1960 · Album
I Concentrate on You
Recorded 1961 · Mercury · Produced by Unverified — detail omitted
Washington Makes Every Standard Her Own
Dinah Washington sings Cole Porter like she wrote it herself and just remembered it.
The title track here comes with a bit of history worth knowing. "I Concentrate on You" was written by Cole Porter for the 1940 film Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940), where it was introduced by Douglas McPhail. By the time Dinah Washington got her hands on it, the song had been recorded by dozens of singers, and yet she finds a way to make you feel like you're hearing it fresh. That's not a small thing. Washington had a gift for treating a lyric like a personal conversation rather than a performance, and that quality runs through this entire album.
The record sits comfortably in the territory Washington occupied through the late 1950s — lush orchestral backings, jazz phrasing over pop-leaning arrangements, her voice doing most of the heavy lifting. If you've heard Unforgettable (1952) or her Mercury recordings from around that period, you know the format. This isn't Washington at her most stripped-down or bluesy. It's Washington being polished and deliberate, which suits Porter's material well. The songs here reward her precision more than they'd reward raw grit.
Is this her best album? Probably not — that argument usually lands somewhere else in her catalog. But it's a very good one to spend time with, especially if you want to hear how a great singer navigates the American songbook without turning it into a recital. Washington never sounds like she's showing respect to the material. She sounds like she's using it, and that's a better compliment. The album holds up as a solid, enjoyable listen, and the title track alone makes it worth pulling out.
