Morning song#Roberta Flack #Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye

Roberta Flack | First Take: 50^th Anniversary Deluxe Edition | (SoulMusic.com) 5 out of 5 stars

The release of Roberta Flack’s First Take in 1969 put her in rare company;solo artists who arrived fully formed on their initial albums. Superstars ranging from Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder to David Bowie and Elton John can’t claim to have accomplished the same thing, even if their fame ultimately overtook Flack’s.

Roberta Flack was already an accomplished, trained pianist and riveting, soulful singer who could shift from a hushed whisper to a searing crescendo in moments. But she also creatively rearranged songs by others, infusing them with jazz, blues, gospel and R&B, often making them better, or at least more affecting, than the originals. That said, it took a few years after its release for Flack to be lauded for the brilliance of her debut. It was thanks to Clint Eastwood, a jazz fan, who used an edited version of her “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in a key scene of his movie Play Misty for Me. That provided Flack with a belated Grammy for Record of the Year in 1973, a full four years after its release.

It also shone a light on the dazzling beauty of First Take. The album’s eight selections were amazingly tracked in just 10 hours. Some sweetening in the form of restrained strings and horns was added, but Flack’s stripped down, acoustic jazz backing of guitar, drums and bass were all she needed to support her exquisite voice and sympathetic but never syrupy piano work. Seven of the tracks were ballads with Flack breathing warm soul into Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and going Nina Simone on the touching “Ballad of the Sad Young Men.” She brings a sweet, subtle jazz reading to the gospel traditional “I Told Jesus” and introduces two wonderful new pieces written by a then unknown college friend, Donny Hathaway.

Posted from: https://americansongwriter.com/roberta-flack-first-take-50th-anniversary-album-review/