EVA CASSEDY - Songbird (1998)

blues,jazz-contemporary, jazz-traditional and rootsrock/traditional R&B, in addition to naming her Artist of the Year, and her then-current release, Live At Blues Alley, Album of the Year. Songbird is a posthumous anthology culled from that album and her other solo release, Eva By Heart, along with one track from her 1992 duet album with Chuck Brown titled The Other Side. Though the production value on several songs falls well short of state-of-the-art, the shimmering beauty of her crystal clear voice, combined with her seemingly limitless range and imaginative phrasing, cuts through to both heart and soul. Whether she beckons a soothing timbre for seductively restrained passages or shakes the rafters by unleashing her formidable power and gorgeous falsetto, Cassidy's warblings always fuse her purity of tone with a purity of emotion and a palpable connection with the lyric. Though the songs described above are luscious, the coup de maitre is the album's finale -- surely one of the great recordings in recent popular music -- Cassidy's stunning version of Over the Rainbow. Recorded with only her own accompaniment on acoustic guitar, keyboards and synthesizer, Cassidy's voice swoops and soars over a musical panorama -- though with a wistful, melancholic shading that almost seems to betray a premonition of her own demise, despite the fact that it would be nearly four years before she would be diagnosed with her terminal illness. Cassidy more than rearranges the Judy Garland classic -- she reinvents it. The song is immediately familiar, yet the beautiful colors that arc the sky are very much hers. In an eerie coincidence, if one inverts the two words contained in the album's title, Songbird (which was taken from her straightforward rendition of the Fleetwood Mac cut , the result is "Bird Song." The irony is that "Bird Song" is the title of the Grateful Dead's ode to another phenomenal woman singer whose melodious flight was tragically cut short: Janis Joplin. One could argue that its lyrics and sentiment are equally apropos of Eva Cassidy.

01 Fields of gold
02 Wade in the water
03 Autumn leaves
04 Wayfaring stranger
05 Songbird
06 Time is a healer
07 I know you by heart
08 People get ready
09 Oh, had i a goden thread
10 Over the rainbow

http://rapidshare.de/files/31176658/Evassedie_Sb.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.de/files/31196103/Evassedie_Sb.part2.rar

Enjoy and don't forget to dream ;-)