record so much I felt I had cheated the record store. A handful of times I have found a record that does the thing I need music to do for a particular kind of moment. This one does the gigantic romantic plea for tenderness thing like no other. Valentine's Day is around the corner, which means in about two weeks I'll be playing the Blossom Dearie self-titled record for my lovely wife. It's a record that never fails.
"Girlish" is the term most commonly used to describe Blossom Dearie's voice, and although "girlish" certainly applies even to her latter-year singing in such songs as the John Lennon tribute "Hey John" or the School House Rocks classic "Unpack Your Adjectives," her singing is different here—her more well-known staccato phrasing replaced with a more drawn out, luxurious style pitched for maximum romantic impact. Not juvenile, but certainly delinquent. Like a '50s version of Kim Deal, Blossom Dearie sings in the Rodgers/Hart song "Everything I've Got", "I've got a powerful anesthesia in my fist/And the perfect wrist to give your neck a twist".
Blossom even finds a deeper, more authoritative register for "Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be)," a torch song that crackles with textured electricity. Similar thrills are present in the final two songs, "I Won't Dance," and "A Fine Spring Morning," tunes that live in a world in which Dearie has banished everything that is generic and ordinary: in the latter song, she sings about a place where "Bums are getting bummier/Chums are getting chummier/And yummy-looking girls are getting yummier." Accompanying Blossom's very grown-up sounding voice are Herb Ellis's guitar and Ray Brown's bass, but most of all, Blossom Dearie's spare piano, played with a subtlety so artful that it gained the admiration of none other than Bill Evans. John Lennon was also a big fan, and you can hear him sing "Blossom Dearie They Call Me" on YouTube, an outtake from the "Get Back/Let It Be" sessions.
Everything about her self-titled 1956 debut is perfect, and definitely worth the premium for an original or early pressing.
Which is not true of the Vinyl Me, Please reissue. I played my 1957 early pressing back-to-back with the Kevin Gray-mastered reissue on my Rega RP6 with Ania Pro cartridge, and found comparable sound, with the reissue featuring livelier bass without sacrificing the delicacy of Blossom Dearie's voice. Natalie Weiner's impressive liner notes were thoughtfully presented in a pink passport-sized booklet. Almost everything about this release was done with care, except for the cover, which is offensively bad:
Comparing the original's front cover to the reissue's reveals how a crisp and evocative image can be turned into one that is a pixelated nightmare. The estate of Photographer Chuck Stewart should sue UMG Recordings for this blotchy travesty. Even worse, a little detective work on Discogs revealed that Vinyl Me, Please recycled the cover from a late '80s compact disc, which explains why it looks like a bitty little image that has been enlarged with no concern for that image's resolution or composition. A blown-up compact disc cover, lousy with late '80s computer typeface, has no place on heavy, glossy, oh, what a thing to be treasured card stock—it just emphasizes the cheapness of the product, like those joke t-shirts with black tie and boutonniere illustrations.
I recommend the pressing (completely flat), the service (the packing and delivery were flawless and speedy), and the mastering (Kevin Gray), but I find the cover to be offensively bad, almost bewildering, as if Vinyl Me, Please doesn't really understand jazz fans, who treasure magnificent cover art and photography exactly as much, and sometimes more, than the music inside. A record as lovely and charming as this deserves better than a cover that evokes loathing not love at first sight.
Post-script: A quick check on the Third Man Records' website revealed Jack White will be releasing Blossom Dearie's self-titled debut album as part of Third Man's "Verve by Request" re-issue series. One web site posted a March 10, 2023 release date. Let's hope Third Man does a better job with the sound than its recent James Brown re-issue, and better work with the cover art than Vinyl Me Please's bootleg-quality cover of this distinctive, memorable, and lovely statement from Blossom Dearie.
