King Pleasure Sings - Annie Ross Sings

King Pleasure Sings / Annie Ross Sings pairs jazz vocalese's two founding voices on one LP, turning saxophone solos into songs that never needed a horn at all.

Vocalese takes an improvised horn solo and writes a lyric that follows every bent note, sung as if the words had always been there. King Pleasure invented the trick in the early 1950s, and Annie Ross, fresh from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, sharpened it into something wittier and more theatrical. Pairing them on one record wasn't just tidy programming, it staged two very different temperaments cracking the same impossible problem, one reverent, one mischievous.

King Pleasure's side leans loose and conversational, ambling through Red Top and Jumpin' With Symphony Sid with the swagger of a man narrating his own legend. Annie Ross takes the flip with sharper edges: Twisted turns a therapist's couch into a comedy routine set to Wardell Gray's tenor line, timed so precisely it still lands decades later, while Parker's Mood strips the humor away, mourning in slow triplets lifted straight from Charlie Parker's own blues solo.

Neither singer needed the other, but together they proved vocalese was its own idiom, not a novelty bolted onto bebop. For anyone chasing jazz singing's cleverest moment, this is where the story starts.

Tracklist

Side A  
1. Red Top
2. Jumpin With Symphony Sid
3. Sometimes I'm Happy
4. This is Always
5. What Can I Say (After I Say I'm Sorry)
6. Don't Get Scared 

Side B
1. Parker's Mood 
2. I'm Gone 
3. Twisted 
4. Farmer's Market
5. The Time Was Right
6. Annie's Lament