Edinburgh Jazz Festival 2017: Seonaid Aitken – A Night With Ella

Seonaid Aitken – A Night With Ella, Festival Theatre ***

After Alison Burns’s homage to Ella Fitzgerald at the Glasgow Jazz Festival, it was Seonaid Aitken, recently named Best Vocalist at the Scottish Jazz Awards but originally known on the jazz scene as a dazzlingly talented violinist, who had the honour of marking the legendary singer’s centenary for the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. 

 

While Burns’s concert was a duo affair, in an intimate venue, Aitken’s, which featured the impressive Groove Merchant Big Band and The Scottish Festival Orchestra Strings, was the Saturday night slot at the Festival Theatre, an occasion which one might – given the jazz festival’s long history of all-star extravaganzas – have expected to boast a number of better-known names, each perhaps focusing on a different aspect of Fitzgerald’s back catalogue.

 

So, no pressure on Aitken then .. However, she pulled it out of the bag in terms of entertaining the audience with her warm personality and covering all areas of Fitzgerald’s career singlehandedly; even managing to justify a violin feature because there’s a violin solo on It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) from Fitzgerald’s Ellington Songbook album. 

 

That song, however, summed up the issue that any jazz aficionado might have had with this tribute. Its singer didn’t swing. Aitken has a beautiful voice, and she swings like mad when playing her violin – but when she’s singing lyrics, she is terribly sedate and sings the songs very straight. The stand-out of the evening was her recreation of Fitzgerald’s iconic scat solo on How High the Moon – where she did a superb job of letting rip and going with the swinging flow of the fantastic big band behind her.

* First published in The Scotsman, Monday July 17th

Review: Martin Taylor & Alison Burns – Ella at 100

Martin Taylor & Alison Burns – Ella at 100, Strathclyde Suite, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow ****

Maybe it’s fitting that a star who was as unassuming in real life as Ella Fitzgerald should have a low-key centenary year – in Scotland at least. The legendary jazz singer’s birthday celebrations can be contrasted with those organised for that other great 20^th Century voice, Frank Sinatra, when he hit the C spot in 2015.

While Sinatra’s centenary in Scotland was a series of big band bashes fronted by such leading singing stars as Kurt Elling, Curtis Stigers and Frank Sinatra Jr, the biggest name on any of the Fitzgerald-themed Scottish concerts is a guitarist ….

But what a guitarist. Martin Taylor, who opened the Glasgow Jazz Festival on Wednesday with his and singer Alison Burns’s tribute, brought the house down in a way that Fitzgerald herself would have done, and in the duo format which Fitzgerald used to memorable effect with guitarist Joe Pass.

His two extended (non Fitzgerald-related) solo segments were, unsurprisingly given his status as an internationally renowned soloist, the stand-outs of the concert: tour-de-force balladeering on Hymne a l’amour (which, he joked, he used to think was a Glaswegian song because his aunty would invariably sing it after a few sherries), a beautiful and characteristically richly textured interpretation of Henry Mancini’s Two For the Road, and a gorgeous bossa version of The Carpenters’ I Won’t Last a Day Without You.

With a warm, lush voice which suited the intimate feel of the venue, Alison Burns impressed in the Ella role, bravely attempting to reproduce some of Fitzgerald’s less energetic improvisations and singing in a style which featured most of Fitzgerald’s trademark “licks”.

A slightly shorter version of this review was published in The Scotsman on Saturday, June 24th

Ella in Scotland

This year, the music world celebrates the centenary of the vocalist known as the “First Lady of Song”, the mighty Ella Fitzgerald – and it is entirely appropriate that Scotland should play host to a number of Fitzgerald tributes and events. Why? Because this is where she made her British debut in 1948; the first of a handful of visits over the years.

 

Born on April 25 1917, Ella Fitzgerald was a decade into her career as one of the most highly regarded singers on the scene when she arrived in Scotland in late September 1948. She had topped the charts and made her name in the late 1930s with the hit record A–Tisket A-Tasket, a swinging rendition of an old nursery rhyme which she went on to sing in the Abbott and Costello movie Ride ‘Em Cowboy. Her most celebrated admirers included Bing Crosby, who had said: “Man, woman and child, Ella is the greatest of them all.”

 

But her debut at the Glasgow Empire on Monday, September 27 seems to have been a non-event.

 

Accompanied by her new husband, the bassist Ray Brown, Fitzgerald had arrived off the Queen Mary at Southhampton a week earlier, to be told that the location of her British debut had been changed from the London Palladium to the Glasgow Empire – because boisterous Hollywood personality Betty Hutton’s Palladium run had been extended. 

 

Fitzgerald said she was worried about her London appearance and welcomed the chance to make her debut in Glasgow instead. But according to the reviews, and judging by Fitzgerald’s own reaction, her debut performance – accompanied by pianist Hank Jones – was a bit of a damp squib.

 

“Enthusiasm was lacking” said one review. “Ella made the mistake of changing her act to cope with request numbers,” said another, “and the result was a fairly ragged presentation.” Among the songs she sang were Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me, A-Tisket A-Tasket, Woody Woodpecker and Nature Boy.

 

Apart from the fact that Fitzgerald was suffering from both a bad cold and a bad case of nerves, there was also the problem that – as was the case with all American jazz musicians at the time – she was appearing as part of a variety programme (below the top-billed Gracie Fields in London, for example, and with the Nicholas Brothers dance team, plus a comedian, in Glasgow) which was designed to cater for all tastes, rather than for an audience of jazz aficionados. And at this point, encouraged by Dizzy Gillespie and her newfound enthusiasm for bebop, she was starting to explore scat singing. Perhaps Empire audiences just weren’t ready for it. 

 

Indeed, after the first show, Fitzgerald told one interviewer that she was a “rebop” (sic) singer. “You know what that means?” she asked. The reporter replied that he understood it to be a modern way of phrasing music. “You’re lucky,” said Fitzgerald. “I doubt if the audience knows. I don’t really know myself what it is. To me it is singing discords. It goes down well in America. I wonder if it will go down well in Britain.”

 

By 1964, when Fitzgerald returned to Glasgow, she was indubitably the queen of jazz; her recent series of classy songbook albums underlining the fact that she was at the peak of her powers. This time, she shared the bill with the Oscar Peterson Trio and trumpet ace Roy Eldridge. 

 

Among those in the audience of the Odeon Theatre on Friday April 3, 1964 were two young singers who would go on to dominate the Scottish jazz scene: Carol Kidd and Fionna Duncan. Kidd recalls:  “She walked on in silence – no announcement, and stood at the microphone with a big smile waiting for Tommy Flanagan to get his music together. Then she decided to go ahead anyway! She went straight into It’s Alright With Me at breakneck tempo, but by God she was spot on with the key. It took Tommy Flanagan a full chorus to catch up with her! She giggled all the way through the song which was obviously not rehearsed. I’ll never forget the impression that made on me – to be so sure that you can carry such a hiccup off and always be in key..

 

“Just to see her standing there in front of me took my breath away. I cried all the way through it. Her scat was just a joy because we never knew when she was going to run out of phrasing but she never repeated herself – not once!”

 

Duncan, meanwhile, was struck by how shy and self-conscious Fitzgerald appeared onstage. “She just just didn’t look comfortable at all – until she was singing. As soon as she sang, she was a different person. I was bowled over by her singing. I’d always been a fan; I loved how she grabbed the melody.”

 

It may have been a momentous occasion for many in the audience, but media coverage of Fitzgerald’s appearance seems to have been non-existent. That there were no interviews or photographs in the local press seems to fit in with Fitzgerald’s reserved personality. And a performance at the Apollo in Glasgow exactly ten years later drew as little coverage. Only one interview pops up and that was secured by a bold Daily Record reporter who bypassed her “people” and nabbed her when she returned to her hotel in Southport just before she came north to do her Apollo gig.

 

“Sure I’ll talk, honey,” she told him, over a slimline tonic. “I hear people saying I don’t give press interviews – and that kinda puzzles me. Because while I’m on tour I never see the press. I guess someone gets to them before they can get to me. There has never been anyone so great that they didn’t need the press. If you think that, then you have nothing left to accomplish.”

 

Asked about her repertoire and how it had changed, she said: “I’m always striving for something new, and nowadays we’re playing a lot of material by the young generation of composers. People like Carole King and Bacharach.”

 

Indeed, in Edinburgh the following year it was with Stevie Wonder’s You Are the Sunshine of My Life that she serenaded one adoring young fan. Singer Todd Gordon was a 16-year-old devotee of Fitzgerald when he heard she was coming to Scotland for Glasgow and Edinburgh dates with Count Basie’s Orchestra (at the Kelvin Hall and Usher Hall respectively).

Having heard her at the Apollo, he resolved to go one better the next year – so he turned up at the Caledonian Hotel, where she was lunching before her two Usher Hall performances, and presented her with 20 pink roses.

 

Gordon recalls: “Towards the end of the first concert, when Ella came to say thanks to the musicians, she added: ‘I’d also like to thank a young fan who gave me flowers earlier today. I haven’t been able to see you. Are you here?’” As Gordon waved from the organ gallery, a spotlight shone on him and Fitzgerald invited him to come onstage with her. After she had sung her song and Gordon was making his way back to his seat, she said: “Wasn’t that sweet? He spent his little bread on me – when he could have spent it on Elton John!”

 

Gordon, like Fionna Duncan, found Fitzgerald to be very shy but also “very motherly”. He adds: “She really put me at ease.” So much so that he went back to see her the next time she visited Edinburgh – when she was appearing with pianist Jimmy Rowles’s trio and the BBC Concert Orchestra in a concert later released as an album – in July 1981. This time it was the distinctly less impressive King James Hotel – rather than the elegant Caledonian – where this jazz legend was staying. 

 

Perhaps this is where Fitzgerald was more comfortable. After all, she seems to have been quite a homely person, “a simple soul” – as Jean Mundell, another Edinburgh-born singer who spent a little time with her, remembers. 

 

This, after all, is the woman who – at the end of her first-ever week performing two shows a night in Britain – took the time to hand-write a letter on Central Hotel notepaper to a couple who had, presumably by giving up some ration coupons, helped to make her visit to Glasgow more comfortable. This rare letter, which turned up on an auction website a couple of years ago, thanks Beth and George for “a lovely time”. Intriguingly, it adds: “It isn’t everyone who will give up there (sic) points so nicely, you see I’m a housewife also and I know what it meant.”

 

* Tina May & Brian Kellock are visiting Greenock, Glasgow, West Kilbride, Arbroath and Inverness with an Ella Fitzgerald & Oscar Peterson tribute show from May 10; http://www.tinamay.com

* Alison Burns & Martin Taylor – 100 Years of Ella Fitzgerald is at the Perth Festival on May 17

This article was first published in The Herald on Friday, April 21st.

Jacqui of All Trades

Jacqui Dankworth is in a class of her own. Not only is she the offspring of jazz royalty (her father was saxophonist, bandleader and composer John Dankworth; her mother is the formidable vocalist Cleo Laine), but the disarmingly unaffected singer and actress has a career that must be widely envied, not least for its eclecticism and variety.

In her visits to Scotland in the last year alone, Dankworth has performed in an opera at the Edinburgh International Festival, sung songs from family movies and cartoons with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, and headlined one of the most successful concerts at the British Vocal Jazz Festival, within the Fringe.

For that concert, she was reunited with her occasional singing partner, Edinburgh-based Todd Gordon, and the pair bring their hugely popular Frank & Ella show to the Glasgow Jazz Festival this week. It’s proved to be a winning combination, and, since the two stars  – whose close friendship offstage accounts for the warm atmosphere on it – clearly get a kick out of performing together, it’s more double than tribute act. Indeed, as Dankworth points out: “I don’t sing like Ella but obviously I grew up listening to her. She was a one-off. It’s not a tribute show; it’s just acknowledging her and singing some songs that she sang.”

The Ella side of the operation, says Dankworth, means that pretty much anything from the Great American Songbook goes, as she sang everything during her long and prolific career – and in many instances, the record-buying public know more than one Fitzgerald recording of a song, since many live performances were been released on LPs.

“It’s strange because obviously Frank Sinatra had a lot more songs that he made the definitive versions of,  and hits that he was strongly associated with – like My Way and New York, New York – but that isn’t necessarily the case with Ella Fitzgerald. Hers was a different kind of career really. With Sinatra, it was almost more about him in a way than the songs. With her, she was serving the song.”

Although Dankworth may have had free rein to choose pretty much any standards she fancied – since Fitzgerald undoubtedly recorded them all – she did have to include two which are strongly associated with the legendary singer: Every Time We Say Goodbye (“though it was only a hit here – not in the States”) and How High the Moon, which became a Fitzgerald party piece due to her downright dazzling scat solo.

When it’s put to her that the other Ella’s with whom Todd Gordon has worked might have shied away from the mind-blowing acrobatics of Fitzgerald’s How High the Moon solo, Dankworth laughs and says: “It took me a long time to learn that solo. It feels easy now but when I first started learning it I thought how am I ever going to do this?! I learned it for Todd.”

Strangely, although Dankworth never met or heard Fitzgerald live (the teenage Todd Gordon did,  though, at the Usher Hall in the 1970s) she can boast of having spent an evening in the company of Gordon’s concert alter ego, Frank Sinatra. It was 1984, and Dankworth had recently graduated from Guildhall’s drama department.

She recalls: “I was on a 73 bus and as it passed the Albert Hall, I saw mum’s name because she was opening for Sinatra. I decided I should go and see her. They were all going out for a meal afterwards, and she said: ‘I’ll ask Frank if I can bring you along.’ So she rang his dressing room, and he said it was fine. I said: ‘Mum, I’d love to come but .. ..look at me!’ I was wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.”

“Mum said: ‘Look, grab some earrings and we’ll get you jouged up a bit.’ So I sat looking slightly bedraggled on this table with the owners of all the casinos in Monte Carlo and the guy who was responsible for bringing Liza Minnelli over to Britain, plus this songwriter who’d had a big hit in the 1960s – I can’t remember his name. They were wearing their Versace and I was in a T-shirt and denims. It was a mad night.” And that was even before the songwriter made the Frank faux pas of bringing up the subject of a Mafia murder which was in the news. Dankworth remembers freezing in her seat. “I thought ‘oh God, get me out of here’. It was the longest three seconds of my life.”

A much more pleasant memory is that of Sinatra’s performance earlier that evening. “His presence onstage was astounding,” she says. “He sang every lyric as though he meant it – especially Ol’ Man River, which would normally be a bit odd, but he made it work. He made me cry..” And did she get to talk to him? “Well, not really. I just shook hands and said it was a pleasure to meet him.”

At that stage in her life, Dankworth had not yet even begun to try to make her mark as a singer; acting was her passion and for 15 years she made her living as a jobbing actress, having first discovered her flair for drama while at boarding school. Her musical gifts first revealed themselves during her schooldays too – and she played violin, flute and sang. “The music teacher thought I was talented. He wrote these incredibly difficult musicals and my mum remembers feeling gob-smacked when they came to hear me sing in these musicals because it was really difficult music, and I was nine or ten.”

It was only in her thirties that the naturally shy Dankworth began to focus on singing. “My passion was acting and it was when I met my first husband and he said ‘Let’s form a band’ that I got into doing more music, but when I started singing a lot I found it very difficult. It was easier when I was acting as I had to be someone else.  In fact, I remember having this conversation with Paloma Faith once and I asked her how she was able to be so outrageous onstage. She said: ‘Jacqui, I’m so shy, if I were just me up there everyone would feel shy and embarrassed’ so in a way she has a persona that gets her through. She’s approaching her stage persona in the way an actor would approach a part – and I identify with that.”

* The Frank & Ella Show/Todd Gordon & Jacqui Dankworth is at the City Halls on Friday. Visit www.jazzfest.co.uk for details and ticket links, or call 0141 353 8000.

* First published in Scotland on Sunday on June 22nd

CD Recommendations – April 2012

Billie Holiday: The Complete Masters 1933-1959 (Universal)

As somebody who already owns everything by her favourite singer – but scattered across box sets, single CDs and LPs – I am thrilled with this exquisitely presented limited edition collection of all the master takes from her vast and varied career. It’s a shame not to have some of the best alternative takes, but great to not have two versions of the same tune back to back. And to be able to hear her go from radiant, ebullient, teens-to-twentysomething Billie on her joyful 1930s small group recordings, right through to her worn-out, but utterly compelling and sumptuous final (with strings) album, is a privilege and a treat.

Derek Nash Acoustic Quartet: Joyriding (Jazzizit Records)

British saxophonist Derek Nash’s first CD with his regular trio is a fresh, funky and engaging affair which features an imaginative selection of tunes, most of them originals by Nash himself but also such stand-outs as the Ennio Morricone’s unjustly neglected Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso and a Gerry Mulligan-inspired take on Jerome Kern’s All The Things You Are. Nash is a lovely, melodic player who has a terrific rapport with his trio, particularly with the ever-elegant pianist David Newton.

Ruby Braff: Three Classic Albums Plus (Avid Jazz)

Wow. This is one of the best of these Avid two-CD sets that I’ve heard. The great trumpeter Ruby Braff was in his early thirties when these four late-1950s LPs were recorded – and his playing is sensational, as is the company he keeps (Roy Eldridge, Bud Freeman, Freddie Green, Hank Jones – on vibes! – etc). In fact, it’s difficult to get past the first album, Hi-Fi Salute to Bunny, which finds him alongside the legendary clarinettist Pee Wee Russell and is an absolute gem, featuring a string of unforgettable, downright sexy takes on such evergreens as I’m Coming Virginia.

Bucky Pizzarelli: Challis in Wonderland (Arbors Records)

The octogenarian US guitarist Pizzarelli is still playing as superbly as ever. On this new CD, he pays homage to both the legendary Bix Beiderbecke and Bill Challis, the arranger who ensured that Beiderbecke’s masterful piano compositions were transcribed and saved for posterity. All four of those feature here (played on guitar, of course), alongside some other Bixian numbers and tunes of his era – plus Pizzarelli’s own title composition. He’s joined by his son and fellow guitarist John, and a string quartet featuring the violin whiz Aaron Weinstein. Delightful stuff.

Nigel Clark: Under the Stars (Circular Records)

While some solo guitar players seem to sap the life out of their material by picking it apart, stretching it out and extemporising ad infinitum, Glasgow-based guitar star Clark brings colour, energy and lyricism to whatever he plays – as effectively as if a whole band was performing. On the 16 eclectic tracks included on this, his first, solo album, his classy taste and love of (and respect for) a beautiful melody shine through – among the highlights are numbers by Jerome Kern, Carlos Santana, Antonio Carlos Jobim and a trio of original tunes.

Ella Fitzgerald: The Complete Masters 1935-1955 (Universal)

The Ella Fitzgerald set in this superb new series of limited edition box sets may not – as the Billie Holiday one did – cover her entire career, but it takes in some of her finest work, notably this reviewer’s favourite Fitzgerald recordings, the duos with elegant pianist Ellis Larkins in 1950 (her first Gershwin songbook) and 1954. The 14 discs span the dynamic singer’s output from her coquettish debut with Chick Webb through to the 1950s when she exuded a downright regal quality on her ballads.

Charlie Parker: The Complete Masters 1941-1954 (Universal)

As with the other box sets in this limited edition series, this 11-disc collection is a must-have for anyone interested in the subject; this time, the legendary bebop pioneer and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. It traces his evolution – and that of bop – from his Kansas City beginnings in the mid-1940s with Jay McShann’s blues ‘n’ boogie-style band through to his sporadic final recordings before his untimely 1954 death (aged 35). Highlights include his electrifying encounters with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk and his masterful strings albums.

Sidney Bechet: The Complete American Masters 1931-1953 (Universal)

The legendary New Orleans-born clarinettist and soprano saxophonist is the subject of the fourth and final of the superb new limited edition box sets from Universal. This collection isn’t comprehensive –  the recordings he made after settling in France in June 1950 aren’t included (so Midnight in Paris fans won’t find Si Tu Vois Ma Mere) – but it is an impressive 14-disc set nevertheless and spans his career from 1923 (though he first recorded in 1921) to 1950, by which time he was being feted by the younger generation.

Long Live The Queen!

Maxine Sullivan is one of my very favourite singers (as well as something of an honorary fellow Scot) – so I couldn’t let her centenary this month go by without taking the opportunity to write about her. Unfortunately, I was too young – but only just! – to have heard her sing live (she died in 1987, which is just when I was first listening to jazz), but I’m lucky enough to now know many of her colleagues. And none of them has anything but the highest praise for her, both as a singer and as a human being.  She is definitely a lady whose life and career are worth celebrating.

Maxine was born Marietta Williams on May 13, 1911 in Homestead, Pennsylvannia. She began singing as a child and went on to perform regularly in and around Pittsburgh. “Discovered” by Gladys Mosier, the pianist in Ina Ray Hutton’s all-girl band, she moved to New York in 1937 and was introduced to bandleader Claude Thornhill.

According to Will Friedwald, who writes about Maxine in his book Jazz Singing, “Thornhill’s ideas as to how to use her voice were to soon do as much for his career as they would for Sullivan, and he concentrated on a gimmick that Sullivan had already been using for years. Thornhill matched Sullivan’s ‘suave, sophisticated swing’ with material from way out of the Afro-Jewish jazz and Tin Pan Alley lexicon, from Anglo-European folk sources, which paid off in the Sullivan-Thornhill hit ‘Loch Lomond’.”

Loch Lomond was an international hit, and, as she later said, it put Maxine on the map. She was very clearly a class act, with her cool voice and unfussy, natural, gentle swinging style, and although she recorded a string of traditional folk songs and standards, she was forevermore known as the Loch Lomond Girl – not that everyone approved of the liberties being taken with song: one American radio station manager banned it, deeming it “sacrilegious”.

In 1938, she  sang the song in the Dick Powell movie Going Places which also starred Louis Armstrong – pictured here with Maxine and songwriter Johnny Mercer who penned the lyrics for the Harry Warren tunes featured in the film. (See clip of Mutiny in the Nursery at the end of this article.) Ella Fitzgerald later went on record saying that she had the idea of swinging the nursery rhyme A-Tisket A-Tasket from Maxine’s success with swinging the classics.

In 1939, Maxine appeared in the movie St Louis Blues, singing the title number while Dorothy Lamour got all the new songs. Maxine, however, managed to record one of Dottie’s songs – Hoagy Carmichael’s Kinda Lonesome – before the film was released.

In 1939, Maxine and Louis Armstrong were reunited – as Bottom and Titania, no less (see pic below) – for the ill-fated, but intriguing-sounding, Broadway extravaganza Swingin’ the Dream, the swing version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which brought together the creme de la creme of the jazz world. It wasn’t Maxine’s first foray into Shakespeare territory – she had already recorded swing versions of It Was a Lover and His Lass and Under the Greenwood Tree – and it wouldn’t be her last, as she revisited the bard’s sonnets three decades later in the delightful company of pianist, composer and arranger extraordinaire Dick Hyman.

Despite the fact that Swingin’ the Dream was a spectacular flop, Maxine’s career continued to blossom into the early 1940s when she and her husband, the bass player/small group leader John Kirby, became the first black stars to have their own radio show, Flow Gently Sweet Rhythm.

The show ended in 1942, not long after Kirby and Maxine divorced. During the 1940s, Maxine continued to be a major draw at nightclubs the length of 52nd Street. She came to Britain in 1948 – a visit which was documented by an American news magazine – and took a weekend out of her schedule to sing Loch Lomond on its “bonnie bonnie banks”. She didn’t perform – officially – in Scotland during that trip but I’ve found some lovely photos of her collecting water from the famous loch, and entertaining a crowd at the water’s edge, in the local press here in Glasgow. (She came back and toured Scotland in 1954.)

The 1950s were tougher for Maxine, partly because the jazz scene was changing and she was still regarded as a swing singer, and partly because she didn’t get the publicity for her shows from the radio stations, as she had in the past. She later said: “It was like walking uphill with the brakes on.” So, in 1958, she decided to stop performing and concentrate on her family and the community affairs in which she enjoyed an active role. By now married to pianist Cliff Jackson, she trained as a nurse, served as the president of her children’s PTA, and – in her neighbourhood of the Bronx – established The House That Jazz Built, where she rented rooms to musicians, provided space for local arts groups and organised workshops and concerts.

The retirement didn’t last long – and Maxine was back in the recording studio in the late 1960s when she embarked on what would turn out to be the arguably most productive and prolific comeback in jazz history. Working with such master arranger/players as Bob Wilber and Dick Hyman (with whom she had already collaborated on a classic album of Andy Razaf songs), she won over a new generation of fans with such superb albums as Close as Pages in a Book and The Music of Hoagy Carmichael (both with Wilber). With Hyman, she revisited the sonnets of Shakespeare for the cultish album Sullivan-Shakespeare-Hyman, a lesser-known gem in her recorded output.

By now promoted to jazz royalty and nicknamed “The Queen”, Maxine toured and recorded extensively during the 1970s and 1980s, notably with the Scott Hamilton Quintet. Her rate of recording seems to have accelerated in her final years when she produced five LPs with a Swedish group headed by trumpeter Bent Persson; worked her way through a raft of definitive songbooks of such favourites of the jazz world as Burton Lane and Jule Styne, with small bands under the direction of the pianist/arranger Keith Ingham, and produced the fabulous Uptown with the Scott Hamilton Quintet (featuring the wonderful John Bunch on piano). Lyricists loved her because she paid such great attention to their words, and usually sang the rarely-performed verses. And musicians loved her too.

Dick Hyman told me a few years ago: “I’ve always thought that she was maybe my favourite singer of all to have accompanied. Why? Because she was so musical. She responded to anything that she heard. It wasn’t just a matter of your following her; she would follow you too – so from the point of view of jazz, it was a very mutual kind of situation.

“As a person, she was laidback and easy to get along with. She was small-ish and perfectly self-possessed, and could take charge of a musical situation with her delicate way of singing – quite the opposite of someone who shouts the blues or rants and raves. She was very controlled, very delicate and feminine in what she sang. And she swung.”

Like many of the musicians Maxine worked with, Hyman stressed the fact that “she was one of the boys”. He added: “She was perfectly feminine but she fit right in with us – and really we thought of her as another musician because she was such a good time-keeper and knew how to relate to what we were doing.” I think the fact that she is the only female vocalist (and one of only three women) in Art Kane’s iconic Great Day in Harlem photograph (a snippet of which is shown above) illustrates the fact that she was regarded as a musician rather than a girl-singer.

Continuing the one-of-the-boys theme, Warren Vache recently told me that when he was 25, he was drunk under the table by Maxine, who – it seems – was very fond of her whisky. And, according to Vache, anyone else’s that was lying around …  Despite the fact that she was an old lady when he knew her, Vache still refers to her as “a great gal” – and certainly the age difference between her and such younger musicians as Scott Hamilton and Phil Flanigan, who played bass in Hamilton’s quintet, didn’t seem to matter one iota.

Flanigan told me: “What I remember about Maxine is the ease of working with her and travelling with her. It was all pleasantness. The idea of a generational divide never occurred to any of us. I loved her singing style which was as straight and true to the composer’s intention as you could imagine but yet she did her own thing. She had a complete lack of affectation – which I loved about her. Some singers float on top of the rhythm section without sustaining any time. Maxine was an absolute genius at that but she could nail the time in such a way that it was a pleasure for a rhythm section to play with her. She was a musician of the voice, and a pleasure for other musicians to work with.”

Maxine Sullivan died on April 7, 1987, just months after returning from her last visit to Japan – where she was the darling of the jazz scene – with Scott Hamilton’s Quintet. And the last song she sang onstage (and recorded – as the concert was filmed)? You’ve guessed it: Loch Lomond.

(c) Alison Kerr

Jazz on Film: Jazz ‘n’ Gin – The Speakeasy Scene

I’ve been reading a brilliant biography of the original Public Enemy No. 1 – gangster “Scarface” Al Capone and it has revived my fascination with the Roaring Twenties, when jazz thrived in the illegal drinking dens operated by hoodlums.

Of course, my earliest impressions of that period were formed by the movies, and particularly a couple of the jazz biopics which usually featured a scene set in a speakeasy. Here’s one of the first I remember seeing: Louis Armstrong and the All Stars with some special guests, in The Glenn Miller Story (1953)

Another family favourite was The Five Pennies (1959), the biopic of the trumpeter Loring “Red” Nichols. A little Danny Kaye goes a long way but he was on top form on the songs in this film, notably When The Saints Go Marching In, a memorable duet with Louis Armstrong. The speakeasy scene in this movie came near the beginning, when hick-from-the-sticks Nichols, whose new, cool girlfriend doubts his hot trumpet skills, reveals all as he emerges from the men’s room… Sounds dodgy on paper, but make up your own mind .. oh, and that’s Nichols ghosting Kaye’s playing.

Of course, the speakeasy scene cropped up in many movies set during the 1920s – remember the opening sequence of Billy Wilder’s masterful black comedy Some Like It Hot (1959)?  Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955) – a drama about a jazz trumpeter who runs into problems with the mobsters  – featured some of the best speakeasy jazz – and no wonder: it had two top jazz singers in its cast:

and

Undoubtedly the most authentic evocations of the speakeasy come from the Prohibition era itself and that authentic touch adds immeasurably to the already considerable appeal of this last clip: the “soundie” of Bessie Smith’s majestic St Louis Blues, from 1929.

* Get Capone by Jonathan Eig (JR Books) is out now.

Herman Leonard

The great photographer Herman Leonard died on August 14. Here’s a piece I wrote about him, when I did a phone interview with him in 2005 on the occasion of the publication of his book Jazz, Giants, and Journeys – The Photography of Herman Leonard (Scala). He was a delightful and very gracious man.

He may have lived in seven different countries, worked with the world’s most beautiful models and photographed far-flung places and people, but the constant throughout the long career of photographer Herman Leonard has been his passion for jazz. His portraits of such jazz greats as Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington are regarded as the definitive images of these stars, and his archive is a veritable Who’s Who of jazz history.

Now, at the age of 83, Leonard’s work is being celebrated in a new book, Jazz, Giants, and Journeys – The Photography of Herman Leonard. It very nearly didn’t happen, though: 10,000 of his prints were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and it was only because Leonard took the precaution of storing his negatives in a vault in a New Orleans museum that this unique archive survives.

For Leonard, the music came second only to the pictures: his first love was undoubtedly photography. The chatty octogenarian chortles as he recalls how his passion was initially stirred. “My older brother was interested in photography and had taken some figure studies of his wife which I came across in the tray in his little darkroom. I was eight or nine years old and had never even imagined anything like these pictures! The only nude women I’d seen were Greek statues. But I saw his photos and I thought – this is the way I gotta go…”

When Leonard set up his first studio in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1948, he was a fully-fledged jazz fan. Luckily for him, it was at a time when the scene was thriving – though there was, as he points out, “no living to be made in jazz photography.” By day, Leonard worked for magazines and shot advertising campaigns, but at night he was to be found on 52nd Street, the birthplace of bebop. “I loved the music and became enchanted with the whole atmosphere of the nightclubs,” he says. “I wanted to make a visual diary of these musical moments, just strictly for my own self.”

Leonard would trade his photos for admission into the clubs, and soon became a fixture in front of the bandstands in the Royal Roost, the Downbeat and Birdland. “I was very fortunate. The club owners let me come in in the afternoon to set my lights up.” His unforgettable, black and white photographs of the young turks of the scene – Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon etc – are thrillingly evocative and undoubtedly helped jazz earn its “cool” status. Leonard was the same age as many of the musicians he was photographing, and he quickly became “one of the guys”.

Among his early work, one of his best-known photographs was a still life of the melancholy tenor saxophonist Lester Young’s sax case and iconic pork pie hat, surrounded by the swirls of cigarette smoke which were ubiquitous in Leonard’s club pictures. It’s one of Leonard’s favourite photos, because it sums up the character, and yet – incredibly – it was completely un-posed.

Another of Leonard’s early sessions was with the singer who was Young’s musical soulmate – Billie Holiday. He recalls it vividly. “The first time I worked with her was 1949 and she had just come out of jail. She was healthy and rested and off the drugs. She was charming, she was welcoming. I was with a reporter, and when we got to her modest Harlem apartment, she was wearing an apron and she’d been cooking a steak for her dog.

“The last time I photographed her was at a recording session for Norman Granz in ’55. When she walked in, she looked so terrible – haggard and drawn, just horrible – that I turned to Norman and said: ‘I can’t shoot this. You can’t use these pictures on your cover.’ He said: ‘You get your ass out there and shoot. You may not have another chance.’ Which turned out to be the case.

“I have a lot of pictures from that session that I’ll never show anybody because she just looks awful, and that isn’t the way I was brought up in photography. My mentor, Yousuf Karsh, told me:  ‘Herman, always tell the truth but in terms of beauty’. I loved Billie so much that I wouldn’t dare show these very sad pictures. But I did manage to get four or five images at that last session that I do show.”

One of these is of her shoes. “I particularly like that shot. You know, she had a tragic life – always being taken advantage of and abused by the men and so on. She lived her life in chains, and here she is in a pair of shoes with chains around her ankles. That to me is symbolic.”

Another favourite subject and singer was Ella Fitzgerald, whom Leonard photographed in the States and in Paris, where he lived for over a decade from 1956. Fitzgerald came to Paris with the producer and impresario Norman Granz (who owned Verve Records).

Leonard has very fond memories of Granz. “Norman did so much for jazz and so much for the musicians. He always did everything first class. He flew them first class, he put them in first class hotels – everything. There were occasions when he would come with black musicians and they wouldn’t be accepted, and Norman would say: ‘Either you keep us together – you don’t segregate us – or we won’t do the gig.’ ”

Just as Leonard was in the right place at the right time being in New York as bop blossomed, so he was perfectly placed in Paris for catching up with the superstars of jazz when they flew in for concerts. As often as not, it was with Leonard that they hung out at the Club St Germain after their show, or at the cosmopolitan Brasserie Lipp when they needed a late supper. The amenable photographer recalls snapping the majestic alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges there – “a sweet man” – and taking advantage of the kitchen’s late opening to dine on pastrami and coleslaw with him and other hungry American musicians.

One of Leonard’s favourite stars was Louis Armstrong. “Louis was fabulous. He was a show. He was always gagging around, having fun – just like the personality you see in his films. That’s why there’s one particular picture that I have of him which is out of the ordinary. He looks melancholy, but he was actually just thoughtful in that picture. He was backstage, and I was behind some curtains. I looked through and saw him sitting there like that so I poked my camera through and took a shot. He heard the click and he looked over at me and winked. I like that shot because it shows a different aspect of Louis.”

So who was the biggest thrill to meet? Leonard becomes very thoughtful, and his assistant suggests some names. Miles? “No, with Miles, I gravitated into his acquaintance gradually.” Louis? “No, because Louis was so open. I think it was Duke Ellington – wow, that was the biggest thrill: I was in the presence of the Duke, the elegant Ellington. He was a masterful guy and he was extremely sweet to me and accommodating. I was most impressed by that. He was hounded by everybody and you know when you hang around these big stars and you see what they have to go through, you can understand that they back away.

“For instance, I’m also, happily, a very close friend of Tony Bennett’s. I’m hanging out with him, we’re walking down the street, he has no entourage, nothing like that and people come up to him, and he stops and smiles and .. I say: ‘Doesn’t this all kind of bother you after a while?’ He says: ‘Look, these people are wonderful.. ‘ and he goes on like that. Ellington was like that too. A gentleman, a total, total gentleman.”

One of Leonard’s very favourite pictures is a rear view of Frank Sinatra. “I like it because it’s undeniably Sinatra – the body language, the feel of the smoke from the cigarette, and the simplicity of the picture. There’s nothing complicated about it, but to me it tells the story of Sinatra.

“In fact, I was taken out to his domain in Palm Springs by Quincy Jones one day, years ago. I had brought that particular print with me. I showed it to him and he hesitated and said: ‘Monte Carlo, 1958’. My jaw fell to the floor. At that point, somebody called him and he walked away. I turned to Quincy, and said: ‘How did he do that?’ . He said: ‘I don’t know, this guy is weird’. That’s a true story. He was wonderful. He was probably the one musician that I was in awe of. I didn’t engage him in long conversations as I would with the others. I just stood back there and watched and listened because I loved what he did. Sinatra was, to me, the greatest singer of all time.”

So, any regrets? Didn’t the camera sometimes get in the way of enjoying the music? “Absolutely,” nods Leonard. “People ask me: ‘What were they playing when you took that picture?’ I have no idea. I was thinking about the focusing and the angle and the exposure and all that kind of thing. I missed a lot of music because I was concentrating on the shot. But I don’t feel I missed out on the experience. The thrill of being there was enough for me.”

* Visit www.bbc.co.uk for a lovely tribute to Herman Leonard, with pictures and music.