Night Beat
Label: RCA/Legacy
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Night Beat
One of Sam Cooke’s most rewarding albums, Night Beat has nonetheless been somewhat overlooked, a situation that will hopefully be rectified with this new reissue. This could be due to its doleful soulfulness and lack of upbeat radio hits like “Chain Gang” or it could be because Cooke never had much of a reputation as an album artist. Whatever the case, when it was released in 1963, Night Beat went beyond both the filler-stuffed long-players of Cooke’s peers and the supper-club discs of his own past. Conceived and executed as a thematically linked set, the album sinks itself into a thick and smoky blues atmosphere. Between Cooke’s surprisingly gruff vocal delivery, meaty piano runs courtesy of Ray Johnson and the wispy accents of Billy Preston’s organ, the album is consistently and convincingly evocative of late-night/early-morning regret and is equaled only by similar concept work by Ray Charles.
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2005.