Irene Kral: A Voice So Irresistible, Beguiling and Pure [From the Archives]

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Irene Kral was not just another jazz singer.

“She had a delicate style, yet every note was placed with deliberate aim, and she always hit her mark with unerring accuracy. She had a brilliant flair for picking tasty, little-known material, often by up and coming young, jazz-influenced songwriters.

She recorded only a small number of albums, often on small, jazz labels and she never sang in a show-off way, never scatted, never belted or made her voice raunchy .

Most aficionados of female vocalists have never heard of her, and she remains largely forgotten in the jazz history books. Yet her work deserves to be searched out, for her intimate style and purity of tone.”

“Irene had a lovely, resonant voice with a discreet vibrato, flawless diction and intonation …. She was a master of quiet understatement.”

- Linda Dahl, Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazz Women [p. 151]

“She was a superior ballad singer of impeccable taste.”

- Reg Copper, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

Drummers and “chick singa’s” do not go together like love and marriage and a horse and carriage.

Contrary to what Sammy Cahn and Jimmy van Huesen say in their lyrics, drummers and female Jazz vocalists “… is an institute you [can] disparage” just by asking most drummers about their experiences in working with female Jazz singers.

By the way, before this introduction gets labeled as some sort of sexist rant, the same can be said about the antipathy that many drummers have about working with most “boy singers,” too.

My statement is only a generalization, but most of the time, drummers work with singers because they have to in order to make a few schimolies and not because they want to as singers usually drive them nuts.

There are exceptions, of course.

It was a total blast to work with Anita O’Day during a two week stint as a member of her trio at “Ye Little Club” in Beverly Hills [John Poole, her regular drummer, had taken ill].

The late Irene Krall is also among my special favorites, a list which includes the likes of Carmen McRae, Blossom Dearie, Ruth Price and Ruth Olay. I heard Irene sing with Shelly Manne’s group on a few occasions and I remember him remarking: “Irene is just the best. She’s like another member of the band. She’s a musician.”

And Russ Freeman, the late pianist who worked with Irene in Shelly’s quintet and on Irene’s 1965 recording Wonderful Life, said of her: “She is a gas to work with. Her choice of tunes is so different and she handles difficult material like a snap.”

Hal Blaine, the drummer on the Wonderful Life album said of Irene: “When she did that cut on Sometime Ago, we were all spellbound. Most singers do the tune too slow like they want to wrap themselves in every word. She sang it perfectly and then went on to do a swinging version of Bob Dorough’s Nothing Like You Has Ever Been Seen Before. Just like that: bam, bam. What a pro.”

Music captivated her at an early age. As Gene Lees recounts in the following excerpt from his essay on Irene’s older brother, Roy Kral [a pianist and a singer], and his singer-wife, Jackie Cain:

"When I was about seventeen, we were rehearsing our dance band in my basement. Four brass, four saxes, three rhythm."

His sister, Irene, would always remember this. She said, ‘I was always fascinated by my brother rehearsing in the basement with different bands and singers, and they were having so much fun, I just knew that I wanted to do that too.’ Born January 18, 1932, Irene was eleven years Roy's junior and so must have been about six when that band was in rehearsal.” Singers and the Song II, p. 176]

It’s a good thing that she got an early start. Sadly, Irene’s “wonderful life” was over all too soon as she passed away at the relatively young age of forty-six [46].

Here’s a retrospective of the salient aspects of Irene’s short-lived career and a well-focused explanation on what made her singing so unique as excerpted and translated from the insert notes to Irene Kral with Herb Pomeroy: The Band and I [Japanese Capitol TOCJ-6076].

© -  Capitol Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Irene Kral was not just another jazz singer.

She had a delicate style, yet every note was placed with deliberate aim, and she always hit her mark with unerring accuracy. She had a brilliant flair for picking tasty, little-known material, often by up and coming young, jazz-influenced songwriters.

She recorded only a small number of albums, often on small, jazz labels and she never sang in a show-off way, never scatted, never belted or made her voice raunchy .

Most aficionados of female vocalists have never heard of her, and she remains largely forgotten in the jazz history books. Yet her work deserves to be searched out, for her intimate style and purity of tone.

Irene Kral was born to Czechoslovak parents on Jan. 18th, 1932 in Chicago. Her earliest musical influence was her brother, Roy, who at 18 formed his own big band and would rehearse the group in their parent's basement. While watching her brother and his band, she decided that she wanted to sing. She was 8 years old at the time. Her brother, Roy, became well known later as half of 'Jackie and Roy', a highly influential bebop vocal duo, well-respected in jazz circles.

By the time she was 16, she was singing and accompanying herself on piano, performing at school and the occasional wedding. Her vocal skills impressed her professional musician brother enough for him to take her by the hand to audition for a swinging Chicago big band, led by Jay Burkhardt. Burkhardt’s band had been the starting point for two other singers, who went on to bigger things, Joe Williams and Jackie Cain (who later married her brother, and was the 'Jackie' of 'Jackie and Roy). A series of jobs with other bands came and went, over the next few years, including a brief stint with Woody Herman.

In 1954, she landed a job singing with a jazz vocal group called the Tattle Tales. She played drums, and sang lead with the group, which traveled from coast to coast, and to Canada, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. The group recorded for Columbia Records, but nothing much came of the records. She stayed with the group for a little over a year. Following her heart to stretch out as a solo artist, she left the Tattle Tales and began picking up the occasional weekend solo job, and auditioning for any band that she thought might be going places.

When she was 25, in 1957, her friend Carmen McRae recommended her to band-leader Maynard Ferguson. The next time Ferguson came through Chicago, she got up on the stand and sang one tune with the band. After Ferguson heard Krai finish singing Sometimes I’m Happy he hired her on the spot and she started that night with no rehearsal. In Ferguson’s band she met Joe Burnett, a trumpet and flugelhorn player, whom she married in 1958. She stayed with the Ferguson band for nearly two years, recording one album with them, before she was offered her own contract to record solo.

In 1959, while in Los Angeles, she became a regular vocalist on The Steve Allen Show. Her exposure on the Allen show led to the recording of her first solo LP for United Artist Records, an entire album of songs written by Steve Allen entitled Stevelreneo. The same year, she cut the LP The Band And I, with the Herb Pomeroy Orchestra, working with legendary saxophonist and arranger Al Cohn.

Next, she became the featured vocalist with Shelly Manne and his Men, a popular leader of 'West Coast cool jazz'. She also appeared solo at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. By 1961, Irene and her husband, Joe, had relocated to Tarzana, California, a small suburb of Los Angeles where their daughter, Jodi was born. Their second daughter, Melissa, followed. She limited her yearly out of town performances to a half-dozen choice engagements around the country, in order to spend time with her family.

Throughout her career, she felt like she had been born too late, and had just missed the height of the Big Band Era. She recalled, ‘When I was in high school, I bought every Woody Herman and Stan Kenton record that came out. June Christy seemed to be in the greatest spot in life, and gave me my first inspiration. I'm sorry I missed hearing some of the really good big bands around earlier, like Jimmie Lunceford's and Billy Eckstine's, and Dizzy Gillespie's first band.’

‘Now when I'm old enough to appreciate them, almost all the really good bands are gone.’ She named a few of her other favorite singers as being Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington and Helen Merrill.

Although she could swing with the best of them, she thought of herself as primarily a ballad singer. ‘I love to sing ballads more than anything, and consequently I know three times more ballads as 'up' tunes. I dig tunes that have a warm laziness about them.’ Jazz vocalist Carmen McRae who, talking about Irene, said, ‘Besides being a marvelous singer, Irene has great taste in tunes. In fact, I've 'stolen quite a few from her!’

In 1964, she sang on Laurindo Almeida's Grammy© Award-winning album, Guitar From Ipanema. The following year, she recorded an album of her own, called Wonderful Life, on the small Mainstream label. In addition to her usual choice of great songs, unfortunately, the company insisted that she record three tunes aimed at the Top 40 'teen' market. On these songs, she seems like a fish out of water. Nothing came of the attempt to make her more 'commercial,’ and the songs stand as the only blemish on her recorded output of classy material.

Ten years passed before she recorded again. She continued to perform regularly at jazz clubs around the country. By the mid 70's, her relationship with her husband, Joe, had begun to deteriorate and shortly after their divorce, she met a Los Angeles disc jockey named Dennis Smith. ‘They got along wonderfully and really hit it off right from the start,’ her brother, Roy Kral recalls. ‘Dennis was the best thing that could have happened to her. It was his love and warmth, and his protection, and his caring for her that brought out this wonderful sound from her, at the time. Before that, her vocal tone had been a little more strident. Her relationship with Dennis brought all this warmth out of her, and that really showed in her singing on the Where Is Love album.’

Where Is Love was released in 1975 on the Choice label. On this album of solely ballads, she is accompanied by just piano, thoughtfully played by Alan Broadbent. The material is so laid back, it almost stands still. In the liner notes, she wrote, ‘This is meant to be heard only during that quiet time of the day, preferably with someone you love, when you can sink into your favorite chair, close your eyes and let in no outside thoughts to detract.’

In her 1984 book on women in jazz, Stormy Weather, Linda Dahl wrote: ‘Irene Kral had a lovely, resonant voice with a discreet vibrato, flawless diction and intonation, and a slight, attractive nasality and shaping of phrases that resembled Carmen McRae's. But where McRae's readings tend to the astringent, Kral's melt like butter. She was a master of quiet understatement and good taste.’

Her album, Kral Space, was released in 1977, and was a welcome return to the swinging trio sound of her earlier efforts. The album brought together the songs of contemporary jazz songwriters like Dave Frishberg and Bob Dorough, as well as Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. Kral Space was nominated for a Grammy© for Best Jazz Vocal performance.

The following year, another quiet album of voice and piano, Gentle Rain was released. Again she was nominated for a Grammy© for her work. Both years, she lost the award to her good friend Al Jarreau. Downbeat Magazine, in its' review of Gentle Rain, had this to say about her voice: ‘Irene Kral is one of today's most engaging vocalists. Though she doesn't possess a great natural instrument, Kral projects intelligence and emotional depth. This gives her performance a worldly dimension akin to that of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra.’

Jazz singer/songwriter/pianist Dave Frishberg remembers, ‘Irene had a definite direction in her singing. I accompanied her many times as I've done for other singers. Usually, when you accompany a singer, there are times when the piano player can lead the singer into different directions. With Irene, she definitely led you and you followed. She knew exactly what she wanted, and she was firmly in command.’”

“Sometime Ago” which forms the audio track to the following video tribute to Irene and is from her Wonderful Life CD.

"Any Dude'll Do" - Bill Holman and The Metropole Orchestra

A "Voyage" with Stan Getz

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

With so much of the late, great tenor saxophonist Stan Getz’s recorded music available, it is understandable that his 1986 recording Voyage on the Blackhawk Records label [BKH 51101-1-D] has gone largely unrecognized.

But while this oversight is comprehensible, it is unacceptable, at least from my perspective, as I consider it to be one of the best recordings that Stan ever made.

Mercifully, it is still available both as a CD and on vinyl so if you haven’t added it to your Getz collection, you should give serious consideration to doing so.

A subsidiary of Aspen Records based in San Francisco, CA, Blackhawk Records issued a number of superb recordings by Phil Woods, Jessica Williams, Kenny Barron, the Elvin Jones - McCoy Tyner Quintet, Steve Kuhn the Gil Evans Orchestra, Sonny Stitt with the Hank Jones Trio, Roland Hanna, Hal Galper, Eddie Gomez, John Scofield, Chico Freeman, Maynard Ferguson, Shelia Jordan, Jimmy Knepper, Dizzy Gillespie and The Mitchell-Ruff Duo and Abdullah Ibrahim before doing the typical here-today-gone-tomorrow small Jazz recording company fade at the end of the decade of the 1980s.

Voyage is largely an outgrowth of the time that Stan and his then quartet consisting of pianist Kenny Barron, bassist George Mraz and drummer Victor Lewis spent as part of the Artist in Residence Program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Ca [about 30 miles south of San Francisco, CA].

The recording was made at the Music Annex Recording Studio in nearby Menlo Park, CA and features Stan and the band in peak performance after playing the six tunes that comprise the LP on an almost regular basis throughout the period of the Stanford Jazz Program residency.

The distinguished Jazz author and scholar, Dr. Herb Wong had an ownership position in Blackhawk and wrote the following insert notes which explain the significance of Voyage at this point in Stan’s career as well as its place in the Getz discography.

“A  gap of four long years has separated Stan Getz last quartet recording and this latest voyage. As one of the first magnitude stars of the pantheon of jazz. Stan carries special significance to every one of his performances, regardless of the context. The quartet, however, is admittedly his favorite environment. Logically, a new Getz quartet recording promptly generates eventful interest.

It has quickly stimulated vigorous applause from those who have had the opportunity to preview it. After recording on literally several hundred albums, reams of copy and a trail of awards, you'd think he might have reached a complacent comfort zone.

Au contraire. Stan persists in his dynamic process of improvised inventiveness, shaping the bed of creativity through his enchantingly lyrical and virile personal sound and style. It's a style on the tenor saxophone that spurs and triggers a listener's imagination to roam and to discover aural images.

Apprehension of how original ideas pop up at a given moment from the unconscious is difficult to explain. Stan's genius is perceivable as a pathway to truth and ecstatic beauty. Noted psychoanalyst Rollo May in his scholarly discourse on the nature of creativity, insists that ecstasy is the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act... involving the total person. "It brings intellectual, volitional, and emotional functions into play all together." Under Dr. May's framework. Stan Getz' music, in my opinion, expresses a union of form and passion with order and vitality.

Recently I asked pianist Kenny Barron about the specialness he experienced in playing with Stan, and Kenny was quick to say. "His attitude is open to growth. Stan welcomes ideas of younger players, including new tunes." And. indeed, there is fresh literature on this album—the opener. "I Wanted to Say" is contributed by drummer Victor Lewis and there is an infectious pair by Kenny—"Dreams" and the title selection. "Voyage." Pianist Victor Feldman. who has played with Stan on a number of stints through the years, composed the lovely "Falling in Love." a perfect vehicle for the warm romanticism of Stan and his group.

Balancing original pieces are the 1939 evergreen ballad penned by Jimmy Van Heusen. "I Thought About You." and the Jerome Kern diamond. "Yesterdays." recut by Stan with some surprises that just sparkle. (Dig how Kenny Barren picks up on Stan's solo!  It's like an orchestrated thing, and it just happened at the moment; Kenny plays the Milt Buckner-inspired block chords, and they are a beautiful fit I was. as well as everyone else, knocked out by the unexpected gem.)

Speaking admirably about Kenny, bassist George Mraz and Victor Lewis, Stan asserts that "they are the kind of musicians who almost sound as if they are classically trained because everything they touch is correct. Even though they have the drive of a jazz band, they have the touch of pure classicists.

"The band is like a classical string quartet. If I had another horn, it would get in my way and it would almost be like playing arrangements. In a quartet, I'm able to phrase differently every night. I'm up there and I can freely do whatever I wish to do. And a quartet is small enough for everyone to solo; I like to hear everyone in the band solo. It's essentially a classical-jazz approach to music."

In reality, the band on this album is Stan's working band. It's plain they fit into his paradigm of empathic values. All three rhythm section mates play what's needed for each individual tune, giving to the whole. "Kenny, for instance, plays every piece, wanting to give Kenny Barron to the piece, and not make the piece Kenny Barron." notes Stan. "Like George and Victor, too. he's ego-less like the Taoist philosophy of removing all self."

Not incidentally, this quartet has been the official band Stan has been leading during his current Artist-in-Residency at Stanford University-a position from which he has been deriving much pleasure, having invested much time and expertise into the experience.

Besides concertizing on campus, he works with the university big band, a cluster of jazz combos, plus other facets of the jazz education curriculum. Residing in nearby Menlo Park, moments from Stanford's campus. Stan finds this peripheral enjoyment a part of the total positive perspective of his living. He is a veritable super folk hero on campus and in the community. As the director of the Stanford jazz ensemble, Joseph Bowen, says: "When Stan walks into class, the students are in awel"

Stan speaks through the eloquence of his horn to illustrate theoretical aspects, always with the fluid, emotional heat he brings. "My area of the curriculum is feelings. When I was asked about my reaction regarding modes in a jazz theory class. I said: 'I don't care much for modes. It's not the mode that counts, it's the mood!" Man, that is succinctness

Here. then, are four brilliant magician/musicians sharing their spiritual and organic soulfulness. delivering their messages. Personally I have had a lifetime love affair with Stan's music and emotional art. and so have countless others

One of these generalized others is Aiko Suzuki of Toronto whose striking art piece adorns the album cover. Her fan letter to Stan includes associative responses illustrating the influence of his music:

"Your artistry is compelling for so many reasons, at many levels... intense serenity ... from out of ancient lonely primeval caves to dazzlingly positive humanism ... rich and at times minimalist —hence spiritual and emotional dynamism ... you dignify our carnal spirit. . no rhetoric, clear, clean ... crystalline ... elegantly romantic and sensuous."

The music on "Voyage" will stick in your memories. It should enjoy an unlimited life span.”

—Dr. Herb Wong

You can check out the title track on the following video:

Madeline Eastman - "The Dolphin Lady"

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“‘The definition of a jazz singer is a singer who sings jazz,’ said Mark Murphy with tongue-in-cheek, although, actually, he's a definitive jazz singer himself.

He scats with bravado. He improvises melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, and with the lyrics. He writes vocalese lyrics to jazz instrumentals and also writes his own songs. He can break hearts on a ballad, plumb the deepest blues, bossa like a Brazilian, or wing harder and hipper than just about anyone. [Emphasis Mine]

‘A lot of singers attempt to sing jazz, use aspects of jazz in their arrangements, but without really getting into the whole thing,’  …

‘l think the test is The Jazz Singer Test.  You take a singer and three musicians and you put them in a room, or a pub like I used to do in London. I had this trio. The piano player couldn't read. The bass player couldn't read. The drummer read, but it didn't matter. I gave them a list of tunes. We never rehearsed. We just got up. I gave them the keys, and I counted off, and it happened. Because we were all Jazz musicians. I think that's the test. If a singer can get up and cut that, he's really doing it."

- Mark Murphy as told to DJ Michael Bourne

“In this world of ordinary singers, of overrated singers, I’m glad there is Madeline.”

- Leonard Feather, Jazz author, scholar and critic

Michael G. Nastos in his artist biography about Madeline Eastman for all about jazz asserts: “

“In her career as a jazz singer, Madeline Eastman has remained close to home while establishing a worldwide presence without recording for a major label, instead releasing a series of independently produced, critically acclaimed recordings.”

Remarkable in itself, what makes this statement border on the incredulous is that “close to home” is the greater San Francisco Bay Area, which in recent years has not exactly been known as a hotbed of Jazz.

But for those of us who have ready access to the SF bay area, catching Madeline in performance in either a club or a concert venue is one of Life’s great Jazz experiences for nothing compares to the vocal renderings of Mad [an explicable nickname that comes about by shortening her first name; you are gonna have to wait for an explanation of “The Dolphin Lady” until you read the Mark Murphy insert notes to her Point of Departure CD that close this piece].

I mean, where else can you hear vocalese lyrics to tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson’s Inner Urge, or vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson's Little B’s Poem - both of which she wrote [!]- or a scat chorus sung in unison with Phil Woods on Eddie Harris’ Freedom Jazz Dance, or a heart-stopping rendition of the ballad theme to the movie Baghdad Cafe?

Perhaps Madeline’s greatest gift to us goes beyond her interpretative skills as a vocalist and points directly to the quality of her voice which is magnificent in and of itself. Madeline’s voice is the ultimate “point of departure.”

Madeline’s voice is pure and it is powerful and I for one have to take it in small doses because it simply overpowers my emotions.

By way of background, Mad was born June 27, 1954, in San Francisco, CA, where she grew up listening to pop tunes on the radio, including those sung by Barbra Streisand, Jack Jones, Vic Damone, and Eydie Gorme, among others. In her senior year of high school, she viewed the film Lady Sings the Blues and discovered Billie Holiday, then enrolled in college music classes at San Francisco State University, and also attended various local jam sessions during her academic years.

Finding her calling as a “legitimate” jazz singer through early voice coach Charles Richards, Eastman made her recording debut with the Full Faith & Credit Big Band; began collaborating with Palo Alto-based trumpeter Tom Harrell; and over the years worked with internationally known veterans like Phil Woods, Cedar Walton, Kenny Barron, Mike Wofford, the Turtle Island String Quartet, Tony Williams, Rufus Reid, Matt Wilson, and vocal mentor Mark Murphy. Barron and Eastman teamed up for a recording project with the legendary 50-member Amsterdam-based Netherlands Metropole Orchestra.

In 1990, Eastman and Kitty Margolis co-founded their Mad-Kat record label, through which they were able to make their own music with no commercial or artistic constraints. She has also been a member of the administrative staff for the San Francisco Jazz Festival.

Aside from performing, she has conducted many clinics, is director of the Stanford Jazz Workshop, is artistic director of Jazzcamp West, conducts mobile touring Monterey Jazz Festival programs, and does her own Voice Shop retreats.  She now serves as Department Chair of Jazz Vocal Studies at the Jazzschool in Berkeley, CA.

A pivotal recording, influential for her in terms of composition, arrangements, and phrasings, was Miles Davis' Filles de Kilimanjaro. After hearing it, Eastman's approach to time, dynamics, and pitch changed her into a jazz vocalist more interested in taking chances than in toeing conventional standard lines. Her debut recording, Point of Departure from 1990, was followed by Mad About Madeline! in 1991, Art Attack in 1994, and the 2001 CD Bare, which concentrated on ballads. While broadening her repertoire, Eastman added Brazilian and soul/R&B tunes along the way for the 2003 effort Speed of Life, featuring Reid, Akira Tana, pianist Randy Porter, percussionist Michael Spiro, and trumpeter Mike Olmos. All of her recordings are available through her website: www.madelineeastman.com.

Along the way, Eastman has picked up awards from Down Beat magazine critics in their annual Talent Deserving Wider Recognition poll, and has twice been named one of the top female jazz vocalists.

She has toured worldwide, from Japan, Finland, Sweden, Germany, and Scotland to New York City nightclubs and festivals close to her West Coast home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eastman has also become a prominent lyricist, writing her own song lines to several modern jazz classics, and has arranged more than a fair share of her repertoire.

As promised. here’s Mark Murphy’s insert notes to Mad’s Point of Departure CD.

“Just a few years ago I was doing my three or four hips at the local "Y" pool here in San Francisco. This particular afternoon my snail's pace kept being interrupted by a lithe, fishlike lady slipping past me like a dolphin. I stopped after the sixteenth splash and took a pause. Who pops up out of the chlorine from another lane in the pool but the great drummer Vince Lateano. of jazz and latin fame. We shout "Hey..." and begin the rebop that is inevitable between musicians anywhere: what's doing and where etc… Suddenly the dolphin lady surfaces dripping and grinning to join us. It's Mad! I mean Madeline Eastman, the swimmer. She and Vince know one another 'real well,' and the rebop gets louder among us.

So, you might ask, what's doing with Mad? Madeline Eastman has just recently given me one of the best, most stylish and cool album-tapes of contemporary vocal jazz.  I hear them all and this is the best in a long time. The dolphin lady certainly does more than swim...she sings.

Wherever I perform, I'm constantly given tapes from songwriters and jazz singers, all over the world, really. I love singers. Jazz singers and all their problems especially. I know them all. (You should have heard my concert in Sydney of the Australian Vocal Jazz Summit a few years ago. Wow.) But, we're talking Madeline Eastman here.

I first heard Mad on my long gig at Jim and Mary Lou Quinlavin's The Dock - in Marin County's stylish Tiburon [north across the Golden Gate Bridge]. Even then Mad was cool, as she belted out Four all the way through, and she lets you do some of the work, making you listen. Now, of course, with that swimmer's bod and her stylish clothes that remind you what a looker she is...you might be distracted from her vocal artistry. But not for long.

Cool, but intense is our Mad. She means it. She did not compromise, and this radiant tape is the result.

Like I say, for years singers have given me tapes, and Madeline Eastman's is just about the freshest, coolest, most interesting of them all.

You'll pick your own favorites of course, but dig the bittersweet heartbreak of "No More" — all those bop lines she sings with such ease. She even makes sense of the silly English lyrics to two gorgeous Ivan Lins songs. And then the brilliant You Are My Sunshine. I could go on.

Special, SPECIAL applause for the charts by Paul Potyen! Hey Paul!...All right! And she's got some good company in trumpeter Tommy Harrell, pianist Mike Wofford and bassist Rufus Reid. Remember the other swimmer? Vince Lateano? Playing here, too. But as for you Madeline Eastman, baby...you did it right!”

— Mark Murphy

Jeri Southern

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The contributions that Orrin Keepnews and Gene Lees have made to Jazz over the past fifty years are immense and go well beyond anything that can be described in this brief introduction.  Orrin’s work in recording and reissuing the music and Gene’s in writing about it have made the world of Jazz a far richer place because they devoted so much of their talent and creative genius to it.

Teaming up to develop and describe this retrospective of Jeri Southern’s early recordings at Decca is certainly an indication of the respect and admiration that Orrin and Gene have for this member of the Jazz family, a female vocalist who was not accorded enough of either in her lifetime.

When the likes of Orrin Keepnews and Gene Lees have so much praise to offer about the song stylings of Jeri Southern, the least I can do is to listen to them and to recommend that you do so as well.

© -  Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The Very Thought of You: The Decca Years, 1951-1957 [Decca GRP – 671]

“Here is a good clear look at one of the very best singers to emerge from the Pop/Jazz/Show-tune musical world that flourished in the mid-century years. By now this era can seem incredibly long ago and far away, but at its strongest it still retains all of its power to charm us and move us - and to demonstrate that, in the best of hands, this area of popular music is a true art form.

It has been my pleasure to work on this project with Kathryn King - a long-time friend with a solid track record of her own as a record producer, who has the considerable added incentive of being the daughter of the artist who is heard here in retrospect. Jeri Southern began her significant recording career with the half-dozen years at Decca from which this CD is drawn, As we picked our way through an extensive body of music, finding that our individual lists of preferred songs were looking remarkably similar, it did seem best to follow chronology in a general way, but without being excessive about it. As a result, tempo and instrumentation and the emotional content of these songs have led to a program that seems to pretty much set is own pace.

I knew Jeri Southern hardly at all; I only met her after she had ended her singing career. But I first heard her a long time ago, and have been fascinated over the years by what I consider to be a striking example of one of the major show-business paradoxes. This woman, a warm-voiced, sensitive, intelligent interpreter of the wonderful repertoire that a lot of us insist on capitalizing as The Great American Song Book, had all the qualities that I associate with two closely allied, important and consistently undervalued fields: being a jazz singer and being what for want of a better name is often called a cabaret singer. In Jeri's case this included the helpful fact that she was an excellent musician [among some attributes that in my view she shares with Carmen McRae is that she may well have been her own best accompanist]. But like so many of the best qualified female singers of the pre-rock days of the Fifties and early Sixties, she was typecast into a ‘pop vocalist’ category and as a result suffered through deliberate (although presumably quite well-intentioned) efforts to make her sound like everyone else and concentrate on the kind of lower-level Tin Pan Alley music that only a song-plugger or a music publisher could love.

The only two women I can think of who entirely fought their way through that mess and emerged as universally acknowledged major artists were obviously very strong, very tough, and supported by even tougher friends and associates. Ella Fitzgerald, who of course had Norman Granz as her all-American blocking back; and the totally indomitable Peggy Lee [who was a good friend of Jeri’s and, I’m inclined to suspect, would have been her role model if Ms. Southern had by nature been a more hard-shelled personality]. But that was not the way it worked out for Jeri; it should realty not be surprising to learn that her relatively early retreat from the show biz battlefront was basically the result of her being - to apply a phrase usually used to describe a jazz musician whose work goes sailing way over the heads of his audience – “too hip for the room.”

Way back when I first heard this voice, I was in Chicago visiting a World War II army buddy - it couldn’t have been past the very beginning of the Fifties, maybe earlier. He and his wife insisted on my listening to the laidback late night disc jockey who was The Man of the moment, Dave Garroway, soon to become one of the very first of the star night time (and subsequently early morning) casual television hosts. But all that lay ahead. What Garroway was doing at that particular time was shouting the praises of a great young locally-based singer by the name of Jeri Southern.

I became a fan at first hearing, then admittedly cooled off as her career seemed to be going in directions that I didn’t care for – you’ll note that we have not included one of her most popular recordings, a folksong tear-jerker called "Scarlet Ribbons.” Consequently, it took me much too long to become aware of some important factors. One was that her voice remained a great instrument, and another that she was singing a very high percentage of the right kind of songs -  merely note in passing that the writers represented here include Rodgers and Hart [four times], Cafe Porter [twice], Jerome Kerr [two more] and Kurt Weill.

It also seems apparent that she was doing battle energetically and in two ways against the kind of arrangements that were all too often in deadly vogue in those days. For one, in a period when a singer’s worth seemed to be measured by the size of the accompanying orchestra, she nevertheless succeeded fairly often in working on records in much the same setting as she would appear in clubs: backed only by a rhythm section, which on five of these numbers is led by guitarist/arranger Dave Barbour [long and closely a collaborator with Peggy Lee). It’s a formula that at times even allows her to be the piano player -  check out the Southern solos on Ray Noble's I HADN'T ANYONE ‘TILL YOU and her own I DON T KNOW WHERE TO TURN. And secondly, even when the writing behind her was lush and potentially overbearing, someone -- perhaps the artist herself, or a properly- motivated manager or other colleague  - often was able to keep the background writing under control. Or, when necessary, she seems to have been able simply to overcome it. I refer to my own listening notes on possibly my personal favorite in this collection, the magnificent Kurt Weill/Ira Gershwin MY SHIP. It was a specific and private comment, not intended for publication, but it now strikes me as quiet generally applicable to this compilation, and indeed as a summation of the artistry of Jeri Southern. “The strings are a matter of taste  I wrote, "but it is such a great performance of a great song.”

-         0rrin Keepnews

Remembering Jeri – Gene Lees

"Once upon a time, America was blessed with any number of small nightclubs that featured excellent singers singing excellent songs, and even the' big record companies were interested in recording them. Some of the best of them played piano, ranging from the competent to the excellent, Most of them were women, and there was a glamour about them, superb singers such as Betty Bennett, Irene Kral, Ethel Ennis, Marge Dodson, Lurlean Hunter, Audrey Morris, Shirley Horn, and even regional singers, such as Kiz Harp of Dallas. Many of them are forgotten now; Shirley Horn alone has enjoyed a resurgence.

They were sometimes called jazz singers, although they were no such thing, or torch singers a term I found demeaning, not to mention horrendously inaccurate. Male singers were with equal condescension from an ignorant lay press called crooners.

The songs they sang were drawn from that superb classic repertoire that grew up in the United States between roughly 1920 and the 1950s, and had any of us been equipped with foresight, we’d have known that the era was ending, doomed by “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” and “Papa Loves Mambo” and “Music Music Music “even before the rise of Bill Haley and His Comets, Elvis Presley, arid the Rolling Stones.

Of all these singers, one of the greatest was Jeri Southern, born Genevieve Lillian Hering near Royal, Nebraska on August 5, 1926, the baby in a family of two boys and three girls. Her grandfather had come from Germany in 1868, and in 1879 built a water-powered mill on Verdigris Creek. His sons and grandsons, including Jeri’s father, worked there. I am indebted to Jeri’s sister, Helen Meuwissen), for this information about Jeri’s early life.

“She could play the piano by ear when she was three, Helen said. She started studying at six. I don t think she ever quit taking lessons. (I car confirm this Jeri was doing some formal study of piano to the end of her life.) She went to Notre Dame Academy in Omaha, and always credited the nuns there for her background. She took voice lessons in Omaha with Harry Cooper. It was her desire to be a classical singer.”

Jeri also studied classical piano in Omaha with a much beloved teacher, Karl Tunberg. But her ambitions in the classical world evaporated one evening when she walked into a nightclub and heard a pianist playing jazz. She loved this music, and the experience changed her life. After high school graduation, she moved to Chicago.

She started playing standards in clubs, and got more experience as a pianist in local Chicago big bands. Eventually, as her reputation grew, she was advised that she could make more money if she would sing, a standard casting for women pianists in those days: women were not supposed to be instrumentalists, they were supposed to sing, or, just maybe, play the harp. So she did start to sing, and accompanied herself at the piano. She abandoned her trained operatic voice and began singing in her speaking voice, which had a smoky sound, with a very soft enunciation and a haunting intimacy. And her career took off.

Her greatest popularity was in the 1950s. The first of her records I heard was YOU BETTER GO NOW, the oldest track on this CD. I was blown away by it: the simplicity, the exquisite lack of affectation or mannerism. She recorded it for Decca in late 1951, just after she turned 25. She then turned out a series of superb performances for Decca, through to the Rodgers and Hart gems she recorded November 26, 1957: YOU'RE NEARER and NOBODY’S HEART. I met Jeri probably two years later, in 1959. She eventually left Decca and went on to record for other labels.

Unlike many performers, her stage career represented a great struggle for Jeri. First, she was extremely shy. I remember her telling me during our Chicago friendship that the first time she arrived at a nightclub and saw her name on the marquee, it terrified her. She deeply felt the responsibility of drawing and pleasing an audience – she was intimidated by the look of expectation in their eyes.

There are performers who passionately crave the audience. They will climb over footlights, climb over the tables, do anything to claim the audience’s attention and, I suppose, love – or the illusion of love. Jeri wasn’t like that. She simply loved the music. The music was everything, She was almost too much a musician, and certainty a perfectionist. Her philosophy of performing was the diametrical opposite of Carmen McRae's, who not only wouldn't do a song the same way twice, but probably couldn’t remember how she did it the last time. Jeri worked on interpretation until she got it ‘right,' which is to say the way she wanted it. She would then stick with her chosen interpretation. She was also disinterested in scat singing. I have noticed an interesting thing about those with the harmonic and instrumental skills to scat-sing - they often don’t and won’t do it. Nat Cole was a classic example of this fidelity to the original melody; so was Jeri.

As her reputation grew, her handlers – the managers, agents, publicists, record company executives - set out to make her into a pop star. Certainty with her Germanic beauty, she had the basic material for it. They dressed her in fancy gowns.  They took her away from her beloved piano and stood her in front of a microphone with some else to play for her. Nothing could have been more diabolically designed to send her fleeing from the spotlight.  And so, like Jo Stafford [and for the record, Greta Garbo, Doris Day, and others], she simply quit. She walked away from the business and the discomfort it brought her.

But the musicianship was always there, and she took to teaching. She wrote a textbook, Interpreting Popular Music at the Keyboard.   She enjoyed composing, and over the years wrote pop songs with various partners [one of which, I Don’t Know Where to Turn is included here], and even ventured into other genres like orchestrating film scores and writing classical songs.

I used to drop by to visit her every once in a white at her apartment in Hollywood. Illustrating some point in a discussion of this song or that, she would go to the piano and play and sing for me. She simply got better throughout her life, and during these occasional private performances, I could only shake my head and think what the world was missing. Her piano playing in those last years was remarkable. It had grown richer harmonically, and the tone had evolved into a dark golden sound.

She was working on a book of piano arrangements of songs by her friend Peggy Lee, also a friend of mine. One sunny afternoon a few years age, I telephoned Peggy. How re you doing? I began.

‘I’m very sad,’ she said. ‘Jeri Southern died this morning.’

As I learned later, she succumbed to double pneumonia. The date was August 4, 1991. The next day, August 5, she would have turned sixty-five.

Once she told me that during those Chicago years, she considered me her closest friend in the world. It is an honor I will not forget. I truly loved Jeri, not only the singer but the person inside who through music so diffidently allowed us glimpses into her all-too-sensitive soul.”

-         Gene Lees

Jeri Southern at Home

"Jeri Southern was essentially an intensely private person whose talent for music thrust her into a public career. Since Gene Lees and Orrin Keepnews have done such a fine job of describing my mother's public life, I thought it would be of interest to her still devoted audience to learn something of her private life. as I knew it.

My mothers life was unusual in a number of respects, not the least of which was the fact that a great deal happened to her at a very early age. She started performing as a pianist while still in her teens, moved from Nebraska to Chicago, developed a following there, married, signed a record deal, had a baby, and had her first great commercial success as a recording artist, all by the time she was 25. At 36 she retired from her public career. For the next 30 years her time was as much taken up with music as it had been before, but as a teacher, a writer and a composer - she never went back to performing.

Shortly after recording YOU BETTER GO NOW, my mother moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she lived for the rest of her life. Taking the title of one of the songs she recorded perhaps a little too closely to heart ( Married I Can Always Get"), she married four times; three of her husbands were musicians, one a radio der5onatity. My earliest memories are from the house we had in Malibu, a wonderful place right on the water, where she and I would take daily "walks' with our hyperactive Irish Setter. The intellectual pursuits, the preoccupation, the pleasures my mother enjoyed at the Malibu house were the ones she carried with her throughout her Life – she loved reading, exploring the whole dimension of the mind, summoning the restorative powers of the sun, and most of all, playing the piano. 

She always practiced classical pieces, although she never performed them. Some of her favorite things to play were Beethoven sonatas, Grieg’s Holberg Suite, Debussy’s Images, and in later years the Brahms Intermezzi.  She would also compose and improvise at the piano. Because she suffered from what could only be described as a crippling case of performance anxiety, she hated to be observed while she played, and only really enjoyed herself when she thought that no one was listening. So it was that I got in the habit of sneaking

She had the most exquisite command of  harmony, so that when she played a tune, she would basically use it as a launching pad for an extended improvisation which often went very far afield harmonically.  Sometimes, as I sat surreptitiously listening  to these explorations of  hers, I would be certain she could never figure out how to get back to  the original key of the  piece, but she always did, and in the most spectacular way, with subtle and elegant voice leading and chord progressions that were simply stunning. For a period of years she also studied guitar with a fuzzy-voiced Italian whose greatest contribution to our lives, notwithstanding the guitar lessons was probably the killer spaghetti sauce recipe she induced him, after much cajoling, to surrender.

When she was at home she spent a lot of time reading. She was fascinated by the work of Carl Jung, whose ideas became an essential part of her world view. She was also very taken with Gurdjieff, and even got interested in numerology toward the end of her life. She found it exciting to contemplate both the innumerable possibilities of inner space, so to speak, and the complexities of the physical world.

Another pursuit of her life at home was listening to the work of other singers. Her perfectionism made her a tough audience, but there were a few to whom she would return again and again. As one can immediately discern from listening to her recordings, she felt that the most important criterion for a great singer was a reverence for and communication of the lyric. She was not swayed by technical brilliance; the only singer with astonishing vocal technique whose work she enjoyed was Mel Torme, and that was because he delivers a lyric so well. She also loved Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Lucy Reed, Jackie and Roy, and the Hi-Los.

Music was really the playing field for her entire life. And with a few important exceptions, all of her most important relationships were with musicians, with whom she could share her opinions, her discoveries, her delights. Though she lived in Hollywood most of her adult life, she was not involved in that world. To say that she was reticent socially would be a mammoth understatement.

She hated parties and social gatherings, and had the same small circle of friends the day she died that she’d had for decades before. But for those of us who were privileged to be close to her, she had that rarest of gifts - acceptance. She was a loving, supportive, non-judgmental friend and mother. She loved her family and, in an important part of her mind and heart, she never really left Nebraska.

I still miss her so much, but it fulfills the dream of a Lifetime to be able to put this package together, to remind the world of what a wonderful singer she was."

- Kathryn King