Nancy Wilson Yesterday's Love Songs, Today's Blues CD

Nancy Wilson has always been something of a paradox: a supper club singer with deep R&B roots and a student of Little Jimmy Scott and Dinah Washington with a Midas-like ability to transform their powerfully unorthodox phrasing into something upscale and chic. It took Little Jimmy himself till the postmodern '90s to get to the same place.

YESTERDAY'S LOVE SONGS, TODAY'S BLUES is a key Nancy Wilson album in which she thoroughly examines her blues roots ("Sufferin' With the Blues," "Send Me Yesterday") and middle-class present with a keen, cool eye and magnificently buffed voice. Arranger Gerald Wilson is also able to inhabit both worlds as he and Wilson invest a tune like "Satin Doll" with a pungency it rarely possesses in other hands, least of all Duke Ellington's. Likewise, the luxurious orchestral trappings the arranger drapes around Nancy Wilson's shoulders as she tackles material like "The Very Thought Of You" and "Never Let Me Go" allow this intense singer to tastefully wrench as much emotion as she can from these classic beauties.

Includes liner notes by Will Friedwald.

Personnel: Nancy Wilson (vocals).

The Gerald Wilson Orchestra: Al Porcino, Carmell Jones, Jules Chaikin, Freddie Hill (trumpet); Bob Edmondson, John Ewing, Lester Robertson, Kenny Shroyer (trombone); Paul horn, Joe Maini, Teddy Edwards, Harold Land, Don Ruffell (reeds); Jack Wilson (piano); Joe Pass (guitar); Jimmy Bond (bass); Kenny Dennis (drums).