Anita's Progeny, Pt. 1: June Christy

I chose the title "Anita's Progeny" for this post and the one that will follow because I will be profiling two singers (June Christy & Chris Connor) who followed Anita O'Day as "girl singer" in the Stan Kenton Orchestra and who, at least early in their careers, sounded remarkably like O'Day.  Neither Connor nor Christy improvised like O'Day, but their tonal qualities and range were similar.  Interestingly, O'Day recommended Christy for the Kenton job and she in turn recommended Connor.

Christy (nee Shirley Luster) grew up in Decatur, Illinois, began performing professionally at 13, and  had taken her career to Chicago where, as the story goes, O'Day discovered the 19-year-old singer.  Itching to escape the confines of the Kenton orchestra, O'Day reportedly approached and asked her, "How would you like to become rich and famous?"  Regardless of the exact details, Christy did join Kenton in 1945 and would become rich and famous.  Her first recording with Kenton, the novelty song, "Tampico," became a million seller.  Not Christy at her best, but it's part of the story.  The sombrero doesn't do a lot for Kenton either.



Christy would record some other hits with Kenton, and while in his employ meet and marry Kenton's tenor player Bob Cooper, a marriage that would last for 44 years.  Christy stayed with Kenton until he temporarily disbanded the unit in 1948.  Between 1947 and 1950 she made a series of singles for Capitol.  In addition to meeting her husband of many years while with Kenton's orchestra, Christy established a professional relationship that would prove fruitful and lasting as well.  Pete Rugolo was a writer and arranger who significantly influenced the Kenton sound of the late 1940's.  He left Kenton in 1949 to become music director for Capitol records.  He would arrange and conduct half of Christy's post-Kenton albums as well as several of her singles.

In 1954 the Christy-Rugolo collaboration created the album, Something Cool,  described by the authors of the Penguin Guide as a masterpiece "meticulously tailored to June's persona." Critic Will Friedwald included this album in his "Don't Show Up At a Desert Island Without 'Em" recommendations. The title song with it's unconventional structure and unconventional lyrics (Friedwald described the singer/narrator as "Blanche Dubois-like") is featured below.











Citing Christy's "perfect breath control and vibrato as well as her emotional colouring [sic]," The Penguin Guide describes several other songs from the album, including "Midnight Sun" as "near-definitive."



While still with the Kenton band, a disc jockey had taken to rhyming Christy with "misty."  To many this pairing seemed apt and it caught on.  Capitol would use it to title another outstanding Christy-Rugolo collaboration The Misty Miss Christy.  The Penguin Guide rates this album as almost as good as Something Cool and considers her version of "'Round Midnight" as one of the "great treatments of that overworked classic."














The Penguin Guide also raves about 1960's The Song is June.  The authors describe Rugolo's chart for "Remind Me" featured below as "astonishing," as good as any arrangement he ever made.




June Christy's "laid back and emotionally reserved" (Scott Yanow, 2008)  singing in the 1950's largely defined what "cool" jazz singing was all about.  By the time she was 40 in 1965, except for an occasional reunion with Kenton or other special occasion, Christy had essentially retired.  She died in 1990 after years of illness.

Cats who Scat

Although not all jazz vocalists are practitioners, no vocal style is more closely associated with jazz singing than scat.  Britannica Online defines scat as the use of "emotive, onomatopoeic, and nonsense syllables instead of words in solo improvisations on a melody."  Scat singing allows vocalists to perform improvisations equivalent to instrumentalists-voice as instrument.  At least one author, psychologist Jeff Pressing, has argued that scatting is more difficult than instrumental improvisation because it does not provide as much feedback for the performer to judge the quality of the output.

Although Louis Armstrong is often credited with inventing the style on his 1926 recording of "Heebie Jeebies," earlier examples of scatting were recorded.  The story (likely apocryphal) as told by Armstrong is that his his music fell off the stand during the recording session, and not knowing the lyrics, in the best "necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention" developed the style on the spot.



Ask people to identify a singer who sang scat and the name Ella Fitzgerald will appear on an awful lot of lists.  The next video is a 1969 performance of her rendition of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "One Note Samba."  Her performance exemplifies two other qualities often associated with scatting: humor and quotations from other songs. 



Ella began her career singing for the Chick Webb big band in the 1930's and many of her scat solos reflect the big band/swing influence.  Sarah Vaughan's scat solos, on the other hand, are said to be more reflective of the later be bop style.  Sarah's "Lullaby of Birdland" is from the great album she made with trumpeter Clifford Brown.  Although she sings the song pretty straight at first, she starts trading riffs with the instrumentalists at about the 2:30 mark.

















Scatting is usually an individual endeavor, but Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross turned it into a group effort. In case you somehow don't get the bop connection in the above video, you can't miss it in their rendition of Jon Henricks' "Everybody's Boppin'."  Hold on to your hat and fasten your seatbelt.

















Mel Torme was well-known for his scatting skills.  Here he is near the end of his career with "Pick Yourself Up" in which he pays homage to Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, as well as J.S. Bach.



Torme was not the first to make the connection between Bach's instrumentals and scat.  In the early 1960s Ward Swingle and his Swingle Singers recorded some vocal transcriptions of Bach's works, including one album titled Jazz Sebastian Bach.


















A few generations of children have probably been introduced to scat singing via Louis Prima's "I Wanna Be Like You" from Disney's Jungle Book.




 In case the Millennial Generation missed Louis Prima & The Jungle Book when they were kids they can still hear a little scat from their contemporary Amy Winehouse in her intro to "Stronger than Me" from her debut album, Frank.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Everybody Digs Bill Evans was the title of an album the pianist released in 1958.  The title is an apt summation of the career of a musician who is widely viewed as the most influential jazz pianist of the post-bop years.  Joel Simpson, in his biographical sketch of Evans at AllAboutJazz.com,  described Evans' "highly nuanced touch, the clarity of the feeling content of his music and his reform of the chord voicing system pianists used."  Miles Davis described Evans' playing as "quiet fire ... or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall."  Davis dug Evans enough that he included him, along with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, in the group that would record the immortal album Kind of Blue.  Evans, however, was much more than a sideman; as a leader he would record over 50 albums and receive 5 Grammy awards.


Evans' "quiet fire" is on display from about the three-minute mark in the recording of "All Blues" as he plays behind solos from Davis, Adderley, and Coltrane, and then adds a spare, sparkling solo of his own.



Born in New Jersey in 1929, Evans began taking piano lessons at age six.  His parents didn't want him to be limited to just one instrument, so he also took violin and flute lessons.  He would later credit the flute with helping him play with tonal expressiveness.  Evans' mother was an amateur pianist herself, and she had amassed a large library of classical sheet music, which young Bill mastered rather than practicing scales.

After college and a stint in the army, Evans recorded his first album, New Jazz Conceptions as leader in 1956.  The album was a critical, but not a commercial success; it sold only 800 copies in a year.  In between stints with Miles Davis, Evans released his second album as leader in 1958, the above-mentioned Everybody Digs Bill Evans.  The video below is "Some Other Time" from that album.  Evans is joined by Miles' drummer, Philly Joe Jones and bassist Sam Jones (no relation).


Evans was especially fond of the trio format and by giving prominence to the contributions of the drummer and bassist took a more egalitarian approach to the ensemble than was common at the time.  Among the most acclaimed of Evans' trio recordings are the recordings of live performances at the Village Vanguard in 1961.  On these dates he was joined by long-time drummer Paul Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro. The authors of the Penguin Guide described this group as one of the "finest piano trios ever documented."  Evans' composition "Waltz for Debby" featured below, was first recorded on his 1956 debut and became one of the pianist's signature songs as well as the title of one of the Vanguard albums. Unfortunately these Village Vanguard albums would be the last from this trio as LaFaro died in a car accident ten days later.
















As the '60's progressed, so did Evans' career.  He pioneered the use of overdubbing (standard practice today) and won a Grammy for his Conversations with Myself.  He would also win a Grammy for his 1968 album of piano solos, Alone.  "Never Let Me Go" from that album is presented below.







During the same period that Evans was experiencing his greatest professional success, he also experienced devastating personal tragedy.  Like so many jazz musicians of the period, Evans developed a heroin addiction that would plague him for years.  His wife, Ellaine, also an addict, committed suicide by throwing herself under a train in 1970.  Although not immediately, Evans did enter a methadone treatment program and stayed away from heroin.  He married for the second time. Although the marriage didn't last long, the union did produce a son, Evan, for whom Evans senior composed "Letter to Evan," and who became a prominent musician in his own right.



Evans' productivity and artistry remained unabated during the 1970's.  The Bill Evans Album (1971) won two Grammies.  In 1975 and 1976 Evans teamed with Tony Bennett for The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album and Together Again. Presented below is the vocal version of "Waltz for Debby," which the authors of the Penguin Guide characterize as the definitive vocal presentation of that song.
















Although Evans had been off heroin for some time, by 1980 he started using the current drug du jour, cocaine, which he thought of as "safe."  This was to be his undoing and he died in Mt. Sinai hospital on the 15th of September of that year.  Evans' influence lives on and has probably even grown since his death.  Joel Simpson ranks him, along with Oscar Peterson, as "one of the major enduring forces in jazz piano."

Bodies and Souls

If "Stardust" is the most recorded song of all time, then surely "Body and Soul" is; Gary Giddins claims it has been recorded more than 3000 times.  Composed by Johnny Green in 1930, with three lyricists credited, the song almost didn't make it into the final production of the musical, Three's a Crowd, for which it was written.  In a 1980 essay, "Fifty Years of Body and Soul," Giddins described the song as "an unusually difficult example of the 32-bar AABA song, with three key changes in the chorus (and three more in the rarely performed verse), intricate major/minor circuitry, and a wide range ... Jazz musicians favor [it] ... because they like the tune."

Louis Armstrong recorded one of the memorable renditions of the song the year it was written.




What is probably the definitive jazz version of "Body and Soul" was recorded at the end of the '30s by tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.  Giddins described this version as "a gauntlet tossed at every other saxophonist in jazz."  Hawkins version, which was considered significant enough to be included in both the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz and Ken Burn's compilation from his Jazz video series, is almost pure improvisation.  Below are reproductions of the sheet music along with a transcription of Hawkins' solo.

Billie Holiday took several vocal liberties with the melody in her 1940 recording.  The muted trumpet solo is Roy Eldridge.



Frank Sinatra recorded a "straight" version in 1947.  The trumpet solo here is Bobby Hackett, who would later be featured soloist on many of the "make out" albums recorded by the Jackie Gleason orchestra in the 1950s and '60s. An abbreviated version of Hackett soloing from Gleason's 1960 album Music for Lover's Only follows Sinatra.





Also in 1960, a very different, but still pretty straight ahead recording, was made by John Coltrane and his quartet.
 



In the 1970s Ella Fitzgerald put her unique take on the song on a Frank Sinatra TV show.



Finally, "Body and Soul" has lived on into another century.  The next video is bass and vocal prodigy, Esperanza Spalding live in Copenhagen.  It's time for another essay: "Eighty Years of Body and Soul."

Versatility!: Charlie Haden

There is probably no one in jazz, or even the whole wide world of music,  who has recorded a greater variety of music than bassist Charlie Haden.  Born into a musical family in Iowa, Haden began his musical career as a small child in his family's well-known country and western band.  In 1957 he moved to LA where he played with many of the up-and-comers for modern jazz.  Most notably, at 22 he became a member of Ornette Coleman's revolutionary free jazz quartet (probably about as far from his C & W roots as one could go).  From the mid-'60s through the mid-'70s, Haden was associated with another musical pioneer, Keith Jarrett.  In 1969 Haden founded the Liberation Music Orchestra, which blended experimental big band jazz with politically-themed music. During the 1970s Haden began a long, intermittent collaboration with guitarist Pat Metheny.  In 1996 the duo released Beyond the Missouri Sky, an album of "contemporary impressionistic Americana."  The Penguin Guide described this album as selling "like SnoCones in the desert," and included it in their Core Collection.



Backtracking chronologically a bit, from 1996's Missouri Sky, in 1986 Haden founded the ensemble Quartet West with whom he would work regularly for some time.  In contrast to the free jazz of his early career and the "new agey" collaborations with Metheny, Quartet West's recordings were more straight ahead jazz and often leaned toward the nostalgic.  In fact, two of their albums Haunted Heart (1986) and Always Say Goodbye (1993) are unashamedly so.  Both are inspired by and evocative of the noir novels and movies of the '40s and '50s.  They both also include dubbed in music from some of that era's singers and instrumentalists, e.g., Jo Stafford, Ray Nance with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.  The video that follows is Haunted Heart's "Dance of the Infidels," composed by Bud Powell and first recorded in 1949 .


















Although Haden has continued to work regularly with Quartet West, he has by no means limited his output to his collaborations with that ensemble.  He has also recorded duet albums with pianists Hank Jones and Denny Zeitlin.  One of my favorite CDs in my collection is Night and the City, an evocative live recording with just Haden and Kenny Barron.  Below is Barron's "Twilight Song," which is ten minutes long, but my ears think it's worth every second.






If you need further proof of Haden's versatility, in the early 2000s Haden won two consecutive Latin Grammys for Nocturne (1999), a collaborative effort based on Cuban ballads or boleros with Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and Land of the Sun (2003), again featuring Rubalcaba, this time exploring Mexican folk music.

















In 2008 Haden came full circle in musical career when he released Charlie Haden Family and Friends: Rambling Boy. This album pairs songs associated with his youthful C & W career with the younger generation of the Haden family.  Joining in are some of the biggest names in today's country and bluegrass scene, e.g., Vince Gill, Roseanne Cash, Dan Tyminski, and Ricky Skaggs.