The meaty-voiced Diane Schuur, two-time GRAMMY Award Winner for best jazz female vocalist for her albums Timeless and Diane Schuur and the Count Basie Orchestra, has been pleasing audiences for twenty years with her satisfyingly rich sound and triumphant confidence. Trumpeter-bandleader Maynard Ferguson, now 73, has been blasting high notes at the canine decibel level for decades, and his current ensemble, the Big Bop Nouveau band, proves that no matter how you slice it, it's still Maynard. The Big Bop Nouveau boys are a debonair bunch, offering solid support for the session. (Ferguson aptly calls them a "small big band.")
Both Schuur and Ferguson share a quality of fearlessness, and as Ferguson interjects his loud, brassy asides on a song like "Just One of Those Things," his shivering high notes are like an exuberant mother-in-law offering high-pitched commentaries to Schuur's vocal derring-do. Just as during his three much-noticed years with the Stan Kenton band (starting in 1950), Ferguson is still the Alpine athlete, ever swinging to greater heights.

Schuur enters convincingly into the Ferguson esthetic, although this program -- that includes standards like "Besame Mucho," "Autumn Leaves," "My Romance," and "Lush Life" -- offers arrangements by various hands with varying understandings of how to join the two artists' sensibilities. Perhaps the subtlest is Ron Oswanski's arrangement of "I Fall In Love Too Easily," which avoids the hard pulse of a Ferguson intro to an essentially low key ballad -- an error that another arranger falls into with "Autumn Leaves."

Schuur, blind from early infancy after too much oxygen was pumped into her incubator, has healthier and younger vocal chops than even Ella Fitzgerald was blessed with, during the years when Ella recorded most of her high flights of instrumental-sounding scat singing. Schuur is also recorded better today on the Concord label than was largely Ella's fate. (Schuur's producer is the reliable Phil Ramone.) Since being presented by Dizzy Gillespie at the 1979 Monterey Jazz Festival, Schuur has won ardent admirers, most recently for her previous Concord set Friends For Schuur that included duets with Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and Stan Getz.

About the only suggestion for improvement one can give this superbly talented artist is that it's time to retire the puns on her name in album titles -- other discs include Schuur Thing and Blues For Schuur. Unlike a series of mystery novels that can benefit from such repetitive jokes, Schuur's rock-solid artistry hardly needs coy gimmicks.

Benjamin Ivry
CDNOW Contributing Writer