#0020: Ray Charles - The Genius Of Ray Charles [***]

This album is, according to the reading I just did a few seconds ago, a breakaway album.  Ray Charles was already a well established RnB* player by the time he made this record.  The comparison could be brashly made with The Beatles almost decade later, who broke away from their establish sound to make Sgt Pepper.  I don't think this move is worthy of that comparison, however.  In Sgt Pepper people got something they hadn't heard before whereas this set simply joins an already crowded mainstream of big band singers.

Having said that, the presence of players from Count Basie's and Duke Ellington's bands is noticeable albeit in a hindsight kinda way.  "Aaah _that_'s why it sounded great."  Quincy Jones was also involved in this and with credentials like that, who's gonna knock it?  Charles himself with his funky piano style and road-worn vocal texture breathes into these songs life that may hitherto have been beaten out of them with soulless repetition.

Altogether it's damn enjoyable but I wouldn't go so far as to ascribe it genius.  Certainly it's better than anything I could've produced that year, being as I was still a decade away from the first Higgs-Boson of a glint in my father's puritanical eye.

But I have fond memories of Ray Charles.  His duet with Billy Joel remains a firm favourite of mine and I can't think of Ray Charles without being reminded of that scene in the Commitments where Jimmy tells the piano player he has to perform without his spectacles.

Stephen: But I'm blind without me glasses!
Jimmy: So was Ray Charles.

His piano playing is beyond reproach and this album contains consistent evidence of that.  So in case there's any doubt, "I don't think there's anything wrong with the action on this piano."

* - And by RnB, I mean actual rhythm and blues where the tunes are carried with emotion rather than with a desperate sense of self comparison to Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and the interminable pantheon of caterwaulers littering unimaginative backing tracks with their unimaginative vocal cadenzas.