Aretha Franklin - Tiny Sparrow: The Bobby Scott Sessions (1963/2011) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

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Aretha Franklin - Tiny Sparrow: The Bobby Scott Sessions (1963/2011) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

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]At Columbia, Franklin lived an entirely different musical life than she would at Atlantic, one that was grounded in jazz and the Great American Songbook, revealing a gigantic vocal talent that betrayed potent hints of the tectonic soul shift to come at Atlantic. It takes precious little imagination to conclude that Franklin was as important to American music in the middle-to-late 1960s as singer/pianist Ray Charles was the decade before, the two star ascents crossing in creative eclipse. Franklin gave potent voice to women in the soul and rock arenas, enabling the flourishing of the Tina Turner, Janet Jackson and Jennifer Hudson generations. Her parallel to Charles is not incidental, sharing the visions of Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, the operators of the Atlantic musical collider that mashed up gospel and the blues, creating r&b and soul. But Franklin had a hefty musical career before she was crowned the "Queen of Soul" by an un-named MC in 1965. Before Atlantic Records, Muscle Shoals, Wexler and the Ertegun Brothers, there was Uber-AR man John Hammond and five productive years at Columbia Records. Hammond, whose musical influence spanned the center of the 20th century, touching the work of artists from Robert Johnson to Stevie Ray Vaughan, brought Franklin to Columbia with the intention of continuing the label's success in jazz vocals experienced with Billie Holiday. Franklin's Columbia output can in 2011 be considered a sublime failure when compared to her Atlantic material. It was excellent music resulting from misapplied direction. Hammond admitted that the label failed to recognise and exploit Franklin's gospel roots in her secular output. A mistake the Atlantic crew took full advantage of later. However, the result of Franklin's association with Columbia did yield a creatively and quantitatively rich catalog, showing Franklin as a fully developed and accomplished performer when she came to New York City from her father, Rev. L.C. Franklin's Detroit Baptist Church. Her Columbia material included seven original LPs, each expanded here with alternate mixes, making up the roast beef of the set. The gravy comes with the previously unreleased or differently released material, including Franklin collaborations with producers Bobby Scott and Clyde Otis yielding Tiny Sparrow: The Bobby Scott Sessions (1963) and Take A Look: The Clyde Otis Sessions (1964), material either never released or released only as singles.