Most Requested Songs

To me, it is criminal that despite her three decades of superb live shows, extensive touring and nineteen albums, she never gained the wide recognition that was rightfully hers. She should have been the best loved gal jazz/pop singer since Peggy Lee; one of those voices you heard most often on jazz radio.

I cannot avoid feeling bitter and angry about this album. It is not the record Susannah wanted to make in 2001. Interviewed by a German jazz magazine last February, she already had her next project well in mind:

"I'm going to do all love songs in several languages - I'll probably do one in German - in fact, I'd be interested to hear what your suggestions might be! I'll do romantic standards, 'cause I love them of course, and I'll do a couple of Brazilian songs, and probably another one in French - I don't know if you remember, I did "Nuages" in French, and people really liked that - one in German and probably one in Spanish. But it will mostly be in English, and it will still fall within the category of jazz."

It was not to be. Soon after, Concord Records decided to economize by not doing a new McCorkle album, and issuing this "Most Requested" set instead. Susannah gamely went along, selecting the numbers and writing the liner notes, but it was a cruel disappointment. Denied one of her most cherished creative outlets, she fell deeper into the depression that ended with her suicide in May.

This "Most Requested Songs" should have been a bonus, a companion piece to the new album, a wonderful introduction to a great singer whose best work was still ahead. It will serve that purpose, and very well, too. But now we can only look back.

Yet Susannah is not the easiest "sell." Her voice is not going to bowl you over like Eva Cassidy's, seduce you like Diana Krall's, or intimately embrace you like Shirley Horn's. There's often a "tired" quality to her tones, a rough-edged coolness along with hints of strain and pain. Her indebtedness to Billie Holiday, especially late Lady Day, is more than a little apparent. What may be lacking in vocal equipment is readily compensated for by sheer musical intelligence.

But the reason Susannah was so essential is that she was one of the few remaining interpreters and representatives of the American Songbook. We live in an age when the production and synthesis of music have replaced performance and interpretation. The artist and the material are inseparable, a single commodity. Imagine the absurdity of even considering the way a Michael Jackson or Elton John, a Madonna or Britanny Spears interprets a good song. Popular art is no longer about interpretation--the performer's or the listener's. It's simply about the manufacture and marketing of a product.

Susannah felt so strongly about the songs she sang that, as she relates in the album notes, she sat through Fred Astaire's "Shall We Dance" 3 times in order to jot down all the lyrics of the Gershwin tunes. Wonderful songs, according to her, are what "chronicle our lives, cheer us up, and keep us company." For the listener who takes songs as seriously as Susannah, this is an indispensable album. She brings to bossa nova tunes a raw, tragic quality lacking in the mellow Astrud Gilberto orginals; she literally "becomes" Chet Baker in her reprise of his performance of "Look for the Silver Lining"; she brings to life the latent power of the songs of Kern, Gershwin, Porter, enabling us to experience the ways in which their songs reveal us to ourselves.

In one sense, this collection is a more satisfying album than Susannah's last recording session, "Hearts and Minds." That program includes so much ironically sad and autobiographical material as to be a trifle depressing. Thankfully, one of the real "keepers" from that date, "For All We Know," is included in this self-selected anthology.