Judy Garland: The Historic Carnegie Hall Concert Remastered. for the First Time in the Original Mono
Judy Garland: The Historic Carnegie Hall Concert Remastered. For the First time in the Original Mono. JSP Records JSP4232 (2 CDs). Endless fascination with Judy Garland's life and career, both the world's and my own, and the ever growing appreciation of her extraordinary vocal prowess have led to heightened interest in her recorded legacy in recent years. All of Garland's known studio recordings are currently available in the compact disc format, with outtakes and alternate takes, and previously lost recordings appearing with frequency as part of new releases. JSP Records has led the way in preserving Garland's vocal achievement in the past few years under the guidance of Lawrence Schulman, a Garland scholar and sound archivist extraordinaire. In preserving Garland's recorded legacy, JSP and Schulman have not limited themselves to her studio recordings but have delved deeply into rare soundtrack, radio, studio, and live concert recordings. Thanks to their efforts, confirmed have burgeoning libraries of Garland recordings. These include the earliest known vocals in Warner Bros./Vitaphone talkie short subjects from 1929-1930 with the seven-year-old Garland as the youngest member of the Gumm Sisters, as well as lost and now found recordings, such as two of her three unreleased 1935 Decca Records tracks--one remains lost--that recently appeared on JSP and Schulman's four-disc Judy Garland: Lost Tracks 1929-1959. Beyond these early recordings, Garland's work in commercial recording studios, on movie sound stages, on radio and television, and in concert spreads across her too-short life up to her last European appearances in London and Scandinavia in the weeks preceding her June 1969 death. Of all Garland recordings, the most acclaimed and best-known is unquestionably that derived from her Carnegie Hall concert on 23 April 1961, released by Capitol Records as a two-LP set called Judy at Carnegie Hall that same year. As the title of this newest release of that recording makes clear, Garland's performance that night has attained historic dimensions in the realm of popular music, as the set's annotator, Scott Brogan, notes. The original release of Judy at Carnegie Hall rocketed to the top of the charts and stayed there for 94 weeks (13 weeks at number one) and won five Grammy Awards, including the first Album of the Year for a live recording and the first for a female artist. It has been constantly available in every commercial audio format, and it is widely considered perhaps the greatest live recording in the realm of popular music. In Garland lore, Judy at Carnegie Hall is the Holy Grail--the pinnacle of her late career vocalizing, and proof, presuming such proof should be needed, that she was a masterful entertainer and singer, easily the equal of any performing artist of the Twentieth Century. As previously noted, Judy at Carnegie Hall has been re-released non-stop since its first appearance over fifty years ago. First released on compact disc in 1989, in stereo, it has since undergone some transformations, including a 2000 gold version released by DCC Compact Classics in which every second of the concert's master tapes housed in its vaults was presented, without editing, from start to finish. The DCC set was followed in 2001 by another Capitol Records release, this too complete and with some reverb added compared to the DCC mastering. These two releases reaped no new songs since all of Garland's vocals that night were included on the original album, but it added some stage waits and Garland quips and stories between numbers, including a hilarious account of a visit to a Parisian hairdresser during a European tour, as well as her touching introduction of songwriter Harold Arlen, a perfect gesture given that her program featured many Arlen compositions (he was only one of a number of celebrities present in the star-studded audience). Garlandites welcomed the DCC set as well as the Capitol, which was released just prior to the fortieth anniversary of the concert. …