Aged to Perfection

By JAY COCKS

Duke Ellington called him "the sonorous B" and said he "makes my songs smile." Billy Eckstine had a baritone that sounded as if it had been aged in wood. His voice, warm and sinuous, slid around a melody like prize malt over rocks -- not cubes of ice either, but precious stones. When Billy Eckstine sang a song, every lyric became a jewel.

Eckstine, who toured and sang until a stroke disabled him in 1992, died in March 1993 without benefit of either a major revival, like Nat King Cole, or a career resurrection, like Frank Sinatra. But as the newly released two-CD set Everything I Have Is Yours (Verve) makes bountifully clear, Eckstine was every bit their equal, a jazzman and balladeer of incomparable technique and fathomless soul. As a vocalist, Eckstine spoke admiringly of such crooners as Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo. As a bandleader in the '40s, he hired Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and other bop hands who kept him close to the molten core. He could take the harmonic ideas of bebop and tuck them between the pages of - the great American songbook, so classics like As Long As I Live and Taking a Chance On Love got a fresh infusion of spirit. It wasn't that they were reborn; Eckstine shook them awake.

This set includes 42 Eckstine renditions spanning his postwar years on the MGM label, from 1947 through a superb duet with Sarah Vaughan 10 years later. Caught in the crush between jazz and pop, Eckstine was sometimes rebuked for selling his jazzman's purity short. His response: "You want me to wind up in a goddamn hotel room with a bottle of gin in my pocket and a needle in my arm and let them discover me laying there? Then I'll be an immortal, I guess, to you." These CDs demonstrate what will, as he knew, truly make him immortal.