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.