Feel It Advent...ure 11. Lorez Alexandria

Lorez Alexandria was not a name I was familiar with until a year or so ago. I think it was an ebay listing where I first came across her name and that triggered a YouTube trawl. Everything of hers I play there I like a lot. One track in particular stood out but it took some serious Googling to find out which album it came from. Once I had identified the album I was pleasantly surprised to find that in only a few weeks I had managed to track one down on ebay for a very good price.


The track in question is "Morning" written by Clare Fischer. It comes from the album "A Woman Knows" an album full of cool, laid back jazz that caresses you from start to finish. It was recorded in December 1978  and released the following year on the small LA label Discovery.     

Lorez was born in Chicago in 1929 and passed away in 2001. For me Jazz singers can often get a little bit too carried away with their interpretations and when they move into scat territory I usually get turned off. But Lorez certainly doesn't turn me off, her voice was pure in tone and she had a wonderfully subtle way of interpreting the songs she sang.


Her recording career started in the late Fifties and ran fairly consistently into the mid Sixties on the King, Argo, and Impulse labels. Then her output dropped off, until 1978 when she was back with a run of releases on Discovery, and then a few more albums through the Eighties and into the Nineties when ill health forced her to stop performing in 1996. 


All in all Lorez Alexandria left behind a decent catalogue of recordings, but for somebody with such a wonderful voice it should have been much bigger and she remains relatively little known and largely under-appreciated.


Lorez Alexandria - Morning 1978