Not that she has lost any of the light, lilting charm that made her one of the singing sensations of the Swing Era. She still has that. But more! There is a gutsy quality in the singing of today's Maxine Sullivan, an outgoing, open blusiness that was not always apparent in the years when she concentrated - through public demand - on a cool, controlled, subtly swinging treatment of folk songs. It was a style that she was virtually locked into after her tremendous success in 1937 singing Claude Thornhill's arrangement of "Loch Lomond." It was a style that she could not shake even after fifteen years of retirement during the Fifties and Sixties when she had stayed home to bring up her daughter.

When she resumed her career in 1969, it was with a repertory that was the mixture as before: "Loch Lomond," "Molly Malone," "If I Had a Ribbon Bow," balanced by such pop songs as "A Hundred Years from Today," "I'm Comin', Virginia," and "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams."

But as her latter-day career continued, as she advanced into her sixties and the century advanced into its Seventies, the balance of her repertory has changed somewhat. She is still sticking to old, established standards, but there is a stronger blues feeling in the songs she chooses and there is a strong blues projection in her manner of singing. Her vocal texture is richer and stronger than we have been accustomed to hear from her. And more varied. There is a buoyant, gutty quality in her voice in I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter, a creamy tone in her delivery of Miss Otis Regrets, a bit of a shout and snap in St. Louis Blues, and a suggestion of Pearl Bailey in Legalize My Name. And all of it is relaxed, assured, with that clean articulation that she always brought to her folk songs.

There seems to be something on the uphill side of the age sixties that opens up new vistas and fresh horizons to some singers. It happened to Eubie Blake. It happened to Mabel Mercer. And it is happening to Maxine Sullivan who, in effect, is starting all over again with a new musical perspective, a rediscovered voice and the experience that everybody wishes they had the first time around. To back up her experience, there is even more experience in her accompaniment. Art Hodes, at 73, is still playing the prodding, bristling piano that has always been his hallmark. He tours the U. S. and Europe regularly and also gives illustrated lectures on jazz. He is heard in this album primarily as an accompanist, a role which he brings a great deal of sensitivity and perception even though it keeps him in the background except for a short, probing solo on She's Funny That Way and a jaunty duet with Ernie Carson on You Were Meant for Me.

Carson gets most of the instrumental solo space, enough of it to display the crisp bite in his cornet and such individualistic characteristics as the wonderfully sour curl of his phrases on Exactly Like You. Although Carson's base of operations is Atlanta, he spends half of each year on the road, playing jazz festivals internationally and working with such all-star groups as Bob Greene's "World of Jelly Roll Morton" troupe. Spencer Clark's big bass saxophone is used primarily as an ensemble color, wandering through the background on an independent, carefree line that recalls Laurie Payne and Ray Noble's English band and Charlie Buebeck with the Ozzie Nelson band. Spencer's style on bass sax is an outgrowth of his experimentation in the late Twenties when he was following the lead of Adrian Rollini, playing with the California Ramblers and with French bands. He now lives in Webster, NC, and still plays the festivals and makes occasional recordings such as this one and a recent Joe Venuti, Zoot Sims session.

Jack Howe, whose tenor saxophone emerges briefly on Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, was a part of the Bix generation at Princeton University. For many years, he was an active musician in Chicago, both in Squirrel Ashcraft's Bix Summer Festivals and as guiding light of the Windjammers, a band of youngsters that included his son. He now lives near Columbia, SC, and plays in the Carolinas which is also the stomping ground of drummer Tom Martin and bassist Johnny Haynes, a member of Larry Conger's Two Rivers Band.

-John S. Wilson reviews Jazz for The New York Times and for High Fidelity magazine and for the Voice of America, does weekly radio program, Jazz Today