Carmen and Dave at the Basin Street Table
McRae and Brubeck trade the standards back and forth, each listening hard to the other.
Carmen McRae came to this session already comfortable with Dave Brubeck's music. They'd recorded together before, and by now there was an ease between them — the kind that only comes when two musicians have spent enough time in the same room to stop explaining themselves. This was their second outing as a pair, and it shows. McRae's voice has that particular quality it carried in her best work: direct, unsentimental, but capable of genuine warmth. She doesn't oversell anything. Brubeck, for his part, stays in the pocket. He doesn't play around her so much as play with her, giving her space and then moving in close when the moment calls for it.
The live setting at Basin Street East matters here. There's an audience in the room, and you can feel the difference. A studio date lets you chase perfection in takes and edits, but a live performance has risk in it — the possibility that something won't quite land, or that it will land in a way nobody expected. McRae and Brubeck seemed to feed off that. The versions here have a relaxed quality, like they're thinking through the songs in real time rather than delivering a polished product. It's not flashy. Neither McRae nor Brubeck was built for flash anyway.
If you already love McRae's voice and you're curious about her rapport with Brubeck, this is worth hearing. It's a solid document of two skilled musicians doing what they do well, nothing more and nothing less. AllMusic gave it three stars, which feels about right — good work, worthwhile listening, but not the album you'd lead with if you wanted to make the case for either artist at their peak.
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More by Carmen McRae
All 44 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
