Grace Jones

Oh, you people are too critical. This album was great. You danced to it, you listened to it, you totally enjoyed it. When you were enjoying it, you didn't actually think about how "Flat and unimaginative" it was. As you were dancing you weren't thinking how"thin" and "flat" her voice is. You simply enjoyed this album, all of it. Everyone played almost the entire album. That sounds like a pretty good album to me. And I haven't started talking about my ALL_TIME FAVORITE SONG,"La Vie En Rose"!! Tell me Grace Jones didn't sing good!! She put on her best, to a simply beautiful song. It is sexy, pretty, erotic and exotic. When she performed this song live, it usually stole the show. The best guitar riff in DISCO was on this song. It was excellent, yet very simple. I can't get enough of this song, to this day if I hear it playing somewhere, in the mall, walking down the street, I'll stop and enjoy it. If I am in a car, and hear it coming out of another car, I go crazy trying to find whatever station it is on. Sadness hits me like a right cross to the jaw when I realize that it is a CD or SIRUS. Frustrating!! We all love this album, it gets a TEN!!!!!

Explosive Broadway disco is the best way to define this album by; the arrangement is by disco pioneer Tom Moulton who produced these cuts for Grace Jones in 1977. The album is highly stylistic, the backing orchestra is magnificent and the overall production of this album is slick; the main attraction however is the flamboyant Miss. Jones who draws you right in with her fierce, formidable, personality.

Portfolio was a huge hit back in 1977, the album provided Grace with a #1 Club Hit, I Need a Man, and a gold-selling single, La Vie En Rose, plus two Top 20 entries with, Sorry, and That’s the Trouble. Grace’s stage-act was something completely different from the rest, her outrageous costumes (Gorilla suits and Men’s clothing) and her performance with live animals, both with tigers and other exotic beasts.

Let’s take a look at the songs. The first three songs consists of a Medley done Broadway style, starting out with a wonderful rendition of Send in the Clowns, it continues with What I Did for Love from (A Chorus Line) and it ends out with a terrific performance of the classic cut from Annie, Tomorrow. The overall album is Disco, but in the middle of it all, is La Vie En Rose, a stunning rendition of Edith’s immortal love song. The acoustic guitars are used to stunning effect, and is this not perhaps Grace’s finest vocal deliverance? Her commitment to the song makes it all the better. Sorry is up next and it’s a very delightful little disco, love song. The latter being especially funny to listen to, especially when you consider her later albums filled with dramatic, often dangerous songs. The first song Grace ever recorded was That’s the Trouble and it’s a wonderful piece of traditional disco, fused with dangerous lyrics.

The album ends with her then-anthem, I Need a Man. Which is heralded as one of the biggest gay-disco anthems of its era, alongside Gloria Gaynor’s, I Will Survive. Grace had not yet learned how to utilize her voice as she does on later albums, her singing on Portfolio is often thin and it falls flat quite often. But she’s definitely committed to the songs, and that’s all that matters.

Much as I love Grace, this is not a very good album. "La Vie En Rose" still sounds fabulous, "I Need A Man" too, "Sorry" and "That's The Trouble" are less spectacular, but decent Philly disco stuff. What makes the record so uneven is the utterly dreadful medley on side 1, dire arrangements with Grace singing flat and unimaginatively. Thankfully things got much better on "Fame" the following year.