Jazz was born at the dawn of the 20th Century with female vocalists huge contributors then and since. One critic wrote there are more great female than male jazz singers “because of the emotional journey women take us on – one that goes to places of the heart where few of their male colleagues have the courage to venture.”
Starting with the great Bessie Smith, the list of jazz-divas is long. I decided on “the mighty Holy Trinity” of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan after discovering these three top every poll of the best female jazz singers of all time. Among the three, none is better than the others, just different: vocal trailblazers during a painful and turbulent period in America’s social history. Brava divas!
Billie Holiday (1915-1959) “Her voice was pure velvet” (Oscar Peterson)
Billie Holiday had an incredible sense of rhythm and harmony and was considered by many the greatest tempo singer who ever lived. Miles Davis said she didn’t need real horns, “she sounds like one anyway.” The facts of her troubled life are well known. So is the fact she was fearless for her art - “I’m going to sing my way.” – and loved music and performing with great musicians.
Our MC selection shows just that. It's "Fine and Mellow” which she wrote in 1939 and had become a jazz standard by the time of the 1957 session featured in the video, where all the players are great and she and they are having a very fine time. Two years later she would die in a Harlem hospital, joking earlier in the day to a musician friend that she planned to write a new song, “Bless Your Bones.” While we don’t have “Bones,” we do have Billie’s “God Bless the Child,” “Strange Fruit” and several other of the best jazz vocal recordings ever made.
Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) “The only thing better than singing is more singing.”
(Ella Jane Fitzgerald)
While her childhood wasn’t as brutal as Holiday’s, it had its challenges when, following the death of both parents, she landed in and then escaped from reform school. She was 15 and would struggle through the Depression for a couple years before winning a chance to perform in one of the Apollo Theater’s famous “Amateur nights.” She won and continued competing in talent shows acquiring both fans and people who would help her, like drummer and bandleader Chick Webb who hired her and became her mentor. That was the beginning. Fitzgerald is celebrated for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, and intonation. With 13 Grammy awards, 40 million album sales and a career that spanned over 50 years, Ella Fitzgerald was the most “popular” among our three divas.
Ultimately Ella would work with all the greats, including Sinatra, Ellington, Basie, Goodman and Louis Armstrong with whom she dueted memorably on several occasions. In 1938, when swing was the thing, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” – our MC -selection - spent ten weeks at number one and made her a star. The song marked her forever as an ageless child who couldn’t keep from swinging. It’s a short Disney film clip and young Ella is a complete joy.
Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan (1924-1990) “the ageless voice of modern jazz . . . a voice that happens once in a lifetime, perhaps once in several lifetimes.” (critic Gary Giddens)
Sarah Vaughan played piano and sang in the church choir and got her professional start at the Apollo, winning a competition in 1942 at age 17. Her prize included a week’s engagement and in November 1942, she opened for Ella Fitzgerald at the Apollo! Band leader Earl Hines was in the audience and hired her for his orchestra where she would meet Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker and later record “Lover Man” with them, her first Gold Record. She always said her singing style was influenced by their horns. Possessed of a three-octave range, Vaughan was compared to opera singers. Her’s was a rich voice, lauded for its wide range and the inventiveness and virtuosity of her improvisations. Mel Torme said she had “the single best vocal instrument of any singer in the pop field; ” Sinatra said she was so good “when I listen to her I want to cut my wrists with a dull razor.”
Our MC selection was influenced by a critic writing about a fabled recording of “Misty” Vaughan made in Paris in 1958. He said she “ushered us into a sugar-plum paradise of beauty and romance. Underlying her every phrase was a musicianship that seemingly knew no bounds.” I couldn’t locate a video of that recording session, but I did find a pretty fabulous “Misty” performed live in Sweden six years later.
I love each of these artists and selected performances. I hope you do, too. Let me know.
