Underappreciated Albums: 'The Dana Owens Album'

There was a little Holly Hunter/Danny DeVito flick that came out that year called "Living Out Loud." Hunter plays a newly divorced woman of means, trying to figure out her life. DeVito plays her building's superintendent and elevator operator who has just lost his daughter and also has gambling debts. If the two of them seem like an unlikely combination, that was part of the movie's charm. Latifah plays Hunter's friend, a local jazz singer.

There's a scene where she does serious justice to Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life," a favorite of mine since picking up a Duke Ellington compilation CD a couple of years prior featuring Nat King Cole's classic 1949 recording. I didn't care for the arrangement at all, but Latifah's voice blew me away.

"She can do that?"

So I kept an eye out for her and, sure enough, in 2004 she finally delivered an album built on the promise of that movie performance. 

It's called "The Dana Owens Album," and it's an unexpected collection of R&B, pop, and jazz standards set to loving arrangements that slide from swing to soul then back again, given new life by Latifah's vocals. 

The album opens with Latifah doing her bluesy best to Leonard Feather's "Baby Get Lost."

 

Several arrangers have credits on the album without saying who arranged which song. So I have no idea whose arrangement that was, but they did it with a huge nod to Count Basie. I appreciate it.

Now listen to her kick back, relax, and have some fun with Joe Zawinul's "Mercy, Mercy Mercy," first recorded by Cannonball Adderley in 1966 and eventually by pretty much everyone — but Latifah makes it her own.

 I have to play two more songs before I wrap up.

The first is Latifah's take on "The Same Love That Made Me Laugh," which was always one of my favorite Bill Withers songs.

 It's so wrong and yet so right for heartbreak to sound so breezy.

Finally, the Bernice Petkere classic, "Close Your Eyes."

 If you'd told me when I first got serious about jazz that Queen Latifah would someday record my all-time favorite version of "Close Your Eyes" — yes, dammit, I enjoy it even more than Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers' record — I'd have looked at you like you were a crazy person.

AllMusic's review summed up the album as "very classy and a whole lot of fun," and I can't argue with that.

Latifah recorded a follow-up album three years later, "Travelin' Light." The second album maybe isn't as consistent as "The Dana Owens Album." But its high points — including Phoebe Snow's "Poetry Man" and Bessie Smith's "Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl" — reach every bit as high. You could play the two albums back-to-back and think she'd recorded a double CD.

One last note on "The Dana Owens Album." 

I found the title to be a bittersweet delight. Dana Owens, I quickly found out, is Latifah's given name. The title practically shouts to the skies, "THIS IS THE REAL ME."

How I wish she'd let us get to know the real her so much sooner — and more often.

"The Dana Owens Album" is not available for streaming, which is a shame. You can't even buy a CD-quality download on Qobuz or a compressed version on the iTunes Store. The CD is available new and used from third-party sellers on Amazon. I guess it really is underappreciated by a wider audience, after all.

But not underappreciated by you anymore, right?

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