Eva Cassidy Songbird CD

Songbird is a posthumous anthology culled from the album Live At Blues Alley and her other solo release, Eva By Heart, along with one track from her 1992 duet album with Chuck Brown titled The Other Side. Blix label.

Personnel: Eva Cassidy (vocals, guitar, keyboards); Chris Biondo (guitar, drum programming); Keith Grimes (guitar); Dan Cassidy, Mike Stein (violin); Chris Walker (trumpet); Lenny Williams (piano); Kent Wood, Hilton Felton, John Gillespie (organ); Larry Melton (upright bass); Raice McLeod (drums).
Arranger: Eva Cassidy.
This posthumous anthology is the perfect introduction to the astonishing vocal talents of Eva Cassidy, a young, relatively unknown singer who died of cancer at 33, just as her career was beginning to gain steam. Cassidy, a native of Washington D.C., gained local favor with her pure, straightforward tone and her lovely, tasteful interpretations of everything from standards to gospel to contemporary pop.
SONGBIRD is a definitive best-of selection that picks from Cassidy's studio albums and shows the depth and breadth of her skills. SONGBIRD's perfection as a compilation is in its song choice, which covers Cassidy's takes on gospel ("Oh, Had I A Golden Thread"), soul (Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready"), pop (Sting's "Fields of Gold"), and well-known standards ("Over the Rainbow"). Cassidy's own perfection stems from her ability to bring the same precise, inventive phrasing and crystalline tone to each individual song, regardless of genre, making it indelibly her own. This collection became a best-selling number-one album in the U.K., and with good reason.
Though many recording artists meld and straddle a variety of genres, few if any defy categorization by excelling in so many disparate styles as the late Eva Cassidy. The diverse offerings from the evocative thrush from Washington, D.C. -- who died tragically of melanoma in 1996 at age 33 -- run the gamut from the radio-friendly pop cover of Sting's "Fields of Gold" to a jazz chanteuse rendition of the standard "Autumn Leaves," to the soulful R&B of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" to her spine-tingling gospel delivery of "Oh, Had I a Golden Thread." Cassidy's mastery of each is perhaps best evidenced by the fact that the Washington Area Music Association honored her (in 1996) as Best Female Vocalist in four separate categories: blues, jazz-contemporary, jazz-traditional and roots rock/traditional R&B, in addition to naming her Artist of the Year, and her then-current release, Live At Blues Alley, Album of the Year. Songbird is a posthumous anthology culled from that album and her other solo release, Eva By Heart, along with one track from her 1992 duet album with Chuck Brown titled The Other Side. Though the production value on several songs falls well short of state-of-the-art, the shimmering beauty of her crystal clear voice, combined with her seemingly limitless range and imaginative phrasing, cuts through to both heart and soul. Whether she beckons a soothing timbre for seductively restrained passages or shakes the rafters by unleashing her formidable power and gorgeous falsetto, Cassidy's warblings always fuse her purity of tone with a purity of emotion and a palpable connection with the lyric. Though the songs described above are luscious, the coup de maitre is the album's finale -- surely one of the great recordings in recent popular music -- Cassidy's stunning version of "Over the Rainbow." Recorded with only her own accompaniment on acoustic guitar, keyboards and synthesizer, Cassidy's voice swoops and soars over a musical panorama -- though with a wistful, melancholic shading that almost seems to betray a premonition of her own demise, despite the fact that it would be nearly four years before she would be diagnosed with her terminal illness. Cassidy more than rearranges the Judy Garland classic -- she reinvents it. The song is immediately familiar, yet the beautiful colors that arc the sky are very much hers. In an eRolling Stone (8/30/01, p.125) - 3.5 stars out of 5 - "...She effortlessly shuffles styles and the song selections are astute...Cassidy comes across as a bluesier version of English folk singer Sandy Denny....she melts her personality into the fabric of each melody..."
Q (3/99, p.93) - 3 Stars (out of 5) - "Eva Cassidy had the power to leave the nerve-centre tingling. She possessed a rare emotional honesty and a knockout voice (closest relation: Roberta Flack) and applied them to whatever material took her fancy..."