Dinah Washington – The Swingin’ Miss “D”
The Swingin’ Miss D is the sixth studio album by Dinah Washington, arranged by Quincy Jones. It was recorded in December 1956 and released in September 1957. The album explores the full range of the singer's talents, from ballads to blues. As Quincy Jones said "Once she put her soulful trademark on a song, she owned it and it was never the same". The Allmusic review by William Ruhlmann awarded the album 4½ stars and stated: “Dinah Washington was accompanied by an orchestra organized and conducted by Quincy Jones on this 1957 album, and she was singing to arrangements mostly written by the young bandleader, swing charts of pop standards by the likes of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. The result had much in common with the swing albums of Frank Sinatra in the same period, especially because Jones' arrangements were heavily influenced by Billy May and Nelson Riddle. Sinatra's records were regarded as "pop, " of course, and Washington's, at least when released on the EmArcy subsidiary of Mercury Records, as "jazz, " but her precise articulation and attention to lyrical meaning left little room for improvisation, and while Jones allowed for brief solos from a band that included Charlie Shavers, Clark Terry, Urbie Green, and Milt Hinton, the jazz categorization was actually arbitrary.”
