Carla Thomas: Live At The Bohemian Caverns

As part of Stax's determination to mine new gold from its storied vaults, Live At The Bohemian Caverns is a welcome revelation... but you won't be forced to rethink Carla, Rufus, or the label in the long run. It is nice to see her jazz chops, though.

It's bound to remain one of the great mysteries surrounding the Stax label -- why, when faced with hitmaker Carla Thomas' desire to branch out into jazz, did the company hire a great band, get Donny Hathaway to lead it and select some standards, book one of the more prestigious jazz venues of the day, and then refuse to release the album at the very last minute? (It even had a release number by that point, though not the same as this CD version; the original number was used for a Booker T. and the MGs album.)

Her performance certainly wasn't the problem; guided by Hathaway (of "Where Is The Love" fame), she finds a perfect mix of Great American Songbook staples and her own classic soul hits ("B-A-B-Y," "Gee Whiz") and then swings them in a friendly yet still soulful style, like a chitlin circuit Billie Holiday with Ella's accessibility. She garnered some great notices, too -- and, as the cover image might lead you to believe, the Caverns were a fine and private place. You can hear her big voice bouncing off the wall behind her, but it never gets too big for the room.

We may never know why Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton (the combined Stax in the name Stax, both of whom were there that night) passed on this release, and so suddenly. Perhaps they sensed her upcoming duet "Tramp" (with Otis Redding, also in the audience) was about to break her big on the pop charts, and didn't want to risk alienating those fans; pop and jazz were still bitterly divided in those days. It only means we almost missed out entirely on her medley of Berlin and Mercer standards, or her take on Hathaway's "Never Be True," although the three-song, two-joke mini-set her father Rufus serves up is a welcome addition to the original album length. Not quite the stunning tour de force she'd envisioned, perhaps -- but proof positive that, stylistically at least, she was robbed.