Billy Strayhorn: Singular Unsung Genius by John Edward Hasse

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

“They were like two aspects of a single complex self. Where Duke Ellington was immodest, priapic and thumpingly egocentric, his longtime writing and arranging partner, Billy Strayhorn, was shy, gay and self-effacing. It's now very difficult, given the closeness of their relationship and their inevitable tendency to draw on aspects of the other's style and method, to separate which elements of an

'Ellington-Strayhorn' composition belong to each; but there is no doubt that Swee' Pea, as Ellington called him, made an immense impact on his boss's music. Even if he had done no more than write 'Lush Life' and 'Take The "A" Train', Strayhorn would still have been guaranteed a place in jazz history.

The ground-rules have shifted a little since the publication of David Hajdu's 1997 biography of Strayhorn, a book which intends no disrespect to the genius of Duke Ellington but which relocates some significant emphases and suggests that Strayhorn may have had a greater part in creating the Ellington sound than is usually acknowledged. Indeed, it may be that association with Ellington significantly redirected aspects of Strayhorn's own talent; whether to his benefit or loss remains ambiguous.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

The following piece by John Edward Hasse appeared in the May 30, 2017 edition of The Wall Street Journal and it, too, helps redress the general lack of awareness of Billy’s immense contribution to the Ellington compositional oeuvre.

“Duke Ellington led the greatest jazz orchestra for 50 years, and for 27 of them Billy Strayhorn was his indispensable musical partner. Strayhorn composed its exuberant theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” co-authored the perennial “Satin Doll,” and wrote more than 100 other works. Theirs was a different-drummer collaboration, one of the most unusual in musical history. Now, on the 50th anniversary of his death, it’s time to give Billy his due.

They worked together in three ways. Some pieces, like “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,” were wholly written by Strayhorn. As if handing arias to his favorite soprano, Strayhorn wrote a number of ballads to feature Ellington’s star alto saxophonist, Johnny Hodges, including the haunting “Passion Flower” and the ravishing “Isfahan.”

Sometimes working over the phone, the two composers wrote pieces such as “C Jam Blues.”

And in suites such as “Such Sweet Thunder” and “Far East Suite,” the individual movements had separate authors. The collaborative composing of Strayhorn with Ellington is extremely rare, if not downright unprecedented in orchestral music.

So crucial was Strayhorn to the building of Ellington’s repertoire that many of the original compositions are yin-yangs, the result of two contrasting creative forces coming together. Unlike Ellington, Strayhorn was well-trained in European classical music and brought his own sensibility and style, as in his impressionistic tone poem, “ Chelsea Bridge ” (1941). Ellington’s sound was rooted more deeply in the African-American vernacular of ragtime and blues—for example in his well-disguised minor-key blues, “Ko-Ko” (1940).

Yet, even 50 years after his passing, Strayhorn’s name is, I would guess, not even one-tenth as familiar as Ellington’s to people other than jazz aficionados.

In their personal lives, the two were opposites. While the handsome, charismatic, 6-foot-1-inch Ellington moved through life with dash and theatricality, charming women and manipulating people, the cherubic Strayhorn was 16 years younger, 10 inches shorter, soft-spoken, modest and gay. Despite these differences, they formed an exceedingly close musical relationship that ended only with Strayhorn’s death, at age 51.

That relationship was complicated. Strayhorn seemed to need a father figure—that was the domineering Ellington who loved and accepted him and provided a home base for his enormous creativity. But Strayhorn wanted credit for his creativity and eventually grew angry with Ellington’s stinginess with attribution. At a crucial dinner in 1956, Billy demanded equal billing—and Duke agreed.

Why was Strayhorn a shadow figure in the Ellington story for so long? Ellington, with his large ego and controlling personality, was, at best, careless at assigning composer credit and royalties to Strayhorn. Shy and retiring, Strayhorn avoided the limelight. Ellington’s late-career publicist Joe Morgen was antigay and diligently kept Strayhorn’s name out of the press. Prejudice prevailed. Some record producers preferred the simplicity of a single name on an album.

A lack of primary sources had long hindered scholarly assessment. But in the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution began cataloging and making available the Duke Ellington Collection, a treasure newly acquired from Duke’s son, Mercer, of some hundred thousand pages of unpublished scores and parts written by Ellington and Strayhorn and a few other collaborators. This sparked an Ellington renaissance, opened up access to Strayhorn’s handwritten manuscripts, and enabled authoritative insight into the contrast in their styles and who wrote what.

In 1990-93, when I was writing my biography of Ellington, the basic research on Strayhorn hadn’t been done. Since then, three works have appeared that have considerably raised his critical standing: David Hajdu’s pioneering “Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn” (1996), Walter van de Leur’s scholarly “Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn” (2002), and Robert Levi’s revealing PBS documentary “Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life” (2007).

And work on Strayhorn goes on. The Strayhorn family repository of original manuscripts has helped unveil heretofore unknown compositions. In the year 2000 alone, Strayhorn Songs copyrighted 200 newly discovered titles.

Beyond his output for Ellington, Strayhorn moved in other intriguing orbits. Before joining Ellington, Strayhorn composed classical-sounding pieces and a successful musical revue, “Fantastic Rhythm.” In the 1940s, he became the soul mate of singer Lena Horne and worked with her in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. And he composed a number of pieces totally independent of Ellington, most notably the arresting, world-weary ballad “Lush Life”—one of America’s premier popular songs—written when he was a teenager.

Ellington deeply loved, admired and depended on Strayhorn. Three months after his passing, the Ellington orchestra began recording a sorrowful, sometimes angry, tribute album made up almost entirely of Strayhorn compositions, “…And His Mother Called Him Bill”—one of the band’s finest works. It’s well worth a listen. Let’s finally give Billy his due.”

— Mr. Hasse is Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian and author of “Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington.”

The Dave Holland Big Band - Something Special This Way Comes

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

Whoosh!

It was in incredible.

My first experience listening to the Dave Holland Big Band involved a track that lasted 17.26 minutes, and yet, it felt like it was over in a flash.

What happened?

How can something with a duration of nearly one-third of an hour seemingly elapse so quickly?

After listening to this selection - What Goes Around – the title track from the band’s first CD on ECM [#1026] - I was instantly and completely absorbed in the music of this big band.

In case you are not familiar with Dave Holland, he is a bassist who assumes a very dominant and propulsive role in the band’s music.

How can you swing a big band with from the bass chair?

And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening in this band’s music – the bass player is the driving force behind it – both figuratively and literally.

Dave Holland has impeccable credentials as a bass player dating back to the late 1960s and his tenure with Miles Davis.  Over the years, Dave has been the mainstay, a force, if you will, in a number of small groups where his huge tone, superb note selection and excellent sense of time have contributed greatly to the overall quality of the music.

But, bringing all of these skills to bear in a big band is quite a different matter as, more-often-than-not, the sound of the bass is lost in such surroundings.

In addition to Dave’s bass and the sterling musicianship of the other players, it is the nature and quality of the big band’s arrangements that distinguish its music.

Traditionally, big band arrangements have been tightly configured vehicles ruled by the constrictions of time and structure. Initially, one reason for this was to take commercial benefit of the earliest records, which along with radio broadcasts, supper club and ballroom appearances, served to generate audiences for the big bands.

The big band tradition came into existence at a time when 7-10” 78 rpm recordings were the mainstay, thus allowing for approximately 2:00 – 3:30 minutes of music to be captured on them.

The temporal and spatial restraints of these early 78’s curtailed the time available for the playing out of a big band arrangement and related solos.

Typically, the earliest big band arrangements, particularly from their high point in The Swing Era, 1930 – 1945, involved a statement of the melody and the release [bridge], brief solos by one or two instrumentalists and then a slightly altered restatement of the theme to close things out.

The advent of the long-playing album in the 1950s made possible longer recorded performances which resulted in more time for featured soloists and the interspersing of riffs, interludes and “shout choruses” [fanfare-type choruses that preceded the closing restatement of the theme], thus extending the typical big band arrangement to approximately 4-6 minutes.

Of course, there were exceptions to this format and these usually occurred when a big band was recorded in performance at a club or Jazz Festival.  One of the more notable examples of such an extended, recorded performance was the classic 20+ choruses by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves on the 14.37 minutes of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue on the Duke Ellington at the Newport Jazz Festival Columbia LP.

But here again, the structure of the arrangement is largely patterned after the more traditional big band arranging format which is altered to allow Gonsalves time to spin his saxophone magic and enchant the crowd at Newport, Rhode Island’s Freebody Park on July 7, 1956.

There were also exceptions to this generalization by arrangers who emphasized concert or orchestral approaches such as those associated Stan Kenton, as well as, big bands scored for by Gil Evans and Gerald Wilson, and, of course Duke Ellington’s extended suites.

Due to copyright restrictions, the crackerjack graphics theme at CerraJazz LTD was unable to use the music from the “first impression” What Goes Around recording on its video tribute to the Dave Holland Big Band, but we were able to put together an audio only Soundcloud music file which you'll find at the conclusion of this piece which uses the band's performance of What Goes Around from the 2003 Saalfelden Jazz Festival [Austria].

For the closing video turned to a live performance of Dave’s tune The Razor’s Edge from the band’s appearance at the 2005 North Sea Jazz Festival which contains smashing solos by Alex "Sasha" Sipiagin on trumpet, Steve Nelson on vibes and Gary Smulyan on baritone saxophone.

In Dave’s arrangement of the tune, you can hear all of the ingredients that make the band so engaging, engrossing and enthralling such as:

- collective improvisation by one, two instruments or even the entire band as an element in the arrangement and/or a background for the soloists to improvise over

- stop time

- the rhythm section “laying out” [stops playing to create a sudden background of quiet]

- restating the theme between solos

- rhythmic riffs played behind soloists and between solos

- alternating such riffs between sections [i.e.: brass and reeds] to give them contrasts

- counter melodies played between sections

- multiple shout choruses as a prelude to the closing theme

Basically, the arrangement is being elongated to allow the soloists to expand their solos, a format which is more characteristic of Jazz in a small group rather than a big band setting.

And, by variegating these orchestral backgrounds, it serves to energize the soloists who now have many more stimuli to chose from as a springboard for their improvisations.

The implementation of all of these arranging, orchestrating and scoring devices provides for a landscape of continually changing sonorities that keeps the music interesting for both the musicians and the listener.

Amazingly, given the variety of the devices employed, they always seem to occur in exactly the right place in the charts for Dave’s band.

With all this going on in the music, is it any wonder that time seems to standstill while listening to it?

If you are looking for something “new and different” in your big band fare, why not give the music of the Dave Holland Big Band a try. 

Don’t be surprised if you lose track of time while doing so.

La Rosa and Sinatra: The Storytellers

“He said for the boys what they wanted to say. He said to the girls what they wanted to hear. The body of excellent songs that had come into existence in the United States at last found a singer worthy of them. He was the best singer we had ever heard. He was one of the best singers in history. And he knew it. He was our poet laureate.”

- Gene Lees

“Look, I know you have a lot of Italian friends. But you don’t know Italians the way Italians know Italians. Italians tend to break down into two kinds of people: Lucky Luciano and Michelangelo. Frank’s an exception. He’s both.”

- anonymous anecdote by an Italian-American musician

“Frank Sinatra was, in his prime, to put the matter quite simply, the best popular singer of them all.”

- Steve Allen

“I know that it sounds like something out of a B movie, but it’s true; before he’d sung four bars, we knew. We knew he was going to become a great star.”

- Vocalist, Jo Stafford, commenting about Frank Sinatra’s first performance with The Pied Pipers and Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra in 1940

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights

There was a time when “Dean Martin,” “Vic Damone,” “Jerry Vale” and “Perry Como” were literally household names, especially if your family circle happened to be a post-World War II one of Italian-American descent, based in the New England – Atlantic Coast states area.

My favorite was Julius La Rosa whose unassuming personality, ready smile and enthusiastic way with a song appealed to my youthful sensibilities.

And then, of course, there was “Sinatra,” or “Frank” to those among his legions of admirers who could lay claim to having seen “The Voice” in person once in a supper club, floor show.

I’m not certain of the exact date, but a few years after Gene Lees left the editorship of Down Beat magazine in the early 1960s, he wrote a detailed account in High Fidelity magazine of the unique aspects of Sinatra’s phrasing of a song’s lyrics replete with anatomical references as to why Italo-American male singers from New York/New Jersey sounded different than African-American males from the Southern States, et al.

It was one of the most instructive essays about singing that I ever read and darn if I didn’t lose track of this issue of the magazine as a result of constantly loaning it to friends.

Although I never thought of him as a Jazz singer, per se, Sinatra was to me, the epitome of “being hip:” he was sew-wave [suave], chick, [chic] and dee-boner [debonair].

I loved his choice of big band arrangers including Billy May, Nelson Riddle and Neal Hefti and – thanks to the awareness created by having read the Lees’ High Fidelity article -  his use of diction, enunciation and, most of all, phrasing, to lift song styling to a whole new dimension of power, persuasion and passion.

Over the years, it has been great fun re-acquainting myself with Dino, Vic and “Frank” [I saw him perform in person in Las Vegas so I guess this entitles me to call him by his first name] as their music was reissued in various CD compilations.

Along the way, I was also fortunate to be able to discerningly re-visit the subject of Frank Sinatra’s phrasing in the form of the following essay by none other than -  Julius La Rosa.

Not surprisingly, I would also find in editions of Gene Lees’ Jazzletter, which was published from 1981 until Gene’s passing in 2010, a two-part essay on Julius La Rosa and one that expanded on Lees’ original treatment of Frank Sinatra uniqueness as a vocalist, both of which have been published in Gene’s book: Singers and The Song II [New York: Oxford, 1998].

© -Julius La Rosa, copyright protected; all rights

“In the beginning he was called The Voice, and what a voice it was. But he never let it get in the way of the message. It set him apart, and he established a standard for interpreting lyrics, giving life to the words on the lead sheet in a way never before considered. Songs were no longer melodies to be danced to. They were stories to be listened to.

Before Sinatra, the lyrics were given at most a casual attention. Why did we start listening? The newspapers wrote about him as if only the girls loved what he was doing. I was one of those who loved what he was doing, and I wasn't a girl. They wrote about us as if we were crazy. We weren't crazy. Whether or not we could put into words what he was doing, we sensed it.

What made us stop dancing and crowd up close to the band­stand to listen? He was making sense of the words. He was telling a story, honoring the American songbook in a way that had never been done, the poems-to-music of Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Sammy Cahn, Oscar Hammerstein, Yip Harburg, Johnny Burke, and other giants. …

Jolson was dynamic, his personality and showmanship foremost. But I don't think anyone ever got drunk listening to him. Bing Crosby, who was to Sinatra what Sinatra was to me, was relaxed, casual, the everyman of singers. But he never projected the emotional values of the lyric, never gave us a sense of what the words meant to him.

Along came Sinatra, the new boy with the Harry James band, and soon after that with Tommy Dorsey. And despite the restric­tions of tempo — the people had to dance, didn't they? — he told the story, and we stopped dancing to listen, and Dorsey noticed this. He was phrasing. Until Sinatra, the song was sung: "I've gaaaaht yoooo unDER my skin." The song is written that way, with the accent on the second syllable of under. (You could look it up!) Sinatra (I refer to his later career) chopped it into its component pieces and sang: "I've got. . . you ..." Brief pause. "UN-der my skin." And that's the way everyone has sung that song ever since.

Cole Porter is said to have wired Sinatra: "If you don't like my songs the way I write them, don't sing them." Sinatra, reportedly, wired back, "If you don't like the royalties, send them back." The story may be apocryphal but it sounds very much in character for both of them.

Porter's mistake lay in not accepting the style of singing Sinatra introduced. An argument could be made, of course, that Porter was concerned for the musical values of the song. But Sinatra went after the lyrical content. As a rule, Sinatra was true to a songwri­ter's intentions in the first chorus, taking his liberties in the second chorus — and he took considerable liberties in the later years.

Toscanini, too, apparently was not enamored by the liberties taken by soloists, vocal or instrumental. Yet he was big enough to recognize a performer's contribution to interpretation of a master's work. During a rehearsal, a trumpet player took a liberty with the phrasing of a solo in some symphonic work or other. The other musicians waited for the maestro to explode, and his temper was famous. To everyone's surprise, he didn't. After the rehearsal, Toscanini encountered the trumpet player at the elevator. He said, ''If you promise to play it that way again, I will conduct it that way." He recognized the contribution.

In the Dorsey days, Sinatra was constrained by dance tempos. But he turned them to his advantage. It must have been about this time that Sinatra became friendly with Alec Wilder. His recording of Wilder's I’ll Be Around is the definitive version. In 1945, by which time Sinatra had left Dorsey and become what we now call a superstar (star was good enough in the old days), he picked up a baton to conduct a suite of Wilder's orchestral pieces. Since Sinatra was known to be unable to read music, Gene Lees once asked Alec Wilder if Sinatra really had conducted those pieces. (You can get them now on CD.) "Yes," Wilder said, "and he did them better than anyone else has ever done them, because he understood something most conductors don't: dance tempos."

And within the restrictions of those tempos, even back in the Dorsey days, Sinatra could shift the accents in a song to get the story out. This Love of Mine was actually in my arms, but we stopped dancing to elbow our way close to the bandstand to gaze up at the skinny guy holding onto the mike stand. He hadn't yet decided what to do with his hands. Oh! how many singers know that problem. We looked up and listened to the story. Hell, it was my story. It was "our" story. Mine and Sue's. Or was it Marianne?

And he told the stories in the same voice he spoke with, a natural quality few singers achieve. It made us all think we could do that too. The technical term for that is placement. Whether in his high or low register, the voice was the same. All the way up. It is far more remarkable than is generally realized. There was no "break" in his voice. Listen some time to the way an opera singer who has come down from Olympus to honor us with a pop song comes to the high note and goes from chest tone to head tone, which is why it's called, justifiably, falsetto. It's an artificial sound. The only time I ever heard Sinatra go into falsetto was on the last note of his Bluebird recording (with Axel Stordahl) of The Song Is You, one of the first four sides he made as a soloist. One night early in my own career, I did a falsetto, eliciting from my accompanist: "Who do you think you are? Deanna Durbin?"

Well Sinatra didn't use artificial sounds, except on that one note of The Song Is You. Why did he do it? Maybe it was to show some people something, that he could do that trick. One is reminded of a story told about Segovia. After a performance, so the story goes, someone asked him why he'd played a certain piece so fast. "Because I can," Segovia replied. Well Sinatra could sing those falsetto tones. He didn't choose to, and in all the recordings from then until his death, I never heard him do it again.

Sinatra was also experimenting with enunciation. Even in the Harry James days, he always sang so that you could hear the words. But there is something a little affected about it. By the Dorsey days, he was finding a clear but natural kind of enuncia­tion.

One of my high-school English teachers suggested that we listen to Sinatra for his enunciation. Later, after he had achieved world renown, Sinatra began revealing, if not actually flaunting, his Hoboken, New Jersey, beginnings. I think it was a not too subtle assertion of his genesis.

With Harry James, and soon after that with Dorsey, the simplicity of Sinatra's singing was deceptive. It seemed so effortless. His intonation was almost flawless. Curiously, where most good singers will sometimes sing flat, Sinatra would be sharp. This has been attributed to Dorsey's influence on him. For reasons beyond my knowledge of instruments, trombone players are more likely to be sharp than flat.

During those Dorsey days, and then those four Bluebird sides and finally the brilliant body of work for Columbia with exquisite­ly lush Axel Stordahl arrangements, the emphasis in Sinatra's career was on ballads, for the obvious reason that he did them as no one ever had before. Some of us still remember his first "album", four 78 rpm records in four sleeves bound with a hard cover, and in that collection, the songs began to seem very much like art music. They were Sinatra's definitive interpretations of I Concentrate on You, These Foolish Things, Ghost of a Chance, Try a Little Tenderness, You Go to My Head, She's Funny That Way, and Someone to Watch Over Me.

Back then Sinatra sang a lot like the way Dorsey played trombone, long lines often carried past the end of an eight bar phrase. You can really hear it in his recording with Dorsey of Without a Song. At the end of the release, Sinatra hits the word "soul" quite big, and without a breath sails diminuendo into the start of the next eight, "I'll never know . . . . " Anyone who doubts Dorsey's influence on him should give that record a listen, not that anyone does.

In a time when most performers didn't publicize aspects of their personal lives, Sinatra sang a sweet song about Nancy, his daughter. We all heard those "mission bells ringing" and got "the very same glow".

I remember his performances at the first spectacular and historic Paramount Theater appearance. Yes, I was there, one of those thousands of "crazy" kids waiting in a line along

West 43rd Street

. At last we got in, and there he was. One of the lines in Nancy is: "Sorry for you, she has no sister." But in that performance he sang: "Just give me time, she'll have a sister." And the bobby-soxers really did go a little crazy. The screaming was deafening.

Nor was Sinatra politically passive. In 1943, when it was considered unwise for an entertainer to voice preferences, he came out for Roosevelt's unprecedented run for a third term. And in 1945, he recorded The House I Live In and made a film short about racial tolerance that was built around it. It earned him a special Academy Award. The song expressed his feelings about America.

With Dorsey, however, Sinatra's rhythmic sense had never been fully explored. Yes, he did several medium "up" tunes such as Snooty Little Cutie, Oh Look at Me Now (remember "Jack, I'm ready!"?), I’ll Take Tallulah among them, but Dorsey used him mostly for ballads.

Sinatra's work on Columbia — there are 72 songs in the four-CD boxed set — is a remarkable celebration of the American song. But the experience there went sour when a-and-r head Mitch Miller forced on Sinatra some dreadful songs, including a monstrosity called Mama Will Bark and a duet with of all people the now-forgotten Dagmar. It still seems to some of those who were close to the situation that Mitch Miller was out to destroy Sinatra. And for a time he did seem destroyed. It was known in the business that he was having serious throat problems. We can never know whether they were caused by nervous tension. And finally, Columbia dropped him. The Columbia period had lasted from 1943 to 1952.

He said that he entered a period of despair when the phone no longer rang. He was desperately short of money, and his career seemed ended.

I don't know this with certainty, but I suspect that Johnny Mercer was the force in the restoration of Sinatra's career. In addition to being a great lyricist — some think he was our greatest of all — Mercer was an astute gentleman. He was also president of Capitol records, which he had founded with fellow songwriter Buddy De Sylva. Mercer was one record-company head who really knew what he was hearing.

And I think Mercer recognized Sinatra's as-yet untapped . . . genius. I don't think the word is an exaggeration. What John Gielgud was to Shakespeare, Sinatra was to the American song. We discovered him with Dorsey, he proved we were right about him at Columbia, and from his very first recordings for Capitol we realized, if we hadn't done so already, that we had a giant on our hands. Nelson Riddle recognized it. Songs for Young Lovers is still my favorite album. Riddle is credited rightly for recognizing the depth of Sinatra's musical instincts. He appreciated Sinatra's intelligence and, I guess, understood his temperament. His arrangements for those early Capitol albums are masterpieces, one after another. And the mature Sinatra was revealed. The ballads are touching, heartbreaking even, and the sense of identification is incomparable. In the reprise of My Funny Valentine when he sings "But donnnnn't change a hair for me ..." oh, the pain. And rhythm songs now were fun. "I get a kick . . . mmmm, you give me a boot!" Cole Porter may not (I would assume) have liked the interpolation, but everyone else did.

By now we knew what he was: a performing poet. And by now he had influenced a whole generation of singers, Vic Damone and me (both of us from Brooklyn) among them. But he created a dilemma for us, too. If you phrased the way he did, you were bound to sound at least a little like him. But on the other hand, as Gene Lees wrote, "Once you had heard him do it, what was a singer to do? Not phrase for the meaning of the lyrics?"

Anthony Quinn said, "Until I speak them, they are just words on a piece of paper." Sinatra could have said, "Until I sing them, nobody knows what they mean." Mr. Quinn once came to see me in Las Vegas. After my performance he came back to say hello. And he said, "Boy! You sound like Frank Sinatra." I had an urge to say, "And you remind of me of Paul Muni." I suppressed it.

But it was true though that until Sinatra sang, "You may not know it, but buddy, I'm a kind of poet," you didn't realize to just what an extent Johnny Mercer really was a poet. Sinatra put blood into the words of that and countless other songs.

When others sang what used to be called torch songs, one could shrug and say, "Who cares? I've got problems of my own." But when Sinatra sang (in another Mercer song) "A woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the Blues in the Night," you were likely to stare into your drink and think, "I know how the poor son of a bitch feels."

A long-time friend of mine, the great arranger Marion Evans, has a wonderful expression. When someone records a definitive version of a song, Marion says, "It's been fixed." Sinatra fixed scores of songs. Remember his performance of (another Mercer lyric) Come Rain or Come Shine with that marvelous Don Costa chart and those insisting French horns? And tell me about the low E in What Is This Thing Called Love. I've always suspected that he'd been out late and recorded it early in the morning. He was awake, but his voice was still asleep. A low E indeed! How dare he! And that high G on All of Me. His range, for all its seeming naturalness, was over two octaves. No one should ever underesti­mate Sinatra's chops.

Though the catalogue of his best work is just this side of unending and it is hard to pick a favorite, I have a great liking for an underplayed album called Watertown on Reprise. I would refer you to particular cuts, Elizabeth and What a Funny Girl (You Used to Be). Enchanting. Sinatra at his most conscientious. He wanted these to be good, and they are.

William Gibson, author of Two for the Seasaw, commenting on Anne Bancroft's portrayal of Gittle Mosca, the character he created, said she "transcended the lines with a humor and poignan­cy I had not suspected in them." Sinatra endowed lyrics with the same sense of truth.

He once said, "Don't get mad, get even." All the sycophants who loved him when he was up took a hike when he was down, and did he get even! From that time on, there is a visible tough­ness in him, an incredible assurance. Most of the adjectives applied to him were accurate to some degree. If you liked him, he was being true to himself. If you didn't, he was a bastard. Why not? He had "all the elements so mixed in him that nature could stand up and say to all the world, 'This was a man.'"

I fell in love with songs because of him. I fell in love with the way he sang them. Very timidly, I thought, 4Hey, I think I could do that." So I joined a choir. And I tried.

I wonder what would have happened to me if Francis Albert Sinatra had not been born. Maybe I'd have stayed in the Navy. Or maybe I'd have left the Navy to go into my father's radio-repair business in Brooklyn. I would be retired by now. But it didn't work out that way. Because of Frank Sinatra I've had a hell of a life.

And to me he'll always be

. . . shining, shining, shining . . .

everywhere."

— Julius La Rosa

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.