A feature on Betty Carter in the Village Voice in the late 1970s feared she might die an unknown genius since no record company would touch her when this record was made in 1979. So she formed her own self produced Bet-Car label – thank goodness she did. This 2LP set is a testament to her genius; among the highlights are ‘Sounds’, a tour de force of scat singing through shifting tempos and meters that lasts 25 minutes and 20 seconds. On it, Carter embraces a whole panoply of phonemes – plosives, frictives, nasals and glides (the descriptive terms given to certain key vocal sounds of scat) – yet she is not trying to jam the entire alphabet into each measure; her spirit is free and floating, associating snippets of melody with pitch-slides, bends and octave jumps that use a wide range of vocal timbres that coalesce into a brilliantly conceived improvised line, all while superbly interacting with her trio. Is it possible she ever sang better this? In one episode, Carter, Hicks, Lundy and Washington are each playing in different meters! And then the album highlight, ‘My Favorite Things’, which still inspires awe 40 years after it was recorded. It's at a ludicrously fast tempo, yet Lundy and Washington exert impeccable control while Hicks is at his most expansive, his accompaniment blossoming into a countermelody that supports Carter's line so that, by the coda, who can say whether voice or piano predominates? Has there ever been a finer jazz vocal performance than this? Yet to say this is one of the finest of all jazz vocal performances is limiting; it numbers among the great contemporary jazz albums, period. And you can still pickup original vinyl copies for under £20 because, to all intents and purposes, Carter did die an unknown genius.