Blossom Dearie
‘Discover Who I Am – The Fontana Years, London (1966-1970)’
Fontana-Mercury Recordings

At the end of “On Broadway,” the first track on the 1966 album “Blossom Time – Blossom Dearie Live at Ronnie Scott’s,” pianist-singer Blossom Dearie addresses the audience, saying in a completely innocent deadpan, “You know my mother doesn’t know I work in nightclubs.” Then there’s a brief pause before the punchline: “She thinks I’m still in jail.” 

Sixty-five years later it’s not only a funny line, but a cultural signifier of a time when jazz clubs were far from respectable performing arts centers — frequently mobbed-up joints frequented by addicts and lowlifes. In showing us Dearie’s remarkably dry, understated sense of humor — as a one-woman show, she was not only Gracie Allen but also George Burns at the same time — we are also seeing the dry, understated, and sublimely perfect way in which she played and sang nearly everything.  

On one level, Dearie (1924-2009) renders both the notes and the words absolutely perfectly, never missing a meaning or even an inflection, yet she never stressed them, belted them, or even raised her voice. She lets the melody and lyrics speak for themselves; she even knows how to let the story tell itself.  

That’s how it seemed, at least, but there were incredible levels of artistry that she deliberately concealed in order to achieve precisely this idea. She sings so quietly and subtly that, as Truman Capote delineates in his most famous lyric, a bee could lie sleeping in the palm of her hand and never wake up.

Like other jazz-oriented, Great American Songbook-driven artists of her generation, such as Mel Torme and Rosemary Clooney, Dearie’s recording career consisted of two big acts. First, she made classic albums in the 1950s and early ’60s for a relatively major label — in her case, Verve. Decades later, in the latter part of her career, she recorded for an independent label, her own Daffodil Records. As with Torme and Clooney, most of us traditionally thought of her work in the mid- to late ’60s as kind of an intermission, in which she didn’t record much, and what she did leave us from those years was relatively minor.

This new excellent package shows us that we were totally wrong, that the second half of the 1960s was a ripe and profitable time for this remarkable artist. There are three undisputedly classic albums here. “Blossom Time – Blossom Dearie Live at Ronnie Scott’s” and “Sweet Blossom Dearie” were both recorded live at Ronnie Scott’s in 1966; hearing them together again was enough to convince me that, collectively, they’re among the greatest of her whole long career, especially in that none of the six earlier Verve albums had been a live set. 

The third CD, “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” (1967), is an excellent studio album with a 12-piece orchestra and a repertory of suitable contemporary songs with multiple entries from both Burt Bacharach and Antonio Carlos Jobim. All of these contain bonus tracks, of which the prize for me is  “Wallflower Lonely, Cornflower Blue,” an ingenious song by Dearie colleague Dave Frishberg that lays on the ears like a hybrid of a jazz waltz and a Ray Charles-inspired modern sound in country music. 

The new set also includes Dearie’s second studio album for Fontana, “That’s Just The Way I Want To Be,” which most of us have dismissed for the last half century as the label’s attempt to push Dearie into psychedelic pop. The low points here are three original songs in which Dearie pays homage — actually, “sucking up” is a more accurate term — to three contemporary British pop stars, John Lennon, Dusty Springfield, and Georgie Fame.  

Dearie also performed the latter song, “Sweet Georgie Fame,” in a live small-group arrangement on “Sweet Blossom Dearie”; Tony Bennett liked the tune well enough to record it himself, which is how most of us first heard it, but many Americans then and now just assumed Mr. Fame was a fictional character along the lines of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” I hadn’t listened to this album in at least 15 years prior to this new package; I was hoping I would change my mind, but though it boasts one excellent Dearie-Dave Frishberg collaboration in “Long Daddy Green,” it’s still the runt of the litter.

The package’s last two discs consist of unissued recordings from this approximate time period, apparently produced by Dearie herself. It turns out that she was no less communicative even when she thought no one was listening; there are some gems here, like a reading of “My Favorite Things” highly influenced by John Coltrane’s iconic arrangement and specifically McCoy Tyner’s piano part.  

Otherwise, these 27 previously unheard songs are a mix of show tunes, embryonic run throughs of Dearie originals, and surprisingly copasetic contemporary pop songs, like Jimmy Webb’s “Didn’t We” and Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Until It’s Time For To Go.”

Of no less value is the 40-page booklet attached, which contains a wealth of photos and illustrations from the late artist’s private archive. There’s also an excellent essay by Jaime Smith, whose credential is “archivist at Daffodil Records,” which generously covers the entire Dearie career, not just the five years included in this package. 

Until now I thought these years were a mere placeholder in the Dearie canon; the new set reminds me that, in the career of an artist of her stature, there are no lesser periods.