By Michael Ullman

It’s the variety of sounds in Eva Cassidy’s repertoire, reinforced by her ability to use them with the utmost tact and control, that impresses this listener.

Eva Cassidy, Walkin’ After Midnight (Blix Street Records)

John Lennon recorded his famous song “Imagine” in 1971 in the midst of the Vietnam War. His recording became instantly and deservedly famous worldwide. Yet when this masterpiece pops into my head, it is the version by the late Eva Cassidy that I hear. At times, she is my favorite singer. I sometimes wonder that she is not everybody’s favorite. Yet I, too, forgot her, for in 1996, soon after her initial albums, she passed away at the age of 33. Few people outside of her native Washington, DC, heard her live. Luckily, others remembered. Before her passing, in 1992, Cassidy released a series of duets with Chuck Brown as The Other Side. Subsequently she scraped up the money to finance her own recording, Live at Blues Alley, released in 1996. She didn’t like it. Not that the listeners could hear it, but Cassidy had a cold the night the gig was recorded. Nonetheless, the recording proved invaluable because that same year Cassidy died of melanoma.

Cassidy’s discography is therefore largely posthumous. Her reputation is based on a series of such releases and compilations along with a couple of amateur videos in which she shines. So I welcome this new collection of previously unreleased live tracks, Walkin’ After Midnight, which I am listening to as a download. It contains her version of “Songbird” (originally recorded by Fleetwood Mac) that I heard on the radio and found entrancing. Her singing on “Songbird” and the arrangement is perfectly relaxed, her voice clear, controlled and subtle. And varied. She enters “Songbird” abruptly with “For you … there’ll be no crying.” She then ascends into her head register, and that adds a grain to her voice: it’s like a fog descending on the song. Her vibrato can be a sensuous wave or what Louis Armstrong used to call “tight like that.” She whispers and shouts and it all sounds inevitable, unmannered.

“Songbird” and the other tunes I will talk about can be found on The Best of Eva Cassidy. To this listener, the more sentimental the original the more miraculous her performance. She makes “Over the Rainbow” a believably wistful story. Again, she stretches out some syllables or words, pauses, and might bring in a barely audible reedy whisper or a sudden near shout. She adds a bit of a croak in the bridge. “That’s where you’ll find me,” she sings musingly. Someday “I’ll wake up with the clouds behind me,” she sings optimistically. She shouts the next phrases before launching into headvoice. She can be self assertive and tender almost in the same breath, and it all sounds right as rain. Then there’s “Danny Boy,” which she performs with acoustic guitar. When she sings forthrightly about being deceased when her lover returns, and then in her sweetest, gentlest voice asks to be told that she is loved, this listener is completely convinced. Her repertoire is varied.… she sings the folk song “Wade in the Water “as well as Lennon’s “Imagine” and the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves.” She even manages to sound a little bitter on Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine.” She improvises and twists her lines in a bluesy fashion — yet the song’s message is always her priority.

Featuring Keith Grimes on guitar, Chris Biondo on bass, and Bruno Nasta on violin, Walkin’ After Midnight is an unrehearsed set that was recorded on the second of November, 1995. The venue was the Maryland Inn in Annapolis. Seemingly delighted in the skips of the melody, Cassidy bounces through “Honeysuckle Rose,” and tries to sound fierce on “Next Time You See Me,” once a hit for bluesman James Cotton. The title cut will be well known to country fans because it was a hit for Patsy Cline. New to her discography is her upbeat version of “Down Home Blues.” She seems to relish kicking off her shoes, waiting for her drink, and reveling in the blues. Cassidy laughs joyously during Nasta’s violin solo. She also sings “Route 66” — I guess she watched TV. Singing Gershwin’s oft-recorded “Summertime,” Cassidy manages to sound both languorous and assertive. It’s the variety of sounds in her repertoire, reinforced by her ability to use them with the utmost tact and control, that impresses this listener. She never loses track of the story, whether singing a lullaby or claiming to have “that fever.” I think she’s a wonder.

For over 30 years, Michael Ullman has written a bimonthly jazz column for Fanfare Magazine, for which he also reviews classical music. He has emeritus status at Tufts University, where for 45 years he taught in the English and Music Departments, specializing in modernist writers and nonfiction writing in English, and jazz and blues history in music. He studied classical clarinet. The author or co-author of two books on jazz, he has written on jazz and classical music for the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, High Fidelity, Stereophile, Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, and other venues. He plays piano badly.