The Jazz Singers

* * * a lyrical survey of blues belters and balladeers, from bessie smith to ella fitzgerald, from leadbelly to ray charles

part II

In the early years of the Depression-wracked Thirties, jazz in all its expressions began to acquire a sophistication and a popular acceptance that had been denied it during its lusty, wailing prepubescence. A number of big bands -- with sidemen duked up in tuxedos and blowing from neatly-inked arrangements on their music stands -- were making decent money and playing to good crowds: Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk, McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Duke Ellington were but a few. Paul Whiteman and Jean Goldkette worked at what was euphemistically called "symphonic jazz," a slicked-up, mostly-cornball, thoroughly-commercial sound that nevertheless gave instrumental voice to such crack jazzmen as Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer. With the Whiteman contingent appeared a vocal group known as the Rhythm Boys, among whom was a mellow baritone by the name of Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby, who was destined to become the first major male voice in the field of popular jazz singing -- which he dominated right up to the start of the Forties.

Crosby had been a law student at Gonzaga University in Spokane when he decided to chuck it and go into show business. After an unspectacular stint in vaudeville, he joined the Whiteman entourage in 1927 and organized the Rhythm Boys along with Harry Barris and Al Rinker. (continued on page 74)Jazz Singers(continued from page 69) During his gig with Whiteman, Bing parlayed an early affinity for the style of Russ Columbo (and for the megaphone of fellow-crooner Rudy Vallee) into a lazy, appealing tone of his own -- soon to be further shaped by the many jazzmen with whom he worked. He recorded with Bix in 1928, with the Dorseys in 1929, with the Duke in 1930 -- and later with Armstrong and Teagarden.

Bing never grunted or blasted in front of an audience; at ease and unruffled, he crooned with a nonchalant charm that wowed everyone during the Thirties, and left a legacy of lyrical naturalness that has been profitably appropriated by the more contemporary likes of Dean Martin, Perry Como, Dick Haymes and Pat Boone. Bing's easy-does-it manner, his knowledgeable way with a lyric and his sharp sense of the value of background jazz horns to a vocalist, made him a fountainhead of inspiration; he was undoubtedly the most influential vocalist of the Depression decade.

As the national economy slowly emerged from the wallows of the lean-money years, jazz audiences grew and grew. The ever-increasing popularity of records, radio and motion pictures had at last given jazz a national sounding board. And then came the night of August 21, 1935 -- one of the most significant in the history of jazz. After laying several large musical eggs along the East Coast, the Benny Goodman band opened at Los Angeles' Palomar Ballroom. The bespectacled clarinetist kicked off the program with a set of inoffensive standards; the audience shuffled a little, politely applauded at the end of each number, but remained generally unmoved. As Goodman recalls, "If we had to flop, at least I'd do it my own way, playing the kind of music I wanted to. For all I knew, this might be our last night together, and we might as well have a good time of it while we had the chance. I called out some of our big Fletcher Henderson arrangements for the next set, and the boys seemed to get the idea. From the moment I kicked them off, they dug in with some of the best playing since we left New York. The first big roar from the crowd was the sweetest sound I ever heard."

The swing era had come alive. "It was a dancing audience and that's why they went for it," said Benny, who immediately met the demand for the swinging sound by setting a key precedent: presenting arrangements of pop hits of the day -- like Goody Goody -- in the jazz idiom. Thousands of radio fans tuned to the Goodman band on its Let's Dance broadcasts over NBC. The collegiate set, too young to hear much of what was going on during Prohibition, flocked to the major cities to catch and jitterbug to the sound of swing.

By 1938, Goodman had successfully invaded Carnegie Hall. Trumpeter Harry James cut out from Goodman to form his own band, as did Gene Krupa and Teddy Wilson. Glen Gray's Casa Loma band came on the scene; the Dorsey Brothers joined the parade. So did Bob Crosby, Charlie Spivak, Les Brown, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Charlie Barnet, Larry Clinton and a host of others. Jazz bands became swing bands, and most all of them featured singers out in front.

Some of the vocalists who warbled with the big bands of the late Thirties and Forties were more jazz-oriented than others; some had listened long and hard to the greats -- Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon, Satchmo; and some of them were as far removed from jazz as Skinnay Ennis was from opera.

Helen Ward, Martha Tilton and Peggy Lee (the last an important jazz-based stylist to this day, firmly entrenched in the Billie Holiday groove) were among those who graced the Goodman bandstand. Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes sang prettily with Harry James. Ray Eberle and Marion Hutton did likewise with Glenn Miller, as did Bob Eberle and Helen O'Connell with Jimmy Dorsey. Of all of them, however, Tommy Dorsey took the prize when Francis Albert Sinatra left Harry James and joined the trombonist's band in 1940, at the age of twenty-two.

The skinny, immensely appealing young singer brought to the Dorsey band a sure and easy feeling for rhythm, an instinctive understanding of what a ballad was supposed to be about. As the best jazz singers had done in the past, he could communicate the meaning of a song through a highly subjective blend of phrasing and lyric delivery. Just as Goodman had brought a new kind of big-band jazz beat to the country, Sinatra brought a fresh kind of delivery to popular singing. As he tells it, the sound of the Dorsey trombone was the real key to his unique style. "I sort of bend my notes," he said, "gliding from one to another without abrupt breaks. The trombone is the greatest example of this." To up-tempo numbers Sinatra imparted the same extemporized vigor he heard on current trumpet solos, especially those of Dorsey sideman Ziggy Elman. But basically, his style was his own; he had identity; and he went his own way in music as well as in life. From the start, he sang with the impact of unfeigned emotion, because he both understood and believed in what he was singing; his concept of phrasing gave the downbeat to a whole new generation of singers ranging from Sammy Davis to Vic Damone to Julius LaRosa -- some great, some something less. Almost alone, the "Voice" changed the entire emphasis and direction of American popular music: from the booming big band with the singer perched out front, to the commanding solo vocalist with big-band background. There can be little doubt that he has been -- and still is -- the second major influence on the history of male jazz singing in a popular vein. He brought the genre to a new pinnacle of popularity -- and vitality; and his personalized style, plus the echoes of hundreds he influenced, were potent enough to survive even the end of the swing era. Swing became infirm around 1945, a tired, cliché-ridden phenomenon, and slowly the big bands prepared arrangements for their own dirge. The voice of the small, experimental group was to be heard in the land.

The distinction between jazz and popular singing was never a clear one, except during the earliest years of jazz; and slowly it began to vanish -- for good reasons. There can be no question that Sinatra's inflections, bent notes and special phrasings, that the mature Crosby's special brand of mellifluous nonchalance are consummate expressions of the personal kind of musicianship that is the very essence of jazz. During the Forties, the pure blues voices continued to wail, of course, along with the syrupy, non-inventive baritones, tenors and sopranos who culled nought but Broadway scores for their material. But there also emerged a raft of new singers with strong jazz backgrounds -- or at least with an awareness of jazz principles -- who did their best to enliven popular tunes with some of the imaginative embellishments that jazz had to offer. The difference between jazz and pop singing became one of degree, not of kind, as the influential flow of jazz made its way into the hearts and minds of singers throughout the U.S.

The sounds of jazz changed. With the bop revolution -- the de-emphasis of arranged big-band sounds in favor of small-group harmonic experimentation -- came a fresh new crop of singers. Jackie Cain and Roy Kral bopped under the banner of Charlie Ventura; their vocalese executions brought a contemporary freshness to the scat principle introduced by Armstrong several decades earlier, and adapted by Ella in the Thirties. Joe Carroll, with Dizzy Gillespie's band, added his eccentric embellishments to the far-out riffing, as did oddball obscurantist Slim Gaillard ("Cement Mixer--put-tee, put-tee"). All were allied to the brisk inventiveness of a youthful movement.

During the early Forties, the vocalist with Earl ("Fatha") Hines' band was a warm-throated baritone named Billy Eckstine, who had turned to singing after a so-so career as a self-taught trumpeter-trombonist. (continued on page 112)Jazz Singers(continued from page 74) Wholly relaxed, he'd saunter toward the mike, slip his hands into his pockets, and release as cavernous a sound as jazz has ever heard. Jelly, Jelly was his blues trademark, chasm-throated masculinity, his forte.

While Eckstine was with the Hines band -- a group that also included Diz and Bird -- he heard a young singer during an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater and promptly landed her a job with the same outfit in 1943. Her name was Sarah Lois Vaughan. Immediately endorsed by jazzmen of the day (and by such hip fringe-figures as Dave Garroway, then a disc jockey on his 1160 Club over NBC in Chicago), Sarah proceeded to hit it big. Her voice -- unlike the coolly precisioned style of Ella -- was ripe with warmth and richness, and with a deep vibrato inherited from Eckstine. She delighted in altering melodic lines to suit her mood -- fanciful, beautifully imaginative extemporizing --just as so many jazzmen had done before her. Her major mentor: "Billy Eckstine, of course," says Sassy (he reports the feeling is mutual).

Another influence emerged early in 1941, when Anita O'Day signed on with the Gene Krupa band. The Chicago-born belter had long been a fixture with Max Miller's combo at the Windy City's Three Deuces Club. Jazz buffs went big for Anita's husky, novel style -- related to Billie Holiday's but tinged with the venturesome bent of the modernists. When Anita let go with Let Me Off Uptown (with a noble assist from stratospheric trumpeter Roy "Little Jazz" Eldridge), she epitomized the improvisational nature of jazz singing during the early Forties. In 1944, Anita joined the Stan Kenton band and made an instant hit with And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine. Hard-swinging, brash, endowed with an inventiveness usually associated only with top jazz instrumentalists, Anita has always been a musicians' favorite. In recent years, on the Verve label, she's attempted to polish the rough edges, to look into Broadway scores for more material, and to succeed without the sometimes-coarse mannerisms that distinguished her early career. One thing about Anita is certain: she set the stylistic stage for the string of Kenton vocalists to follow.

June Christy was the first and most able successor to Anita's Kenton throne. Shortly after joining Stan in 1945, she and the band came up with a hit, Tampico, and racked up a string of big sides in fast succession. Never a giant in matters of intonation, June's appeal is based on attractive rhythmic and melodic improvisation. Working as a single since she split with Stan in 1949 (except for occasional Kenton concert tours), June has recorded extensively for Capitol and has developed an enviable repertoire of seldom-sung but first-rate tunes.

Chris Connor, who was next on the Kenton stand, listened long to the way Anita O'Day and June Christy sang. A trained musician (she played clarinet for eight years before turning to singing), Chris has also been working as a single since leaving Kenton in 1953. In recent years, she's applied her hip, somewhat mannered style (which includes a penchant for some of the flattest warbling in all of modern vocaldom) to a roster of little-known tunes on most of the LPs she has cut for Atlantic.

Ann Richards, Stan's most recent vocalist, marks the first departure from the O'Day-Christy groove. Her approach -- influenced by the Kenton sound itself -- is straightforward, strong and showbiz-oriented. Less experimental than her predecessors, she manages to move listeners with a simple, no-frills, openly emotional style.

Jo Stafford, a compatriot of Sinatra's on the TD stand (first as a member of the Pied Pipers, then as a featured soloist), also found a profitable career as a single during the late Forties and early Fifties. A smooth, always-on-pitch stylist from the Sinatra school of discipline, she has consistently exhibited a steady, impressive musicianship. Mary Ann McCall also served an apprenticeship with Tommy Dorsey, then went on to chirp with the bands of Woody Herman and Charlie Barnet. An original stylist, Mary Ann inspired the respect of modern jazzmen and recorded with several of the best, including trumpeter Howard McGhee and tenor man Dexter Gordon. Her popularity reached a peak in 1949, when she topped the Down Beat poll, and she continues to perform today.

As Mary Ann McCall fascinated modern jazzmen, Lee Wiley became the vocal favorite of the traditional groups. After working the pop circuit in the Thirties, Miss Wiley became closely allied with Eddie Condon and his Dixieland friends. Her skill in interpreting lyrics, and her hoarse, erotic voice -- characterized by a wide vibrato -- brought her recognition among jazz cognoscenti.

Lena Horne, who began as a hoofer at New York's Cotton Club in 1934, turned some of the nuances associated with Billie Holiday -- and several polished facets of her own -- into a lucrative supperclub, Broadway, film and record career, a path which has led her to international fame.

Mel Tormé, who dug Sinatra's casual approach from the start, made his dent as a drummer and songwriter and then as a solo singer and leader of a vocal group called the Mel-Tones. His careful concern for the rhythms and phrasings of jazz has won for him a wide and enthusiastic following among fans and musicians alike, and his recent LPs for Verve -- both as a single and with his revamped Mel-Tones -- are some of the best things Mel has ever done. Herb Jeffries, whose balladry with the Duke Ellington band of 1940--1942 (particularly his now-classic Flamingo), taught a class of young singers how to tackle a love song, as did Al Hibbler, the Ellington vocal star from 1943 to 1951.

All through the history of jazz -- but especially during the Thirties, Forties and early Fifties -- noted instrumentalists like Armstrong and Teagarden have taken a hefty swing at vocalizing, often with memorable results. In listening to them, scores of other less-jazz-attuned singers -- male and female -- got a chance to learn what jazz and jazz singing were all about. Trumpet immortal Bunny Berigan contributed I Can't Get Started -- a staple in most serious jazz collections. Nat Cole, a superb jazz pianist, doubled as keyboard and vocal artist with his trio from 1939 to the late Forties. Soon his singing proved so popular that he gave up piano almost entirely; few singers have so successfully emerged from a strictly jazz-based background to win world-wide recognition. Nat's casual but knowledgeable approach to singing bespeaks an admiration for Sinatra, and for the better jazz horn men with whom Nat worked for many years.

Before his premature death at thirty-nine in 1943, another pianist, named Fats Waller, brought a joy to singing -- comparable to the gaiety inherent in his "stride" piano style -- that harked back to the giddily spontaneous techniques of the earliest jazz pioneers. With doubtful results, Benny Goodman took a crack at vocalizing in an old Capitol version of Gotta Be This or That. Woody Herman, in addition to his bandleading and clarinet-alto chores, sang blues and ballads in an easygoing, lilting style, and even took a brief swing at straight vocalizing after he disbanded his first and greatest progressive Herd. Among the modernists, Chet Baker, Buddy Rich, Kenny Dorham, Dizzy Gil-lespie and Don Elliott have put their instruments aside and sung from time to time -- all in keeping with their individual conceptions as top jazzmen.

During the Fifties, a veritable flood tide of singers inundated the musical scene. In an all-out assault on the ears and wallets of music-craving Americans, many of the new male vocalists dedicated themselves to little more than unconcealed emulation of Crosby or Sinatra. Others appropriated even earlier styles as a springboard to modernity. On the distaff side, Bessie, Ella, Billie, Sarah and Anita have found their echoes, but the new-wave thrushes haven't gone in for imitation quite as openly as their male counterparts.

Among the old-school girl singers, several have managed to move into the present without losing favor -- or flavor. Peggy Lee continues to look toward Billie Holiday stylistically, but has added a host of her own inflections; she seems to improve with age. Kay Starr, whose early days were spent working with jazz musicians, hasn't turned out a hit record in recent years, but still warbles with a sure sense of beat and Bessie Smith feel for blues. Doris Day, who swung with Les Brown's crack Sentimental Journey band, remains a soothing stylist. Annie Ross, currently one third of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, is firmly rooted in jazz. From her first efforts to add words to jazz instrumentals (Twisted, Farmer's Market) in 1952, she's gone on to become a hip singer who can command attention at jazz festival or supperclub.

Judy Garland and Eydie Gormé are belters in the showbiz school, but nevertheless transmit a consistent jazz feel that lifts their solid, rafter-rattling techniques from the ordinary. Carmen Mc-Rae, once beholden to Sarah Vaughan, is less derivative these days -- and consequently a more influential singer in her own right.

Abbey Lincoln, a Billie Holiday type; Mary Kaye, a Sarah Vaughan descendant; Dinah Washington, a Bessie Smith brand of blues shouter; and Dakota Staton, a curious blend of Sarah, Ella, Billie and Dinah -- are all very much on the contemporary scene, too. Keely Smith, one of the few females to try following Sinatra in the phrasing department, manages to do more with it than most of his male impersonators. On a more modest level, Julie London whispers her lyrics beguilingly -- a tribute to Sinatra's popularization of sensual singing. Lurlean Hunter -- an untutored but intuitively hip stylist -- has a wide and faithful following among musicians and discriminating listeners. Mavis Rivers and newcomer Aretha Franklin are but two others who nimbly blend the best of jazz and popular nuances.

Among the male singers, of course, not all of the Sinatra-influenced generation are second-rate. Ambitious, pugnacious Bobby Darin (whose singing style -- and private life -- are as close to Sinatra's as he can make them), and Vic Damone (whose career has zoomed of late after a prolonged dip) are both extremely aware stylists with wide followings. Sammy Davis, Jr., the multitalcnted mimic-dancer-singer and Clanmember extraordinary, displays a somewhat blatant adoration of Sinatra but still comes off as an enormously distinctive performer in his own right. Julius LaRosa, Andy Williams and Frank D'Rone have also fallen effortlessly and successfully into step behind Sinatra. Steve Lawrence, a casually swinging singer, listened intently to both Sinatra and Crosby before setting out to discover his own niche.

There is a well-populated segment of current male singers, however, which owes very little to Sinatra. Harry Belafonte, who began as a jazz singer and flopped, turned to basic folk music from around the world, found his pot of gold, sparked a still-swinging folk movement, and set a lucrative example, since followed studiously by a plethora of ethnic song specialists. If his present style can be traced, it is probably closer to that of the early blues singers -- heavily veneered with sophistication -- than to any prominent jazz or pop vocalist. Buddy Greco, Bill Henderson, Johnny Hartman, Mark Murphy and Jon Hendricks are others who have found comfortable, if limited, grooves of their own.

Johnny Mathis sounds like a high-register version of Nat Cole, divested of Nat's vigorous sense of rhythm and ease in the jazz idiom. Johnny sang better at the start than he does today, but he has his own following in fans and singers like Adam Wade and Johnny Nash. The redoubtable Elvis Presley, long admired by armies of restive teenagers -- and a flock of jazz critics -- is actually closer to jazz than the great majority of present-day singers; much of the rock 'n' roll which made him -- and which he made -- famous can be traced directly back to traditional blues shouting; his raw, primitive style derives from the earliest wailing of itinerant blues singers, and to the rhythm-and-blues so popular for decades. As for Elvis' grotesque imitators -- the Fabians, Little Richards, Frankie Avalons and Brenda Lees -- the material they sing and the way they sing it is so echo-chambered, epileptic and hopelessly inept that it has little value.

The gospel singing of Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and others also has deep roots in the jazz idiom, as a single listen to Nina Simone will eloquently testify. The fervor of the gospel has been a potent influence on singers like Miss Simone, whose background includes years of experience in jazz.

Ever since the heyday of the Thirties, vocal groups have had their niche in the history of jazz singing. The Mills Brothers set the pace for years, recording with such luminaries as Satchmo, Ella and Ellington. But in recent years, the important vocal groups have turned to the postbop modernists for their inspiration; most noteworthily, the Four Freshmen and the Hi-Lo's, both improvisational harmony groups, and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, an inventive threesome given to combining original lyrics with some of the most familiar instrumental arrangements and ad-lib solos in jazzdom. Several of the more venerable vocal groups -- formed to supplement the big-band sound of the late Thirties and early Forties -- are still around: the Modernaires, the Pied Pipers and Tormé's Mel-Tones, still swinging as they did in days of yore, still leaving their marks on countless new contingents.

Ray Charles offers one of the most exciting styles to come along in years and heads any list of present-day blues kings. Joining him are the likes of Joe Turner, Jimmy Rushing, Mae Barnes, Lizzie Miles, Champion Jack Dupree, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Lightning Hopkins, Jimmy Witherspoon, Fats Domino and countless others, old and young, the latest rages and rediscovered veterans, urban and rural blues-belters alike. Barbara Dane, a 1960 edition of Bessie, carries on the tradition, too.

The eminent Joe Williams, age forty-two, paid his blues dues with Jimmie Noone's band back in the late Thirties, later with Coleman Hawkins and Lionel Hampton, then in a long, illustrious stretch with Count Basie. In early 1955. Joe cut Every Day, an old blues he had heard sung by Memphis Slim years before, and the Basie-Williams entente was solidly in the jazz public's eye. Combining soulfulness with a sizable slice of savvy and sophistication, Joe is a natural man, big and powerful, with a sinewy voice that can handle a rousing, uptempo blues or a gentle ballad with equally consummate ease. Today, split from Basie for the first time since 1954, Joe is making his big bid as a single.

So, the blues continue to be sung, with all their throbbing power, with all their pulse-quickening, four-four drive -- vocally and instrumentally, the very essence of authentic jazz, since its beginning. Today's audience for the blues is a vast one -- far greater than during the days of Ma Rainey; but the message remains essentially unchanged.

From the savage eloquence of the first Negro field hand who wailed out his misery in song, to the polished professionality of a Ray Charles or a Sammy Davis, the jazz singer -- and his audience -- have grown and matured in response to the changing rhythms of the music itself. Germinating in the soil of deep-rooted tradition, the jazz singers learned to think and feel for themselves -- and to sing in their own private voice. Whatever their idiom -- from New Orleans to soul jazz -- all have become part of a constantly growing and infinitely varied heritage. The potency of jazz, and the promise of its future, spring from this independence, this freedom from bondage to the past. As long as composers continue to create jazz and instrumentalists to ad lib it, the human voice -- that most flexible of all musical instruments -- will find new ways to sing it.