Search - Lee Wiley :: Cocktail Hour

One Of Best Big Band Jazz Vocalists Ever

09/27/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Lee Wiley, born on October 9, 1910 in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma (she died at age 65 from cancer on December 11, 1975), was certainly among the most beautiful of the Big Band female vocalists of the 1930s and 1940s, and possessed of one of the best jazz voices of any of them. For some strange reason it just never translated into more than one hit single, despite singing with the likes of The Dorsey Brothers, Johnny Green, Glen Gray & His Casa Loma Orchestra, Victor Young, and Leo Reisman.



That one hit came in late 1931/early 1932 when Time On My Hands went to from the Broadway musical Smiles went to # 6 on the Victor label for the Leo Reisman orchestra.



When you listen to the 28 tracks in this release from Columbia Entertainment's Cocktail Hour series you'll be left wondering why she didn't have a slew of hits as her husky-toned voice easily and smoothly handles some of the biggest standards of her day.



The sound quality is very good and in the insert are two pages of liner notes written by Richard Hadlock, author of Jazz Masters Of The 20s. If there's a fault, it's the complete lack of information on the recording dates of each track and backing musicians. You also have to wonder at Hadlock's claim that she wrote, among other tunes, Anytime, Anyday, Anywhere. Clearly, it can't be the hit of that same title for both Paul Whiteman and Art Hickman as both came in 1921 - when she would have been all of 11 years old. But the notes contain no clarification one way or another.



What is worth noting, however, is this portion of Hadlock's notes: "Towards the end of the 30's she began compiling her famous "songbooks" - entire albums devoted to such composers as the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and Harold Arlen. Each songbook consisted of a collection of eight songs on four 10" 78rpm records." This was well before Bing Crosby and then Ella Fitzgerald took on similar projects.



Other releases in the Cocktail Hour series cover: The Mills Brothers, The Boswell Sisters, Cab Calloway, Ive Anderson, Maxine Sullivan, Mildred Bailey, and the multi-artist volumes Toast To Broadway, Toast To Big Bands, Toast To Gershwin, and The Vamps."