Album review: 'Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles' with Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis featuring Norah Jones

Two years after the Red Headed Stranger and one of the prime purveyors and chief defenders of New Orleans culture collaborated in 2007 at New York’s Lincoln Center for “Two Men With the Blues,” Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis reconvened and invited Norah Jones along for a spirited salute to the Genius of Soul.

Ray Charles surely would have admired the inventive and lively jazz-drenched arrangements accompanying many of his standards, including “Hit the Road Jack,” “Busted,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” “Unchain My Heart” and “Cryin’ Time.”

Nobody’s attempting to mimic Charles’ unduplicatable vocal style, and in Nelson this outing has another equally idiosyncratic, quintessentially American voice at the front of most of the numbers. His duet with Jones on Buck Owens’ country weeper “Cryin’ Time” is less a melding of voices than two skilled pilots circling over a runway, each politely offering the other the courtesy of touching down first. Marsalis adds plenty of Crescent City-rooted instrumental spark.

Only in the session-closing performance of “What’d I Say” do you wish they’d been able to channel more of the energy of the original. Charles’ seductive performance was a masterwork of sexual longing; here, all concerned sound like they got caught up in the festive atmosphere of the evening and settled on celebration over lust. Jones gets nominally sultry, but at 77, Nelson’s “heys” and “hos” sound more like distant memories than stirrings of actual yearnings.

—Randy Lewis

Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis featuring Norah Jones
“Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles”
Blue Note
Three stars (Out of four)

 

Ray Charles live in L.A. in 1964 recording due April 5 in expanded reissue

A recording of Ray Charles performing at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1964 will be issued on CD for the first time with the April 5 release of “Ray Charles Live in Concert.”

The original 12-song LP, which peaked at No. 80 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart in 1965, will be fleshed out with seven bonus tracks, including his rendition that night of “Georgia on My Mind,” which was left off the album.

Also on the singer, pianist and bandleader's set list at the Shrine were “I Got a Woman,” “One Mint Julep,” “You Don’t Know Me,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” "That Lucky Old Sun" and “What’d I Say.” The concert featured backing vocals by the Raelettes, and a big band including saxophonists David “Fathead” Newman, Hank Crawford and Leroy “Hog” Cooper as well as guitarist Sonny Forrest, drummer Wilbert Hogan and bassist Edgar Willis.

“He’d made his ascendance in the early ’60s, and he had the world at his feet by this time,” Chris Clough, Concord Music Group’s manager of catalog development and producer of this reissue, said in a statement announcing the project. “He’d basically invented soul, he’d done R&B, he’d conquered country and he was on his way to becoming an American icon.”

The set also will include extensive liner notes by roots music historian Bill Dahl.

-- Randy Lewis

Album cover for "Ray Charles Live in Concert" courtesy of Concord Music Group.

Ray Charles Foundation sues the singer's eldest son over book

The Ray Charles Foundation has filed a lawsuit charging the late soul singer’s eldest son, Ray Charles Robinson Jr., with copyright infringement stemming from the use of a photograph and several of Charles’ songs in the son’s recent book “You Don’t Know Me: Reflections of My Father,  Ray Charles.”

The Foundation, which Charles assigned as the owner of his copyrights and intellectual property rights upon his death in 2004, alleges that Robinson’s book used a copyrighted photo, the titles and  lyrics of four of his songs without permission.

The action filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles seeks $150,000 for each copyright violation and also names as defendants the book’s publisher, Crown Publishing, and Crown’s parent company, Random House, and Robinson’s co-author, Mary Jane Ross. Random House officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

The dedication page of Robinson Jr.’s book, which was published in June, reads, in part, “To the memory of my father, Ray Charles Robinson, and all that you were to be and all that you dreamed you wanted to be. I love you come rain or come shine.”

-- Randy Lewis