SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
VOLUME TWO NUMBER TWO
NINA SIMONE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
VOLUME TWO NUMBER TWO
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
NAT KING COLE
January 2-8
ETTA JAMES
January 9-15
JACKIE MCLEAN
January 16-22
TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON
January 23-29
NANCY WILSON
January 30-February 5
BOB MARLEY
February 6-12
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
February 13-19
HORACE SILVER
February 20-26
SHIRLEY HORN
February 27-March 4
T-BONE WALKER
March 5-11
HOWLIN’ WOLF
March 12-18
DIANNE REEVES
March 19-25
SHIRLEY HORN
(1934-2005)
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
A superior ballad singer and a talented pianist, Shirley Horn
put off potential success until finally becoming a major attraction
while in her fifties. She studied piano from the age of four. After
attending Howard University, Horn put together her first trio in 1954, and was encouraged in the early '60s by Miles Davis and Quincy Jones.
She recorded three albums during 1963-1965 for Mercury and
ABC/Paramount, but chose to stick around Washington, D.C., and raise a
family instead of pursuing her career. In the early '80s, she began
recording for SteepleChase, but Shirley Horn
really had her breakthrough in 1987 when she started making records for
Verve, an association that continued on records like 1998's I Remember Miles and 2001's You're My Thrill.
Along the way she picked up many prestigious honors including seven
Grammy nominations (and one win for Best Jazz Vocal Album with I Remember Miles),
a 1996 induction into the Lionel Hampton Jazz Hall of Fame and France's
the Academie Du Jazz's Prix Billie Holiday for her 1990 album Close Enough for Love. In 2001 Horn's
health began to fail (she had her left foot amputated due to diabetes)
and while it affected her piano playing, she continued to perform
sporadically and recorded one final album for Verve, 2003's May the Music Never End. Horn passed away on October 20, 2005, due to complications from diabetes.
http://www.vervemusicgroup.com/shirleyhorn/
Biography
When Shirley Horn sings a song, she changes the way we hear it forever. Widely regarded as the premiere singing pianist in jazz since Nat "King" Cole, Horn applies her unique alchemy to eleven classic and contemporary songs on You're My Thrill, her eleventh recording for Verve. This album also reunites Horn with Johnny Mandel, who produced and orchestrated Horn's Here's to Life (1992), her best-selling and most popular album to date.
Renowned for her inimitable ability to negotiate melodies and lyrics at an exquisitely unhurried pace, Horn opens her new album with a breathless version of the title track, and follows that lead with equally heart-stopping ballad performances that include "I Got Lost in His Arms," "My Heart Stood Still," "The Very Thought of You," and "All Night Long." A stand-out track is her reading of "Solitary Moon," a Mandel composition never before recorded with the lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Johnny Mandel's lush orchestration complements her voice perfectly on these tracks. While You're My Thrill reconfirms her status as a romantic chanteuse without peer, it also showcases Horn's often overlooked prowess as a straight-ahead swinger as she steps out with her trio on uptempo and blues numbers including "The Best Is Yet To Come," "Sharing the Night With the Blues," "The Rules of the Road," "You Better Love Me," and "Why Don't You Do Right." The combination of these trio tunes and the full orchestra tracks makes You're My Thrill a wonderfully varied collection.
As she has been for the past two decades, Horn is accompanied on You're My Thrill by bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams. "We've been together for about twenty-eight and eighteen years, resepectively," she says. "They know which way I'm going to turn. When the mood is really there and we get into it, it seems like we can feel each other. I remember the concert we did at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1992 for the I Love You, Paris album," Horn continues. "The music was so strong and we were so together, we all got goose pimples. We went back in the dressing room and we were so full of music, there were no words, we just hugged."
"Most of these are songs I grew up with," says Horn, who still lives in her native Washington, D.C. "My family loved music and there was always music around from the greatest singers and bands. Usually, I just learned the songs my mother used to sing around the home. I would ask her, 'What's the name of this one, what's the name of that one?' because I'd have the melody in my mind. I remember hearing Peggy Lee singing 'Why Don't You Do Right.' In fact, probably 75 percent of the songs I do are ones I heard at home."
But Horn did not set out to be a singer. "It was an accident," she explains. "What I remember first in my life is playing the piano. That's when I was four years old. I'd go to my grandmother's home. She had a parlor with a great big piano. The parlor was for company, and it was closed off with French doors. It was always cold, but I didn't want to do anything but just go in there and sit on the piano stool. I wasn't interested in playing with the kids outside. After several years of this my grandmother told my mother to get me lessons."
Horn discovered the allure of her singing when, at seventeen, she was playing in a local restaurant/night club. "One night close to Christmas, this older gentleman who would regularly come in for dinner came with a teddy bear as tall as I. Somehow I knew that was for me," she recalls. Indeed, the patron sent her a note saying "If you sing 'Melancholy Baby' the teddy bear is yours." "I was very shy and it was hard for me to sing," Horn says, "but I wanted that teddy bear."
Audiences continued to ask for songs and Horn eased into her role as a vocalist. "It was no big thing, but then I started to realize how much I loved to sing." One of her most requested tunes was "You're My Thrill." The song stayed in Horn's repertoire for more than twenty years whenever she played the One Step Down, which she remembers as "the best little jazz joint" in D.C. "Joe, the owner, would say 'you've got to record that song'," she remembers, "and I said 'I'm going do it once I've made up my mind.'"
Although content to stay at home, Horn was coaxed away to New York City in 1960 by Miles Davis. Notoriously disdainful of singers, Davis had been seduced by Horn's debut recording, Embers and Ashes. He invited her to open for him at the Village Vanguard, catapulting her into a limelight she had never sought. After Horn retreated from view for much of the 1970s and 1980s to raise her daughter, she found her fame blossoming anew after her 1987 signing to Verve. In 1990, not long before his death in 1991, Davis added his graceful trumpet phrases to the title track of Horn's You Won't Forget Me. In 1998, Horn paid tribute to her mentor with the brilliant I Remember Miles, for which she won the GRAMMY award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. All in all, Horn has garnered seven consecutive GRAMMY nominations, and her albums Here's to Life, Light Out of Darkness (A Tribute to Ray Charles), and I Love You, Paris all soared to number one on the Billboard jazz charts.
What Davis, Quincy Jones, and others heard as early as 1960 has been affirmed over the years by numerous awards and recognitions. In addition to her GRAMMY award and nominations, Horn has won five WAMMYs, the Washington area's music industry award. In 1987, she was presented the Mayor's Arts Award for "Excellence in an Artistic Discipline" in Washington, DC. In 1990 Horn's Close Enough for Love album won one of France's premiere music awards, the Academie Du Jazz's Prix Billie Holiday. In 1993, she added the prestigious Edison Populair HR57 Award for Here's to Life to her stunning list of honors. Three years later, Horn was elected to the Lionel Hampton Jazz Hall of Fame. In 1998, Marilyn Bergman, President of ASCAP honored Horn "in recognition of over four decades of her unique and influential role in interpreting the American song," and in 1999, Horn was selected as the recipient of the Phineas Newborn, Jr. Award, with an all-star tribute concert in her honor. Most recently, she was voted #1 female vocalist in the New York Jazz Critics Awards and #1 jazz vocalist in DownBeat's Critics' Poll.
Inviting listeners into an elegant and sincere musical embrace, You're My Thrill is the latest stunning result of Shirley Horn's singular ability to connect with her collaborators, her material, and her audience at the most heartfelt level.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/arts/music/shirley-horn-jazz-singer-and-pianist-is-dead-at-71.html?_r=0
Music
Shirley Horn, Jazz Singer and Pianist, Is Dead at 71
by BEN RATLIFF
October 22, 2005
New York Times
Shirley Horn, a jazz singer and pianist who drew audiences close with a powerfully confidential, vibratoless delivery, died yesterday at a nursing home in Cheverly, Md. She was 71. Her death was announced by Regina Joskow, vice president of publicity at the Verve Music Group, Ms. Horn's label.
Ms. Horn was a unique singer, with one of the slowest deliveries in jazz and a very unusual way of phrasing, putting stress on certain words and letting others slip away. She cherished her repertory, making audiences feel that she was cutting through to the stark truths of songs like "Here's to Life" and "You Won't Forget Me." She wanted things just so: she stuck with her drummer, Steve Williams, for 23 years, and her bassist, Charles Ables -- who died in 2002 -- for 33.
She lived all her life in and around Washington, often performing close to home to be near her family. But over the last two decades she enjoyed a quietly expanding revival of the concert and club career she had begun in the 1950's, and she became a star in the jazz world.
When she was 4, her mother had her start piano lessons. In her teens she won a scholarship to Juilliard, but it was decided that living in New York would cost the family too much money; she studied classical music at Howard University in Washington instead.
She recalled that at 17, while she was playing classical music at a restaurant in Washington, a man appeared in front of her with a four-foot-tall turquoise teddy bear. "If you sing 'Melancholy Baby,"' he said, "I'll give you this bear." She did, and he did.
At the time Ms. Horn was shy and largely focused on classical music, but she often cited this as the moment when it dawned on her that if she overcame her reluctance to sing and to play jazz in public, she might be able to make a living at it. About her transition from classical to jazz, she liked to say: "I loved Rachmaninoff, but then Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninoff. And Ahmad Jamal became my Debussy."
From 1954, she led her own jazz trio in Washington. In 1960 she recorded her first album, "Embers and Ashes," for a small label called Stere-o-Craft. It was not widely heard, but Miles Davis heard it, and a year later he tracked down her telephone number in Washington and invited her to open for him at the Village Vanguard in New York. That exposure, plus the help of the jazz agent and manager John Levy, helped get her a contract with Mercury Records.
Mercury signed Ms. Horn as a singer, not a singer-pianist. Although some of the great piano-playing accompanists, including Hank Jones and Jimmy Jones, were hired to play on her records, and although "Loads of Love," from 1962, showcased her voice well -- she could sound like a quieter, subtler version of Dinah Washington -- the situation made her uncomfortable.
By the mid-1960's she had stopped touring and decided to restrict her performing to the Washington and Baltimore areas so she could spend more time at home raising her daughter, Rainy. From 1963 to 1978 she made only two records -- "Travelin' Light" for ABC-Paramount and "Where Are You Going?" for Perception. From 1978 to 1984, she recorded for the Danish label Steeplechase and slowly came back into the awareness of jazz fans.
In 1982, she played her first New York performance in more than 15 years, at Michael's Pub, and in 1986 she was signed by Verve. The company built up her career all over again over the course of 11 albums, including "You Won't Forget Me" (1990), which featured guest appearances by Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis; "I Remember Miles" (1998), which won a Grammy Award; and a few that featured string sections.
Ms. Horn's survivors include her husband, Sheppard Deering, of Upper Marlboro, Md.; her daughter, Rainy Smith, of Maryland; and several grandchildren.
Ms. Horn had been fighting breast cancer for some time when complications of diabetes led to the amputation of her right foot in 2002. For a few years she performed sitting in a chair and facing the audience directly, away from the piano, which was played by George Mesterhazy. But in her final performances in New York, a two-week stretch at Le Jazz Au Bar that started last Dec. 30, she was back at the piano again, with the help of a prosthetic device that helped her to use the instrument's sustain pedal.
Three of those performances will be released in October on a Verve anthology of her work, "But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102102057.html
Appreciation
The Innate Tempo Of Shirley Horn
Shirley Horn (with bassist Ed Howard) rehearsing in her Upper Marlboro home last December for a Kennedy Center concert in her honor. (By Dudley M. Brooks -- The Washington Post)
by Richard Harrington
Washington Post
October 22, 2005
No one mined the depths of a lyric the way Shirley Horn did, with a whispery voice that conjured cashmere and cognac. You could lose yourself -- you couldn't not lose yourself -- as the lifelong Washingtonian's dusky alto crawled unhurriedly through time-tested standards and rediscovered treasures, tapestries of song embroidered with her own crisp chords and subtly spun piano filigrees.
Horn's trademark: exquisitely slow tempo and sensitively savored lyric, effortlessly melded. Heart and soul expressed at a piano bench.
Horn, who died Thursday night at 71 after a long illness, could swing a tune with the best of them, and often surprised fans when she did, but that approach simply didn't fit her temperament. Instead, Horn did ballads and cool, understated ruminations better than anyone except her first champion, mentor and lifelong friend, trumpeter Miles Davis. Both were masters of silence and anticipation, but even Davis teased Horn about her pacing. "You do 'em awful slow!" he once said.
Indicating the level of respect Davis had for Horn, the legend, then ailing, accompanied her on the title track of the 1990 album "You Won't Forget Me," the first time he'd recorded with a vocalist in four decades, and Davis did so in the long-abandoned lyrical style he'd defined in the '50s, shortly before he first discovered her. The two were talking about collaborating on an all-ballad album when Davis died the following year. Horn won her only Grammy for 1998's "I Remember Miles," dedicated to Davis.
Another sign of respect came from the great pianist Ahmad Jamal, who accompanied Horn on her penultimate album, 2003's "May the Music Never End." Jamal, one of Horn's early inspirations and models, and himself a master of minimalism, had, in his 55 years of recording, never accompanied a vocalist. But for the first time in her career, Horn was unable to accompany herself on record, the result of losing her right foot to complications from diabetes. It was a significant change, denying Horn use of her piano's expression pedal for controlling the instrument's sustain and quiet features that so defined her sound.
The last few years had been rough on Horn, as she dealt with arthritis and underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer. In June Horn suffered a stroke and had been hospitalized since.
Several years earlier, Horn had been forced to abandon the security of her piano bench and rethink her approach after her voice and piano could no longer be intimate extensions of each other. Last December, just before a brief appearance at a Kennedy Center concert honoring her, Horn seemed weary but as quietly determined as ever, insisting: "I've tried to keep things as level as possible through this whole thing. I'm cool. I know what I have to do: I'm never going to give up the piano, I'm never going to stop singing till God says, 'I called your number.' "
Horn was at times reflective, at times wry, and on occasion caustic and cantankerous. She expressed frustration with the music business, particularly that such pianist-singers as Norah Jones and Diana Krall didn't acknowledge her as the influence she clearly heard herself to be. Motoring around her house in a wheelchair dubbed "the Cadillac" (the fancier "Jaguar" was reserved for concerts), Horn would proudly point to assorted honors, including last year's Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts. But she also seemed frustrated, reduced to performing only a concert or two a month, backed by pianist George Mesterhazy. "I can't get into the music," she said. "I just get lost."
In recent concerts, she managed to find both humor and pathos singing Paul McCartney's "Yesterday," lending multiple meanings to the line "I'm not half the girl I used to be."
So much about Shirley Horn was glacially slow, from her delivery of a song to the acclamation that came late in her career. You can't really make time stand still, but Horn managed an approximation, insisting that ballads were meant to be played slow, the better to understand the power of the story being told and the emotion of the lyric under exploration.
Horn started studying piano and composition at Howard University's School of Music when she was 12, with dreams of a career in classical music. But the realities of racism in the '40s precluded that possibility, and by the late '40s she'd become immersed in the thriving jazz scene around 14th and U streets NW. Debussy and Rachmaninoff gave way to Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Erroll Garner and Jamal. The girl piano player began to make an impression in local clubs, but even after forming her first trio in 1954, Horn was not one to advance herself.
In fact, that Horn came to sing at all was part accident -- a patron bribed her to sing "Melancholy Baby" -- and part pragmatism: A club owner gave Horn a raise on the condition that she keep singing.
That Miles Davis became a fan via Horn's 1960 debut album, "Embers and Ashes," was part miracle: few copies were manufactured and they were hard to find. Yet Davis managed to and became smitten, playing it so much at home that his kids could sing along to it. A year later, he invited Horn to open for him at the Village Vanguard, though that opportunity almost passed. When he called her and made the offer, Horn didn't believe it was really Davis. She hung up. But Davis sent her a train ticket to New York, and she went.
It could have been a breakthrough moment, but in the end, it was only a moment. Quincy Jones, who was in the opening-night crowd, would produce a pair of Horn albums in the early '60s but miscast her as a stand-up singer, denying her the comfort of accompanying herself in the trio format in which she was so adept. "Nobody knows how to play for me except me," she would complain. "I need to hear my own chords and set my own tempo."
Wider recognition didn't arrive until 1986, when she signed with Verve and began a string of critically acclaimed albums that garnered nine straight Grammy nominations.
Horn never pursued a career with the single-mindedness of such peers as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae or Betty Carter -- she simply wasn't as driven or hard-nosed or forceful. But Horn's records drew stellar guests, and she performed around the world as her health allowed. In the end, Shirley Horn's life was much like her song: She got as much music as possible out of every precious note, and in so doing made each note that much more precious.
Last December, looking back on her life, Horn suggested that she never had a choice in the matter: "I think when I was born, it's like God said, 'Music!,' and that was it. All my life, that's all I knew. It's in me, it's jammed up and it's got to come out."
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Shirley_Horn.aspx
Shirley Horn
Shirley Horn 1934–
Jazz singer, pianist
Played Piano in Grandma’s Chilly Parlor
Discovered by Miles Davis
Focused on Family, Carpentry, and Cooking
Stronger Than Ever
Honored Davis and Was Honored in Turn
Selected discography
Sources
“Songs are lucky when Shirley Horn chooses them,” wrote New York Times jazz critic John Parelis, according to www.npr.org. Horn started as a child playing the big, old piano in her grandmother’s parlor and grew to become a classically-trained pianist whom Miles Davis once called his favorite singer. According to Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, Horn possessed a “distinctive timbre and unhurried pace,” which, combined with her “subtle” work on the piano, “make for a singularly effective style.” After a two-decade break from the spotlight, Horn relaunched her career in 1988 and has remained successful since. Well into her sixties, Horn continues to tour and record music for the Verve record label. With 22 albums to her name, seven Grammy nominations, and a Grammy award, Horn maintained a tireless passion for her art, “I just want to get the music right,” she told Essence.
Played Piano in Grandma’s Chilly Parlor
Born on May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C., Horn remembered playing her grandmother’s piano when she was four years old. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was a government worker. Uninterested in playing with the neighborhood children, Horn wanted nothing than to play that piano, and would close herself off in her grandmother’s parlor, which was kept for guests and was chillier than the rest of the house. After several years of this, her mother, who admired classical music, enrolled the girl in piano lessons.
Horn was surrounded by music in her family, and admitted the majority of the songs in her repertoire are those she heard while she was growing up. She played with a choir, at Sunday school, and won a talent contest and 13-week radio engagement at age 13. Horn studied piano and composition at Howard University Junior School of Music, in Washington, from age 12 to age 18. She won a scholarship to Juilliard School of Music in New York City, but enrolled instead as a music major at Howard University, due to financial limitations.
At a Glance…
Born on May 1, 1934, in Washington, DC; married Shep Deering (a mechanic), c. 1955; children: Rainy. Education: Howard University Junior School of Music, studied composition, c. 1946–50; studied six years privately.
Career: Jazz vocalist and pianist. Performed in restaurants and nightclubs in Washington, DC, c. 1951; formed first jazz trio, 1954; released debut album, Embers and Ashes, 1959; performed throughout the DC-Baltimore, MD, area until 1980s; toured and recorded with jazz artists Miles Davis, Branford Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis, and Toots Thielemans, among others; performed in the United States and abroad at prestigious jazz venues; debuted in Paris, and at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1991.
Awards: Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline, Mayor of Washington, DC, 1987; Billie Holiday award, Academie Du Jazz, France, 1990; Edison Populair HR57 Award, for Here’s to Life, 1993; elected to Lionel Hampton Jail Hall of Fame, 1996; honored by the president of ASCAP, 1998; Grammy award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, for / Remember Miles, 1998; Phineas Newborn Jr. Award, 1999; five Wammy awards; voted Number One female vocalist, New York Jazz Critics Awards; Number One jazz vocalist,DownBeat Critics’ Poll.
Addresses: Record company —Verve Records, 1755 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Website— Official Verve Website, http://www.vervemusicgroup.com.
Horn, saying it was hers if she would only sing the classic “Melancholy Baby.” So the trained pianist was forced into singing. “I was very shy and it was hard for me to sing,” Horn said in her Verve biography, “but I wanted that teddy bear.” Horn realized she could earn more money as a vocalist, but continued to play piano and to develop her singing and playing skills, and formed her own trio in 1954. “[Horn] fuses voice and piano into a single expression,” lyricist and writer Joel Siegel told National Public Radio (NPR).
Discovered by Miles Davis
Her marriage at age 21 to Shep Deering, a mechanic, put a damper on her musical career, and Horn performed live only around Washington, and nearby Baltimore, Maryland areas. She released her first recording, Embers and Ashes, on the small Stereo-Craft record label in 1961. The album went mostly unnoticed, but caught the attention of legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, who tracked Horn down and invited her to New York to open for him at the Village Vanguard. Davis threw his weight around with the club’s owner to get the unknown Horn on the bill—he swore that he would not play if Horn was not allowed to perform. Davis drew a high-brow crowd to the shows, which included Charles Mingus, Sidney Poitier, and Lena Home, who all became lifelong fans of Horn’s.
Horn and Davis, known for his disdain for most vocalists, were drawn together by their very similar approach to music. Both artists “are recognized for their use of space—long silences between notes—to create a certain tension, particularly when doing ballads,” according to the NPR profile of Horn found online at www.npr.org. The style creates a kind of “suspense,” according to Siegel. Though the two diverged musically throughout the 1960s, Davis remained a close friend and mentor of Horn’s until his death in 1991.
Horn recorded Shirley Horn with Horns and Loads of Love with producer Quincy Jones for the Mercury record label. Mercury wanted Horn to focus on her vocal skills, and she had been signed as a vocalist, so a studio musician played piano on the recordings. The arrangement was not right for Horn, who would have preferred to play the music herself. If she had had more control, she also may have chosen slower arrangements of the songs than Jones did, a signature she developed in her later years.
Focused on Family, Carpentry, and Cooking
After her Mercury contract ran out in the early 1960s, Horn went into semi-retirement and retreated back to Washington, DC, to raise her daughter, Rainy. She continued to play live shows locally with her own trio, which included Charles Able on bass and Steve Williams on drums. Though she recorded a few albums during this time, including Travelin’ Light, A Lazy Afternoon, Violets for Your Furs, At Northsea, All Night Long, and Garden of the Blues, Horn remained out of the spotlight for the better part of 25 years. A dedicated wife, mother, and homemaker, Horn was a skilled handywoman and cook. “When I am not packing and unpacking my bags, I’m basically a homebody who is just as comfortable standing over a stove or hammering a nail as I am playing a piano,” she told DownBeat.
Horn experienced a tremendous surge in her career in the 1980s. In 1986, at the suggestion of producer Richard Seidel, the prestigious Verve record label signed Horn and her trio to a recording contract. Horn’s comeback with Verve was a live album, I Thought About You, recorded at the Vine St. Bar and Grill in Hollywood with Able and Williams and released in 1987.
The second phase of Horn’s career proved to be her most glorious. Close Enough for Love, Horn’s studio debut for Verve, was released in 1988 and officially marked Horn’s return to the jazz limelight. It did not take long for jazz fans to turn to Horn for her distinctive vocals and solid jazz skills on piano. Her audience grew quickly after these first two releases for Verve. Extensive touring in the United States and abroad at prestigious jazz venues consolidated her growing popularity, and Horn’s Paris and Carnegie Hall debuts, both in 1991, were proof that Horn was back and better than ever.
Stronger Than Ever
Almost thirty years after their first pairing, Horn and Miles Davis appeared together again on her 1990 Verve release, You Won’t Forget Me. Davis played trumpet alongside guests Wynton and Branford Marsalis. Horn then began working with arranger Johnny Mandel.
She trusted Mandel “implicitly” the first time she met him, according to liner notes from You’re My Thrill. The two worked together for the first time on 1991’s Here’s to Life, on which Mandel paired Horn with a string section and orchestra for the first time. Ables and Williams accompanied Horn again on the collection of mostly slow ballads that play off Horn’s instinct for improvisation and chord voicing. Mandel won a Best Arrangement Grammy award for his work on the recording.
A seasoned live performer, Horn was especially fond of European audiences. She recorded her album, I Love You, Paris, live in France at the famed Theatre du Chatelet. The audience proved particularly fond of Horn, as well. “They were so quiet that I was glad when someone coughed,” she told DownBeat, “because it let me know somebody was out there …. I am at a loss to explain this adoration and why I’m so popular.”
Billboard reported in 1995 that Horn was getting back to the old days of jazz to record an upcoming album, The Main Ingredient. Rather than record at a studio, Horn convinced Verve to let her do the work in her own home, in the spirit of the old jazz sessions, where musicians would drop by for informal jazz sessions and dinner parties that lasted through the night. Jazz players like Buck Hill and Steve Novosel were among those who showed up at Horn’s door for good food and good music, which was recorded by a Big Mo Studios’ mobile recording studio parked in her driveway. The group of Horn’s friends, old and new, recorded a blend of ballads and jumping, uptempo songs. On the mellow end were the Hal David/Burt Bacharach tune “The Look of Love,” a slowed version of Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” and the Melissa Manchester tearjerker “Come in From the Rain.” On the uptempo side, they captured Fats Waller’s “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now,” “Blues for Sarge,” and “All or Nothing at All.” The result was classic Horn, “once again succeeding admirably in giving favorite songs an easygoing beauty,” according to DownBeat.
Honored Davis and Was Honored in Turn
Horn was able to salute her friend and mentor, Miles Davis, on 1998’s I Remember Miles. “Full of real warmth and obvious admiration,” wrote critic Ralph Novak in People, “singer-pianist Horn’s latest album is more informed than the usual tribute.” Besides being personally close, the two musicians’ approaches to jazz were quite similar. “Horn’s minimalist affinities with Miles are so obvious,” wrote Paul de Barros in Down Beat, de Barros found it surprising she had not recording something like it before. Horn took on Davis’s renditions of “My Funny Valentine,” “Summertime,” “I’ve Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” “Basin Street Blues,” and “Blue In Green.” The mood Horn created on the record was so complete, so true to Davis, de Barros continued, that “the project makes you shiver.” The album won a Grammy award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance in 1998.
In addition to her Grammy and seven additional Grammy nominations, Horn has received many honors and accolades throughout her career. She was awarded the Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline by the mayor of Washington, D.C., in 1987, the Academie Du Jazz’s Billie Holiday Award France in 1990, and the Edison Populair HR57 Award for Here’s to Life in 1993. She was elected to the Lionel Hampton Hall of Fame in 1996 and was honored by the president of the ASCAP in 1998. She has received five Wammys, the Washington area’s music industry award, and has been voted Number One female vocalist in the New York Jazz Critics Awards and Number One jazz vocalist in Down Beat magazine’s Critics’ Poll.
In 1999 Horn was honored by an impressive array of jazz musicians at New York’s Merkin Hall, where she received the Phineas Newborn, Jr. Award for her lifelong contributions to jazz. Those honoring her included pianist Marian McPartland, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Yoron Israel. “Shirley picks beautiful songs and knows how to perform them,” McPartland told Down Beat. “I’ve never known anyone that could do a ballad that slowly and keep it musical, keep it happening.” Carrie Smith, Russell Malone, John Hicks, David Williams, Jon Faddis, and Etta Jones, among many others, also performed.
One year into the new millennium, at the age of 67, Horn released her eighth Verve recording, You’re My Thrill. A decade after they first worked together, Mandel rejoined Horn as arranger, and Abies and Williams completed Horn’s standard trio. After 29 years with Abies and 21 with Williams, Horn treasured her relationship with the two. “It takes time,” she told Down Beat, “to find the right musicians. Sometimes we are so close when we play that we are moving as one. That kind of unity is so rare. It’s magic.” Together, they alternated “lush orchestral pieces” with “vibrant small-group tunes,” wrote critic Philip Booth in Down Beat. “I Got Lost In His Arms,” “My Heart Stood Still,” “The Very Thought Of You,” “The Best Is Yet To Come,” “The Rules Of The Road,” and “Why Don’t You Do Right?” were among the album’s highlights, though “There’s a certain assured musical sophistication that defines everything Shirley Horn touches,” Booth continued. Critic Lynn Norment declared in Ebony that Horn “is the premier jazz balladeer.”
Selected discography:
Embers and Ashes, Stereo-Craft, 1961.
Live at the Village Vanguard, Can-Am, 1961.
Shirley Horn with Horns, Mercury, 1963.
Loads of Love, Mercury, 1963.
Travelin’ Light, ABC/Paramount, 1965.
A Lazy Afternoon, Steeple Chase, 1978.
Violets for Your Furs, Steeple Chase, 1981.
At Northsea, Steeple Chase, 1981.
All Night Long, Steeple Chase, 1981.
Garden of the Blues, Steeple Chase, 1984.
I Thought About You [live], Verve, 1987.
Softly, Audiophile, 1987.
Close Enough for Love, Verve, 1988.
You Won’t Forget Me, Verve, 1990.
Shirley Horn with Strings, Verve, 1991.
Here’s to Life, Verve, 1991.
I Love You, Paris [live], Verve, 1992.
Light out of Darkness, Verve, 1993.
The Main Ingredient, Verve, 1995.
Loving You, Verve, 1997.
I Remember Miles, Verve, 1998.
You’re My Thrill, Verve, 2001.
Sources
Books
Carney Smith, Jessie, editor, Notable Black American Women, Gale Research, 1999.
Cook, Richard, and Morton, Brian, Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, Penguin Books, 2000.JIG
Erlewine, Michael, editor, All Music Guide to Jazz, OM Miller Freeman, 1998.U
Feather, Leonard, and Gitler, Ira, Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Periodicals
Billboard, June 10, 1995, p. 68.
Down Beat, November 1994, p. 26; June 1996, p. 46; July 1998, p. 60; September 1998, p. 23; May 1999, p. 18; May 2001, p. 72.
Ebony, March 2001, p. 162.
Essence, August 2001, p. 60.
Interview, March 2001, p. 142.
People, June 15, 1998, p. 43.
U.S. News and World Reports, March 19, 2001, p. 62.
Online
All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (September 24, 2001).
National Public Radio Online, http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/shorn.html (September 24, 2001).
Other
Additional information was provided by Verve publicity materials and liner notes from You’re My Thrill.
—Brenna Sanchez
http://jazztimes.com/articles/20248-shirley-horn-around-the-horn-with-shirley
May 2001
by Lara Pellegrinelli
Aside from a boat-sized Cadillac moored in the driveway, the white stucco house in Northeast Washington, D.C., betrays few signs of its occupants. No lights shine, inside or out. Metal bars guard first-story windows with heavy curtains drawn beneath. Grating protects a locked front door. All is quiet, the narrow street deserted on this chilly winter evening, and even the doorbell cannot be heard from the porch outside. It is impossible to tell if anyone is home.
Only after minutes pass does someone answer the door, a lanky older man with tousled gray hair. “She’s in there,” he offers gruffly, pointing back and over his shoulder. “Shirley!”
Noise from a distant television leads to the back of the sprawling house and the kitchen, where Shirley Horn sits looking at sitcoms across a boxy wooden table. “Hello,” she smiles, shifting her focus just slightly. An old scarf covers her hair, save a single curl in the middle of her forehead. Her housecoat hangs open, with several safety pins dangling from uncooperative snaps. Tiny pink rosebuds cover new white gardening gloves worn on both hands. Her lipstick is flawless.
She made some pleasant small talk about her comings and goings, but dropped in a comment meant to deter frivolous inquiries. “You know, you’ve got all the stories,” she purrs hopefully. “Do I have to go back to when I was born?”
Clearly, no is the right answer. And, to be honest, the basic outline of Horn’s career has been told and retold, beginning with her “discovery” by Miles Davis in 1960. As if on cue, Horn growls in imitation of Davis’s harsh whisper: “If she don’t play, I ain’t gonna play,” she repeats, a gleam in her eyes. Evidently Davis had been so taken with Horn’s first album, Embers and Ashes, that he refused to work at the Village Vanguard without her. When faced with this ballsy tactic, club owner Max Gordon conceded and hired her to open for him.
Another celebrated anecdote relates why the young Horn, a classically trained pianist, started singing in the first place. “It was getting close to Christmas and he sent a note up there,” she recalls, describing a polite gentleman customer. He frequented the Merryland Supper Club where she played light classical pieces after school. “He said, ‘If you sing “Melancholy Baby,” this teddy bear is yours.’ Child, I sang two choruses.”
Such familiar standbys may represent pivotal moments in her career, yet precious few articles have probed deeper questions or deviated from basic reportage on her recent activities. Fewer still present Horn in her own words at length, the voice only familiar to audiences in song. She says she doesn’t like to talk about herself—perhaps preempting less than wholehearted attempts to garner her stories—nor does she particularly care for the day-to-day business surrounding and promoting her work, like the new You’re My Thrill! (Verve).
“It’s always something,” she sighs with discontent. “The new record’s coming out and there’s a whole lot of stuff to do with that. Interviews. Photographs. That’s the hard part. But I’d never give it up. I couldn’t. I’m driven. You know, music is my life. Without it, I would perish. The first thing I remember in my life is being about three years old, almost four, going to my grandmother’s parlor and playing this big old piano.”
Finally, an opening had presented itself for a seemingly innocent question: “Your grandmother played piano?”
“She played piano and organ, by ear,” Horn replies. “Mama [her grandmother] played hymns in church. She was a really short thing and it was hard for her to reach the pedals on the organ. After I got married, whenever I had a party with my friends, she’d come over and play the piano at the party. All my musician friends loved her. She was a dear lady.
“And she told my mother to give me piano lessons. I was only four years old—I couldn’t read or write—but this man took me: Mr. Fletcher, I even remember his name. Maybe he’s still living? Well, he took me as far as he could. But by the time I was about 11 years old, my uncle, who was a very rich doctor here in town, went to Howard University and started the junior school of music because there were no teachers left who could teach me anything. I went to school and then I went to Howard University every day. It wasn’t anything like it is now. I had to get on the streetcar and go up to the university to this old house. They had a building, a special building that had the Steinway piano.”
She talks quietly, pausing here and there to keep the facts straight. “The teacher I remember there most is Dr. Frances Hughes,” she goes on after a minute of thought. “I’ll never forget her. I was afraid of her at first, but I respected her because she was a positive teacher. You know what I mean? She started me right off with Chopin. Didn’t give me any little dingle-ingle-ingle stuff. And I loved it.
“Well, I was in that junior school of music at Howard from 12, 13, 14, until I was 18,” she counts. “Then I got the scholarships—one from Xavier and from Juilliard—but my mother wasn’t going to let me go anywhere, you know. My father said, ‘Okay,’ but my mother said, ‘No, you can’t go to Juilliard.’ There was no one living in Manhattan for me to stay with. That was a no no.” Had Horn attended, she would have overlapped with singer/pianist Nina Simone and organist Trudy Pitts.
As we sit opposite each other, smoke from Horn’s cigarette rises like a veil before her soft hazel eyes. Not only does she speak quietly, she speaks slowly. Somehow, though, having accepted her pace, having entered her sense of time, it does not feel slow. Rather, it seems suspended. Silence punctuates her sentences—the same governing of space that brokered her relationship with Miles Davis. It assumes musical properties here as well. Her phrases echo, imparting their words with deeper meaning or at least a moment in which to contemplate them. Some cast long shadows.
Would Julliard have significantly changed Horn’s life, her work? No one can know. But her family proved essential in shaping her musical path. Since her toddler’s steps to her grandmother’s piano, the two have always been intimately connected.
“It was mostly about her baby going away,” she reasons in hindsight. “I have no regrets. I was a baby. I was kept close to home. My mother, she was there for me. I never had to open a door to come in by myself or anything. She was there with the food for me and I loved her dearly. That’s what’s wrong with a lot of situations now. There is no mother at home.”
Although she had excelled at her musical education, her parents’ expectations did not exceed what would be typical for their daughter in the 1950s. “Mother thought I was going to wait a few years and then go out and get married; that’s what she was hoping. But that wasn’t on my mind. That’s the first man I ever dated,” she says, indicating her husband, Shep Deering. He had been wandering in and out of the room since he first deposited me in the kitchen. “Been married to him all these years. He’s like a father. We got married in—’56? I forget, and he gets so mad. And I grew up in those next four years because I was free from my mother. That’s a shame to say that. She was very, very, strict.
“I knew how to handle boys. I’ve got two younger brothers. They were pests, both of them. My father was quiet like me and didn’t go for any noise. In high school, I really got a name because I only associated with the musicians, who were just about all guys. There was one girl, brilliant violinist. She went on to study. Went to New York, got pregnant and came home. What a shame.”
The cordless phone rings from where it had been standing upright on the glass tabletop. Horn utters an apology as she scoops it up, narrowly missing a napkin holder stuffed with receipts and loose slips of paper. The kitchen clearly forms a center of activity. “I’m sorry, I have to do this. Hello? Yeah, babe. I just called your name. Called you a pest.” Her tone switches to that of the teasing older sister. But she soon lets her younger sibling off the hook. “Listen, are you home? I’ll call you back. Okay, baby. Bye.
“That was my youngest brother, who lives around my mother’s old house right there,” she explains, pointing over her shoulder to the right. “And my oldest aunt’s house is right there. I’ve lived here all my life in Washington, D.C., in the Northeast area. I never wanted to live anywhere else. I love to live here. Close to my family and everything.” For much of the 1960s and ’70s, Horn performed only locally, sticking close to home and the little girl she raised. Daughter Rainey also lives a stone’s throw away with her husband and their two nearly grown boys. She called about 20 minutes later. “Hello?” Horn answered. “This is your mother. Yes it is.” Like there could really be any doubt.
As Horn thinks back to the home where she grew up, she mentions that she never sang around the house. “No, I just played the piano. But the singing came because my mother sang all the time. She wasn’t a vocalist, but she sang around the house. I knew the songs because I was always listening to her sing. And my mother put on the best records. None of this juggity-juggity-juggity stuff. The Basie band and Ellington; all the good singers. That’s what I heard. My people loved Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, right? Dinah Washington.
“Why didn’t I want to sing before? I was just shy around people my own age. I was mousy, I guess. A mama’s child. I didn’t have any girlfriends. But I was the first one to get ready to go fishin’ at four o’clock in the morning. And I had two uncles who just adored me. I was kind of the favorite in the family
because I played the piano. ‘Don’t you want to play like your cousin Shirley?’ All the little cousins had to take lessons and they hated me. But I hung out with my uncles and they were all builders.” Evidence of Horn’s formidable handiwork—she learned carpentry early as well—can be found at every turn in and outside of the house: a carport sheltering the Caddy; the piano room in which she parked her Steinway D; the very table at which we sat.
If she sometimes gives the impression that she led a lonely, almost patrician existence, Horn had her outlets, too. By her later teens, she started sneaking out to go to jam sessions and sit in. She would head down to places like the 7th and T Lounge around the corner from the old Howard Theater. There she met tenor saxophonist Buck Hill, a frequent guest on later albums. “I used to go and try to sit in and the only person who was nice to me was Buck. The bass player would say, ‘Oh, here she comes again. Umm hmm.’ I did what I could do. I got over my fear of singing. But I was fresh out of the classics.” She eventually wound up with a steady gig there and other clubs around town such as the Bohemian Caverns, now recently reopened.
“I just knew, ‘I got to play that piano,’ right?” she says, describing how she acquired her jazz chops. “Then I got interested in Erroll Garner and started listening to him. I knew his things note for note. And slowly I learned. I met Stuff Smith. He was in Washington and came to hear me all the time. And he knew my father—my father’s also from St. Louis. He’d come to the house. He always smelled like cigars. But he’d play that violin and people’d sit out front. Mother used to ask, ‘Mr. Smith, would you go? It’s 11 o’clock.’ That was late. But he would pack up his things. And he’d come back ‘cause mother would feed him, you know. And as I grew up, I got to know him better.”
In fact, she made her earliest recording under his leadership: Cat on a Hot Fiddle (1959), reissued for the first time on The Complete Verve Stuff Smith Sessions by Mosaic. She played and sang on the all-Gershwin affair, also accompanying Smith’s one novelty vocal, “Somebody Loves Me.” Her current performances remain stylistically consistent with these beginnings: well-placed block chords complement mellow, spare melodic lines.
Unfortunately, Horn’s playing was falsely credited to pianist John Eaton on the original release, the correction only made with the recent reissue. “I don’t know if I want to hear that again or not because that brings back terrible memories for me,” she says, remembering the disappointment and frustration. “I’d been taken advantage of.”
As she looked through the set’s accompanying booklet, Horn stares at an old photo showing Smith with bassist John Levy and pianist Jimmy Jones. “Is that John Levy?” she asks with surprise. He would become her manager around that time. “It sure is. Isn’t that somethin’. He still looks the same. Sharp dresser. Ah! This is Jimmy Jones. They all played together. Oh, Lord. That’s old stuff. I first got to know Jimmy Jones through his music accompanying Sarah Vaughan. Jimmy Jones played piano like an angel. I’d sit down and sing with him anytime. I think he was only with me once. And I fell in love with him immediately.
“Right now, John Levy is 87 years old. He just wrote an autobiography. I’m gonna check the book,” she teases, implying he’d better have minded his p’s and q’s. “He came to see me right after Miles. John Levy had Cannonball Adderley—first Joe Williams—Nancy Wilson, Wes Montgomery. Hey, he was a big man. All the guys loved him. Number one, he knew music. He was a bass player. John played with George Shearing. And [because he was blind] George couldn’t read contracts, so John started doing the contracts and stopped playing the bass. That’s how he got started.
“See, John Levy heard the first record that I did. It was called Embers and Ashes. And he came to Washington to see who Jimmy Jones was playing for, and there I am, you know. Still, a lot of times people call and ask, ‘Uh, who’s playing piano for you?’ And I laugh. They take out big ads: Shirley Horn and Her Trio. That’s four people!
“John introduced himself to me. Then later he called. ‘Ms. Horn, would you like to come to New York?’ And I said, ‘Well, Mr. Levy, what for?’ He said, ‘You want to record with Quincy Jones?’ ‘Yeah, I’d like to record for Quincy Jones’ [then the A & R man for Mercury Records]. He said, ‘Write a list of songs you’d like to record.’ That’s beautiful. ‘Cause anybody else would have said we want you to record this and this and this and that and that. But here’s the big thing that happened when I got there: ‘You need to stand up.’ They wanted to turn me into a stand-up singer! But I couldn’t get away from that piano.”
The relationships Horn developed with Levy, Quincy Jones and Jimmy Jones resulted in two albums: Loads of Love and Horn With Horns (1963). Jimmy Jones wrote the arrangements for Loads of Love, scoring them for strings, reeds and brass. He accompanied her for two tracks and, by her recollection, also sat in for a couple on Horn With Horns. The pianists hired for the two dates were Hank Jones and Bobby Scott, respectively. At the time, few notable singer/pianists would have accompanied themselves, either in performance or on record.
“After a concert, Carmen [McRae] might sit down and do one song by herself on piano. Sarah [Vaughan] was a bad pianist. Dinah [Washington] was the baddest; Sarah was next. They had a knowledge of the piano, you know. But the record companies, they wanted somebody to stand up and sing. I heard somewhere they were pushing Nat [Cole] to do that. And that’s what Mercury wanted with me. Stand up! Piano playing is secondary. Piano player’s just one of the band. I didn’t—I couldn’t handle anyone playing for me. Because they don’t hear what’s up here and you have no way of knowing what’s going on up here with me,” she points out, her index finger thumping her temple. “I’m my best accompanist. I always know where I’m going.”
Horn decides she needs a glass of water and break. This leads her to ask some of the questions for a change: “Are you hungry?”
“A little bit,” I say.
Shep had come back in the room. “What’s in the refrigerator?” she grills him. “Well, what did we have yesterday? Oh, we had pig feet. You don’t eat pig feet, do you?” Her question is met with wide eyes. That would be a no. She and Shep chuckle. “Etta Jones was in town. See, every time she does a show, we get together here and we cook those big pig feet. Then Etta, a couple of girlfriends and I, we sit around and talk stuff and drink liquor and carry on.
“I don’t have any meat cooked. You like salami? Okay, well that’s a start. You like potato rolls? Turnip greens? Okay, why don’t you make her a sandwich?” she says, enlisting Shep’s help. He, no doubt, surveyed this scene with amusement. “Do that. Some greens and a salami sandwich. Do you like mustard or mayonnaise on a salami sandwich?”
“On salami, mustard.”
“Salami mustard?” queries Shep smartly. “Never heard of salami mustard.”
“Yeah, get the plate out and make the sandwich. He gives me no respect!” she kids. “We’re not recording now, right?”
The greens arrive first, with some malt vinegar on the side. The construction of the sandwich somehow takes longer. When it arrives, the half moons of salami faced in the opposite direction as their potato roll counterparts hang out the sides. It was still tasty.
“You know, it’s been so busy. I should have fixed you a nice meal. Well, next time. You can come back again. I’ve had some here—this guy came in to interview me: ‘Where were you born?’ ‘Why were you born?’ God damn it! Why? It’s very rare that I get someone who’s writing about the music. That’s what it’s all about. ‘She smokes a lot.’ Somebody wrote that. What difference does it make? And oh, I was hard to get along with one time. Damn right!
“One woman wanted to know ‘Did you and Miles Davis have an affair?’” Horn mimicked the journalist’s voice, projecting an unfortunate combination of nerve and curiosity. “Can you believe it? I wanted to tell her yes, you know? It was stupid, so I just smiled at her. Some of the stuff I have here just tears me up.”
Horn speaks fondly of Davis and the early days she spent in New York at the Vanguard. “I worked six days a week, I don’t remember how many weeks,” she begins. “It was like being in a fantasyland because every night there was something to look forward to: seeing another person’s face I had on a record. Miles would introduce me to all these people.
“See, that’s when I lived to go to work. I learned about swinging. And I learned that from Wynton Kelly and Philly Joe Jones. Paul [Chambers] wasn’t around long after I got there. They knew how to swing. You could just feel it. Lord have mercy. You would get down on your knees. I can’t remember what they were playing because I was somewhere else—a little piece of heaven.”
One night, Kelly deftly convinced her to take his place. “Wynton said, ‘I hurt my hand! Sit in with me for a minute.’ He was playing a blues. I’m sitting right in front and he fooled me. So, I went up there and got behind the guys. And everybody applauded. ‘Oh, Lord, what am I going to do?’ But I finally brightened up. Miles wanted me to do the second tune and then I had to come off. There was nobody against me, but I was scared, simple as that. Everybody on the stage was a giant. Everybody in the audience, I know from records. I felt too much pressure.”
She shakes her head when asked why Davis didn’t particularly care for singers. “I don’t know. A lot of singers wanted him,” is her rationalization. “He didn’t talk nicely about singers at all, you know. He liked to listen to me just sing a song. It’s something about the way I use space. He’d sit for a long time. Part of me was gone when he died; he was so dear. We loved each other. We loved the person in the music. And he left me! Jive turkey. Did you know he was going to record some more songs with me?” Davis appeared on perhaps her most exquisite album, You Won’t Forget Me (Verve; 1991), and she paid him fitting tribute with I Remember Miles (Verve; 1998).
What, strangely, does she remember about the time spent outside the club, her first extended stay in New York? “I looked at television. I cooked. Yeah, I cook in hotels, honey! I’ve been staying in this one place for 17 years and they know I’m gonna cook greens.” When Horn needs to be far away, she makes herself feel at home. “And I don’t like to go out during the day. If I want to have something to eat, I want to be quiet someplace and look at my stories. You know I look at The Young and the Restless. Yes, indeed. As the World Turns, The Bold and the Beautiful, Guiding Light.”
The soap opera habit may actually have some relevance, too. With about 40 years of regular viewing under her belt, the daytime devotee may have picked up some tricks of the trade and put them to work in her songs. “I’ve done a lot of heartbreaking songs and I have not lived what I sing,” she states. The muted TV is on all this time in the background. “I’m a good actress. And I didn’t have to beat doors down and pound the streets of New York to get into this business. I was brought in on a carpet. There’s Quincy Jones, Miles Davis, John Levy. Who else do you need?
“I came from a loving family. My mother and father loved each other and I saw a lot of love. All my life I’ve just felt like I was in my family’s arms. But I’m an emotional person and I love people. I love hard. So, if I haven’t been in that situation, I can imagine somebody else going through whatever the story is all about. Sometimes in San Fransisco, we do Yoshi’s and they come in and they cry and I feel bad. ‘Come on, don’t do that.’ But they’re all happy and eyes tearin’ and snottin’ and all that when they leave.” She has her more lighthearted moments as well.
“You tired of me runnin’ my mouth yet?” she purrs hopefully. Clearly, no is the right answer. The last question of the evening has finally come. The once reluctant storyteller seems like she is ready to field questions on at least a few more decades, but she has worn out her interviewer.
It is now pitch black outside, and the gentle lady of the house turns on the lights, opens the door and expresses her wishes for a safe journey home.
http://www.manythings.org/voa/people/Shirley_Horn.html
Shirley Horn was considered one of the great jazz singers of the nineteen fifties and sixties. She was often compared to the famous singers Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. She performed for more than fifty years.
Shirley Horn's voice was smooth and expressive, but never hurried. She was one of the slowest singers in jazz. When she sang a song, she wanted the audience to feel it in the same way she did. She had a small voice. But her songs had a big effect.
Here, Shirley Horn sings her popular song "You're My Thrill."
Shirley Horn was born in Washington, D.C. in nineteen thirty-four. She lived all her life in and around Washington. Shirley began taking piano lessons when she was four years old. Her mother recognized her skill and love for the instrument.
Shirley Horn said most of the songs she performed were ones she grew up with. She said her family loved music and there was always music by the greatest singers and bands playing in her home. Horn said she lived for music. She said it was like food and water to her.
Shirley Horn studied classical music as a teenager. When she was seventeen, she had a chance to attend the famous Juilliard School in New York City. But financial difficulties prevented her from going. Instead, she studied classical music at Howard University in Washington.
Shirley Horn had planned to have a career playing classical music on the piano. But she said all that changed after she began going to jazz clubs in Washington. She said she was influenced by some of the greatest jazz artists, such as Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal.
When asked about her change from classical music to jazz, she would later say: "I loved Rachmaninoff, but then Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninoff. And Ahmad Jamal became my Debussy."
Horn did not plan to be a singer. She said it happened by accident when she was seventeen and playing classical music on the piano at a restaurant. A man offered to give her a huge toy teddy bear if she would sing the song "Melancholy Baby." Although she had never sung in public before, she agreed. She later realized that she could make a living singing and playing jazz. Here she sings the famous song by Cole Porter, "Love for Sale."
In nineteen fifty-four, Shirley Horn began to sing jazz in clubs and started her own jazz group. In nineteen sixty, she recorded her first album, called "Embers and Ashes." The album did not get a lot of attention. But the famous jazz musician, Miles Davis, heard it. He liked it so much that he invited Horn to play music with him in New York City. She sang as the opening act before his performance at New York's Village Vanguard nightclub. Davis had refused to play unless the club owner let Horn sing. Shirley Horn and Miles Davis developed a close friendship over the years. Here she sings and he plays the trumpet on the song "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying."
Shirley Horn's performance with Miles Davis in New York led to a record deal with Mercury Records. She was soon performing around the United States. She also recorded with Quincy Jones and other top musicians. But Horn soon left Mercury Records because of creative differences. She wanted to play the piano on all her recordings, but the record company did not agree.
Shirley Horn stopped performing around the country in the nineteen sixties so she could spend more time at home with her husband and daughter. She played at local nightclubs in the Washington area during the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Shirley Horn rebuilt her career in the nineteen eighties. She began performing more widely at jazz festivals and concerts around the world and received strong praise. In nineteen eighty- seven, she signed a record deal with Verve Records and remained with the record company for the rest of her career.
In nineteen ninety, Horn reunited with her good friend and teacher, Miles Davis, on the song, "You Won't Forget Me." She went on to record several successful albums and performed around the world.
She also worked on several soundtracks for movies. Here are Shirley Horn and Miles Davis with "You Won't Forget Me."
Shirley Horn was nominated for several Grammy Awards. In nineteen ninety-eight, she won the award for the album, "I Remember Miles," in memory of Miles Davis, who died in nineteen ninety-one. Horn received many honors during her career. But her last years were difficult. She had a series of health problems, including treatment for breast cancer. And in two thousand two, she had her foot removed because of problems caused by diabetes.
Shirley Horn continued to sing for audiences, but she did so in a chair, with someone else playing the piano. The loss of her foot made it difficult for her to work the pedals that control the way the piano sounds. However, during her last performances, she returned to playing the piano with the help of a device that took the place of her foot. In June of two thousand five, Horn suffered a stroke. She died four months later at the age of seventy-one.
Critics say Shirley Horn influenced many young jazz musicians of today, including Diana Krall and Norah Jones. Critics say she will be remembered as one of the best singers in a great period of American jazz. In two thousand five, Verve Records released a collection of her work, called "But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn." We leave you now with a song from that album called "Here's to Life."
This program was written and produced by Cynthia Kirk. I'm Faith Lapidus.
And I'm Steve Ember. Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.
Shirley Horn
composer, singer, pianist
Born; Washington, D,C., 5-1-1934
Died; Washington, D,C., 10-20-2005
A child prodigy, Shirley Horn began playing piano at age 4 and the next year started formal musical training. She became so obsessed with the piano that her mother offered her bribes in an attempt to get her away from the instrument so she would play with the neighborhood children.
At just 12 years of age Horn studied composition at Howard University and at 18 was awarded a scholarship to study at Julliard in New York. Unfortunately her family was unable to afford her money for living conditions in New York. Instead she entered a special music studies class at Howard, leaving after several years to work full time in Washington D.C.
In 1960 Horn traveled to New York to record her first album “Embers And Ashes.” Although the record appeared on only a small label and received limited distribution it immediately established her as a gifted and sensitive jazz artist. So impressed was Miles Davis when he heard the disc he brought Shirley back to New York to appear with him at the Village Vanguard, a popular jazz venue in the city. Soon she was working in major clubs throughout the U.S., recording with Quincy Jones for Mercury Records, and singing on the movie soundtracks of “For Love Of Ivy” and “A Dandy In Aspic.”
Creative differences with Mercury and domestic life, in particular her young daughter Rainy, called her back home, and for more than a decade, she restricted her appearances to Washington D.C. area clubs and concerts.
In 1981, Paul Acket, director of Holland’s North Sea Jazz Festival, caught her impromptu performance at a Jazz Times convention at the Shoreline Hotel. He arranged for her European debut at the Holland festival, where delighted audiences and overwhelming critical approval inspired her to revitalize her career.
With her daughter Rainy grown and married, herself the mother of two children; Horn was now at ease to go back on the road. She was soon working with her trio at some of the most prestigious jazz clubs and she recorded four albums. Her association with Verve records, beginning in 1986, cemented her rise in popularity and helped establish her as a top-notch artist worthy of national and worldwide notoriety and fame.
In later years, Ms. Horn performed with artists ranging from Davis, who reunited with her for a rare appearance as a sideman on her 1991 album ``You Won't Forget Me,'' to Wynton Marsalis.
She was nominated for multiple Grammys and won the award in 1991 for best jazz vocal performance. In 2004, Horn was honored by National Endowment for the Arts as a jazz master.
Shirley Horn’s piano playing drew on the influences of Ahmad Jamal and Wynton Kelly. Her intricacies in harmony bring to mind Duke Ellington. Her notes were always chosen wisely, placed expertly at well-chosen times. She had the rare ability to utilize rhythm through silence much as Count Basie and the aforementioned Jamal. Although these behemoths may come to mind when listening to Horn, she claimed the utilization of those manifestations as very much her own art. She was not an imitator.
Vocally Shirley Horn does not sound like anyone else. Although the way she carried out her vocals was akin to the personal relationship and intensity one feels when listening to Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae, King Cole, or even Louis Armstrong; Shirley Horn was an original. Not a scat vocalist but rather a sensitive vocalist: she presented her lyrics with improvisational bending and changing of notes in an artistic style that is the essence of true jazz.
Shirley Horn died Thursday night October 20th, 2005 in her native Washington, D.C., after a long illness.
Click here to read one of the finest Shirley Horn biographies on the net from the Washington Post.
http://www.newsweek.com/ballads-shirley-horn-202374
News
The Ballads Of Shirley Horn
by Newsweek Staff
4/28/91
At long last, a jazz legend gets her due
Shirley Horn was at her mother-in-law's house in Washington the day Miles Davis called. This was 30 years ago, but she remembers that there were buttermilk biscuits and red-eye gravy on the table and that she didn't believe it was really him. She'd recently released "Embers and Ashes," the first collection of her delicately understated piano playing and smoky ballad singing. Davis loved it and wanted her to come to New York and open for him at the Village Vanguard.She didn't believe it was him, but she came anyway, and when she got to his house, she says, "He had his kids sing me the songs off the 'Embers and Ashes' album." For a charmed period, she picked up such accolades wherever she turned. She played the Vanguard: "Everybody in the world was there. Lena Horne was floating around in a red outfit. Charlie Mingus was standing by the door-biggest man I ever saw. Sidney Poitier came up and said he enjoyed my music." She soon signed a recording contract with Mercury.It looked like an overnight success story. But only now, at 56--with her deservedly No. 1 album "You Won't Forget Me"--is Horn enjoying the stature that must have seemed within easy reach 30 years ago.
Horn's earliest memory is of the piano in her grandmother's parlor. The room was cold in the winter, and she remembers sitting at the piano's round stool in a heavy coat. At 4, she began lessons on this piano and as a teen studied classical music at Howard University. She later earned a scholarship to Juilliard in New York but couldn't afford to go; only thanks to her uncle, a doctor, could she afford Howard. She picked up jazz on her own, sneaking dinner shows at a place called Olivia's Patio Lounge. With the Vanguard date, she seemed on her way.
But jazz history is full of dreams deferred or shattered. The Mercury records weren't what she'd expected--the label saddled her with big-band arrangements--and she sat out the contract after making two of them. She had a baby. She didn't like touring and didn't like the business. She built a reputation as a piece of work; if she didn't like a crowd, sometimes she'd walk off stage in midset and call a cab home. Though she insists she never retired, she rarely recorded, or played outside of the Beltway area, for much of the '60s and '70s. Since 1981, though, she's made herself more visible, and in the last four years has made three striking albums for Verve. "You Won't Forget Me" makes it easy to hear what attracted Davis to her. Horn barely fingers the edges of her tunes, investing them with space rather than easy melodies. On the proud "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'," featuring Wynton Marsalis on trumpet, she slows the tempo until each note becomes a statement, each line a surprise. "In my early years," she says, "I listened to a pianist who played a lot of notes, but it just left me cold. Then I heard Miles Davis play one note, and it made all the difference in the world."
Davis adds a solo to the album's title track, the first time he's backed a singer in 20 years. It is a touching show of support, but an extraneous one. Horn's career, come to fruition at its own pace, can now proceed under its own power.
NEA Jazz Masters: Live In SF This Month!
April 2005
The nation’s highest honor for jazz is the National Endowment for the Arts’ “NEA Jazz Masters” program, a pantheon of jazz artists and advocates immortalized for their “enormous and profound contributions to the jazz field.” This spring, SFJAZZ is proud to present a number of these great NEA Jazz Masters in concert, including Sonny Rollins (inducted 1983), Ahmad Jamal (1994), Roy Haynes (1995), and McCoy Tyner (2002). This month alone, the SFJAZZ Spring Season line-up is graced by two of these nationally recognized living legends: the great pianist and composer Dave Brubeck (inducted 1999) and one of 2005’s six newly inducted NEA Jazz Masters, singer/pianist extraordinaire Shirley Horn.
SHIRLEY HORN
Friday • April 29 2005
8pm
Masonic Center
San Francisco, California
“Shirley Horn is a quintessential singing piano player,” writes the NEA in the biography accompanying Horn's 2005 induction into the ranks of the NEA Jazz Masters. “Her skills at the keyboard are legendary for her sense of space, and proper note placement; always injecting the ‘right' chords. Shirley's piano skills are legendary, so much so that the great jazz singer Carmen McRae once enlisted Horn as her piano accompanist for an album project; the ultimate compliment coming from a fellow vocalist. Ms. Horn is blessed with a wonderful sense of vocal drama, an ability to engage the listener to actually feel the lyrics and grasp their message; she never rushes the tempo and has a languid sense of balladry that has won her a legion of admirers.”
One of Horn's earliest—and most influential— admirers was the great trumpeter and band leader Miles Davis, who heard the young Washington, D.C.-based singer's debut album, Embers and Ashes (1960), and secured a career-making gig for her at New York's Village Vanguard. Also supported by early mentors like Quincy Jones, Oscar Peterson, and Ahmad Jamal, Horn seemed poised for stardom when she made the decision to step out of the national spotlight and focus on raising her daughter. But in 1987, after signing to Verve Records, Horn launched a comeback that led to a string of hit albums, including 1998's Grammy-winning I Remember Miles , a tribute to her onetime mentor and ongoing musical inspiration.
“Pianist/vocalist Shirley Horn's career reads like a Hollywood movie,” wrote Down Beat in response to Horn's triumphant comeback. “A young musical genius is discovered by a jazz legend, but postpones major stardom to raise a family, only to emerge in her mature years as a superstar on her own terms.”
Shirley Horn's “movie” would soon take another dramatic turn, however. As a result of diabetes, Horn was obliged to undergo the amputation of her right leg below the knee early in the new century. Many wondered if she would ever perform again. After a period of recuperation, however, Shirley Horn once again demonstrated her great resiliency, picking up where she left off with the fittingly titled disc May the Music Never End and new concert appearances. As The New York Times wrote upon Horn's June 2003 return to the stage: “As her voice and piano engage in a reflective dialogue, the artful hesitations and wide-open spaces between phrases conjure a state of meditative suspension into which feelings spontaneously bubble up and subside…. Ms. Horn exuded the authority of an amused grande dame, serenely but firmly in charge.”
http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/archive/horn_s.html
Jazz Profiles from NPR
Shirley Horn
Produced by Margot Stage
Davis saw in Horn's singing style an approach to music not unlike his own. Both artists are recognized for their discriminating use of "space" -- the silences between the sounds -- to create a dramatic tension, particularly in the performance of ballads.
After her Mercury albums, Shirley returned to Washington -- far enough from New York to allow her to focus on her personal life, yet close enough to still be in touch with the city's vibrant jazz scene. Her decision to move saw her recording opportunities dwindle, but in 1986, Verve Records took the advice of producer Richard Seidel and signed Horn and her trio to a contract.
Her trio recordings emerged with numerous Grammy Award nominations, including one for her most popular album to date, You Won't Forget Me, which featured cameos by Miles Davis and harmonica player Toots Theilemans. A memorable performance in Paris yielded yet another well-received Verve release in 1992: I Love You Paris.
That was also the year Shirley fulfilled a long-held ambition to work with celebrated arranger and composer Johnny Mandel. Their album together, Here's to Life, hit number one on the Billboard charts for a record-breaking 17 weeks.
Throughout her career, Shirley Horn has never compromised her music or her personal life in pursuit of fame. She took her time with success in the same way she controls a slow and shifting tempo on one of her ballads. But all the while, she fulfills her heartfelt ambitions by doing what she loves—making music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Horn
Shirley Valerie Horn (May 1, 1934 – October 20, 2005) was an American jazz singer and pianist.[1] She collaborated with many jazz greats including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Toots Thielemans, Ron Carter, Carmen McRae, Wynton Marsalis and others. She was most noted for her ability to accompany herself with nearly incomparable independence and ability on the piano while singing, something described by arranger Johnny Mandel as "like having two heads", and for her rich, lush voice, a smoky contralto, which was described by noted producer and arranger Quincy Jones as "like clothing, as she seduces you with her voice". Although she could swing as strongly as any straight-ahead jazz artist, Horn's reputation rode on her exquisite ballad work.
Horn first achieved fame in 1960, through her association with Miles Davis. Davis' praise had particular resonance in two respects: because he was so highly respected as a musician, and because he rarely offered public praise for fellow musicians at that time. Horn had, though, recorded several songs with violinist Stuff Smith in 1959 both as a pianist and a singer. After her discovery by Davis, she recorded albums on different small labels in the early 1960s, eventually landing contracts with larger labels Mercury Records and Impulse Records. She was popular with jazz critics, but did not achieve significant popular success.
Quincy Jones attempted to make Horn into a pure vocalist in several recording sessions, something he later hinted may have been a mistake. Horn was also disturbed by the changes in popular music in the 1960s following the arrival of The Beatles. Largely rejecting efforts to remake her into a popular singer, she stated: "I will not stoop to conquer".[4] From the late-1960s, she concentrated on raising her daughter Rainy with her husband, Shepherd Deering (whom she had married in 1955), and largely limited her performances to her native Washington, D.C.
Miles Davis made a rare appearance as a sideman on Horn's 1991 album You Won't Forget Me.[5] Although she preferred to perform in small settings, such as her trio, she also recorded with orchestras, as on the 1992 album Here's to Life, the title song (lyrics by Phyllis Molinary, music by Artie Butler) of which became her signature song. A video documentary of Horn's life and music was released at the same time as "Here's To Life" and shared its title. At the time, arranger Johnny Mandel commented that Horn's piano skill was comparable to that of the noted jazz great Bill Evans. A follow-up was made in 2001, named You're My Thrill.
Horn worked with the same rhythm section for 25 years: Charles Ables (bass) and Steve Williams (drums). Don Heckman wrote in the Los Angeles Times (February 2, 1995) about "the importance of bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams to Horn's sound. Working with boundless subtlety, following her every spontaneous twist and turn, they were the ideal accompanists for a performer who clearly will tolerate nothing less than perfection".
Her albums Here's to Life, Light Out of Darkness (A Tribute to Ray Charles) and I Love You, Paris all reached number one on the Billboard jazz charts.[5]
Due to health problems in the early 2000s, Horn had to cut back on her performances. After 2002, a foot amputation (from complications of diabetes) led her to leave the piano playing to pianist George Mesterhazy. In late 2004, Horn felt able to play piano again, and recorded a live album for Verve, at Manhattan's Au Bar with trumpet player Roy Hargrove, which did not satisfy her.[citation needed] It remains unreleased except for tracks on But Beautiful - The Best of Shirley Horn.
A breast cancer survivor, she had been battling diabetes when she died of complications from the condition, aged 71.[6] She is interred at Ft. Lincoln Cemetery in Washington, D.C.[7]
She was officially recognized by the 109th US Congress for "her many achievements and contributions to the world of jazz and American culture", and performed at The White House for several U.S. presidents. Horn was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree from the Berklee College of Music in 2002.
She was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award in 2005 (the highest honors that the United States bestows upon jazz musicians).
"Shirley Horn" at AllMusic.
"Shirley Horn", Encyclopædia Britannica.
Fordham, John (25 October 2005). "Shirley Horn: Jazz singer-pianist whose distinctive slow tempos captivated her audiences". The Guardian (London).
Michael Mungiello, "Bringing Jazz Back to DC", The Georgetown Independent, April 22, 2013.
"Jazz star Shirley Horn dies at 71", BBC News, October 22, 2005.
Adam Bernstein, "Mesmerizing Jazz Singer and Pianist" (obituary), Washington Post, October 22, 2005.
http://www.vervemusicgroup.com/shirleyhorn/
Biography
"Horn's taste is impeccable, her conviction contagious, and when she sings a lyric . . . we accept it as pure gospel." - Vanity Fair
SHIRLEY HORN
When Shirley Horn sings a song, she changes the way we hear it forever. Widely regarded as the premiere singing pianist in jazz since Nat "King" Cole, Horn applies her unique alchemy to eleven classic and contemporary songs on You're My Thrill, her eleventh recording for Verve. This album also reunites Horn with Johnny Mandel, who produced and orchestrated Horn's Here's to Life (1992), her best-selling and most popular album to date.
Renowned for her inimitable ability to negotiate melodies and lyrics at an exquisitely unhurried pace, Horn opens her new album with a breathless version of the title track, and follows that lead with equally heart-stopping ballad performances that include "I Got Lost in His Arms," "My Heart Stood Still," "The Very Thought of You," and "All Night Long." A stand-out track is her reading of "Solitary Moon," a Mandel composition never before recorded with the lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Johnny Mandel's lush orchestration complements her voice perfectly on these tracks. While You're My Thrill reconfirms her status as a romantic chanteuse without peer, it also showcases Horn's often overlooked prowess as a straight-ahead swinger as she steps out with her trio on uptempo and blues numbers including "The Best Is Yet To Come," "Sharing the Night With the Blues," "The Rules of the Road," "You Better Love Me," and "Why Don't You Do Right." The combination of these trio tunes and the full orchestra tracks makes You're My Thrill a wonderfully varied collection.
As she has been for the past two decades, Horn is accompanied on You're My Thrill by bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams. "We've been together for about twenty-eight and eighteen years, resepectively," she says. "They know which way I'm going to turn. When the mood is really there and we get into it, it seems like we can feel each other. I remember the concert we did at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1992 for the I Love You, Paris album," Horn continues. "The music was so strong and we were so together, we all got goose pimples. We went back in the dressing room and we were so full of music, there were no words, we just hugged."
"Most of these are songs I grew up with," says Horn, who still lives in her native Washington, D.C. "My family loved music and there was always music around from the greatest singers and bands. Usually, I just learned the songs my mother used to sing around the home. I would ask her, 'What's the name of this one, what's the name of that one?' because I'd have the melody in my mind. I remember hearing Peggy Lee singing 'Why Don't You Do Right.' In fact, probably 75 percent of the songs I do are ones I heard at home."
But Horn did not set out to be a singer. "It was an accident," she explains. "What I remember first in my life is playing the piano. That's when I was four years old. I'd go to my grandmother's home. She had a parlor with a great big piano. The parlor was for company, and it was closed off with French doors. It was always cold, but I didn't want to do anything but just go in there and sit on the piano stool. I wasn't interested in playing with the kids outside. After several years of this my grandmother told my mother to get me lessons."
Horn discovered the allure of her singing when, at seventeen, she was playing in a local restaurant/night club. "One night close to Christmas, this older gentleman who would regularly come in for dinner came with a teddy bear as tall as I. Somehow I knew that was for me," she recalls. Indeed, the patron sent her a note saying "If you sing 'Melancholy Baby' the teddy bear is yours." "I was very shy and it was hard for me to sing," Horn says, "but I wanted that teddy bear."
Audiences continued to ask for songs and Horn eased into her role as a vocalist. "It was no big thing, but then I started to realize how much I loved to sing." One of her most requested tunes was "You're My Thrill." The song stayed in Horn's repertoire for more than twenty years whenever she played the One Step Down, which she remembers as "the best little jazz joint" in D.C. "Joe, the owner, would say 'you've got to record that song'," she remembers, "and I said 'I'm going do it once I've made up my mind.'"
Although content to stay at home, Horn was coaxed away to New York City in 1960 by Miles Davis. Notoriously disdainful of singers, Davis had been seduced by Horn's debut recording, Embers and Ashes. He invited her to open for him at the Village Vanguard, catapulting her into a limelight she had never sought. After Horn retreated from view for much of the 1970s and 1980s to raise her daughter, she found her fame blossoming anew after her 1987 signing to Verve. In 1990, not long before his death in 1991, Davis added his graceful trumpet phrases to the title track of Horn's You Won't Forget Me. In 1998, Horn paid tribute to her mentor with the brilliant I Remember Miles, for which she won the GRAMMY award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. All in all, Horn has garnered seven consecutive GRAMMY nominations, and her albums Here's to Life, Light Out of Darkness (A Tribute to Ray Charles), and I Love You, Paris all soared to number one on the Billboard jazz charts.
What Davis, Quincy Jones, and others heard as early as 1960 has been affirmed over the years by numerous awards and recognitions. In addition to her GRAMMY award and nominations, Horn has won five WAMMYs, the Washington area's music industry award. In 1987, she was presented the Mayor's Arts Award for "Excellence in an Artistic Discipline" in Washington, DC. In 1990 Horn's Close Enough for Love album won one of France's premiere music awards, the Academie Du Jazz's Prix Billie Holiday. In 1993, she added the prestigious Edison Populair HR57 Award for Here's to Life to her stunning list of honors. Three years later, Horn was elected to the Lionel Hampton Jazz Hall of Fame. In 1998, Marilyn Bergman, President of ASCAP honored Horn "in recognition of over four decades of her unique and influential role in interpreting the American song," and in 1999, Horn was selected as the recipient of the Phineas Newborn, Jr. Award, with an all-star tribute concert in her honor. Most recently, she was voted #1 female vocalist in the New York Jazz Critics Awards and #1 jazz vocalist in DownBeat's Critics' Poll.
Inviting listeners into an elegant and sincere musical embrace, You're My Thrill is the latest stunning result of Shirley Horn's singular ability to connect with her collaborators, her material, and her audience at the most heartfelt level.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/arts/music/shirley-horn-jazz-singer-and-pianist-is-dead-at-71.html?_r=0
Music
Shirley Horn, Jazz Singer and Pianist, Is Dead at 71
by BEN RATLIFF
October 22, 2005
New York Times
Shirley Horn, a jazz singer and pianist who drew audiences close with a powerfully confidential, vibratoless delivery, died yesterday at a nursing home in Cheverly, Md. She was 71. Her death was announced by Regina Joskow, vice president of publicity at the Verve Music Group, Ms. Horn's label.
Ms. Horn was a unique singer, with one of the slowest deliveries in jazz and a very unusual way of phrasing, putting stress on certain words and letting others slip away. She cherished her repertory, making audiences feel that she was cutting through to the stark truths of songs like "Here's to Life" and "You Won't Forget Me." She wanted things just so: she stuck with her drummer, Steve Williams, for 23 years, and her bassist, Charles Ables -- who died in 2002 -- for 33.
She lived all her life in and around Washington, often performing close to home to be near her family. But over the last two decades she enjoyed a quietly expanding revival of the concert and club career she had begun in the 1950's, and she became a star in the jazz world.
When she was 4, her mother had her start piano lessons. In her teens she won a scholarship to Juilliard, but it was decided that living in New York would cost the family too much money; she studied classical music at Howard University in Washington instead.
She recalled that at 17, while she was playing classical music at a restaurant in Washington, a man appeared in front of her with a four-foot-tall turquoise teddy bear. "If you sing 'Melancholy Baby,"' he said, "I'll give you this bear." She did, and he did.
At the time Ms. Horn was shy and largely focused on classical music, but she often cited this as the moment when it dawned on her that if she overcame her reluctance to sing and to play jazz in public, she might be able to make a living at it. About her transition from classical to jazz, she liked to say: "I loved Rachmaninoff, but then Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninoff. And Ahmad Jamal became my Debussy."
From 1954, she led her own jazz trio in Washington. In 1960 she recorded her first album, "Embers and Ashes," for a small label called Stere-o-Craft. It was not widely heard, but Miles Davis heard it, and a year later he tracked down her telephone number in Washington and invited her to open for him at the Village Vanguard in New York. That exposure, plus the help of the jazz agent and manager John Levy, helped get her a contract with Mercury Records.
Mercury signed Ms. Horn as a singer, not a singer-pianist. Although some of the great piano-playing accompanists, including Hank Jones and Jimmy Jones, were hired to play on her records, and although "Loads of Love," from 1962, showcased her voice well -- she could sound like a quieter, subtler version of Dinah Washington -- the situation made her uncomfortable.
By the mid-1960's she had stopped touring and decided to restrict her performing to the Washington and Baltimore areas so she could spend more time at home raising her daughter, Rainy. From 1963 to 1978 she made only two records -- "Travelin' Light" for ABC-Paramount and "Where Are You Going?" for Perception. From 1978 to 1984, she recorded for the Danish label Steeplechase and slowly came back into the awareness of jazz fans.
In 1982, she played her first New York performance in more than 15 years, at Michael's Pub, and in 1986 she was signed by Verve. The company built up her career all over again over the course of 11 albums, including "You Won't Forget Me" (1990), which featured guest appearances by Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis; "I Remember Miles" (1998), which won a Grammy Award; and a few that featured string sections.
Ms. Horn's survivors include her husband, Sheppard Deering, of Upper Marlboro, Md.; her daughter, Rainy Smith, of Maryland; and several grandchildren.
Ms. Horn had been fighting breast cancer for some time when complications of diabetes led to the amputation of her right foot in 2002. For a few years she performed sitting in a chair and facing the audience directly, away from the piano, which was played by George Mesterhazy. But in her final performances in New York, a two-week stretch at Le Jazz Au Bar that started last Dec. 30, she was back at the piano again, with the help of a prosthetic device that helped her to use the instrument's sustain pedal.
Three of those performances will be released in October on a Verve anthology of her work, "But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102102057.html
Appreciation
The Innate Tempo Of Shirley Horn
by Richard Harrington
Washington Post
October 22, 2005
No one mined the depths of a lyric the way Shirley Horn did, with a whispery voice that conjured cashmere and cognac. You could lose yourself -- you couldn't not lose yourself -- as the lifelong Washingtonian's dusky alto crawled unhurriedly through time-tested standards and rediscovered treasures, tapestries of song embroidered with her own crisp chords and subtly spun piano filigrees.
Horn's trademark: exquisitely slow tempo and sensitively savored lyric, effortlessly melded. Heart and soul expressed at a piano bench.
Horn, who died Thursday night at 71 after a long illness, could swing a tune with the best of them, and often surprised fans when she did, but that approach simply didn't fit her temperament. Instead, Horn did ballads and cool, understated ruminations better than anyone except her first champion, mentor and lifelong friend, trumpeter Miles Davis. Both were masters of silence and anticipation, but even Davis teased Horn about her pacing. "You do 'em awful slow!" he once said.
Indicating the level of respect Davis had for Horn, the legend, then ailing, accompanied her on the title track of the 1990 album "You Won't Forget Me," the first time he'd recorded with a vocalist in four decades, and Davis did so in the long-abandoned lyrical style he'd defined in the '50s, shortly before he first discovered her. The two were talking about collaborating on an all-ballad album when Davis died the following year. Horn won her only Grammy for 1998's "I Remember Miles," dedicated to Davis.
Another sign of respect came from the great pianist Ahmad Jamal, who accompanied Horn on her penultimate album, 2003's "May the Music Never End." Jamal, one of Horn's early inspirations and models, and himself a master of minimalism, had, in his 55 years of recording, never accompanied a vocalist. But for the first time in her career, Horn was unable to accompany herself on record, the result of losing her right foot to complications from diabetes. It was a significant change, denying Horn use of her piano's expression pedal for controlling the instrument's sustain and quiet features that so defined her sound.
The last few years had been rough on Horn, as she dealt with arthritis and underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer. In June Horn suffered a stroke and had been hospitalized since.
Several years earlier, Horn had been forced to abandon the security of her piano bench and rethink her approach after her voice and piano could no longer be intimate extensions of each other. Last December, just before a brief appearance at a Kennedy Center concert honoring her, Horn seemed weary but as quietly determined as ever, insisting: "I've tried to keep things as level as possible through this whole thing. I'm cool. I know what I have to do: I'm never going to give up the piano, I'm never going to stop singing till God says, 'I called your number.' "
Horn was at times reflective, at times wry, and on occasion caustic and cantankerous. She expressed frustration with the music business, particularly that such pianist-singers as Norah Jones and Diana Krall didn't acknowledge her as the influence she clearly heard herself to be. Motoring around her house in a wheelchair dubbed "the Cadillac" (the fancier "Jaguar" was reserved for concerts), Horn would proudly point to assorted honors, including last year's Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts. But she also seemed frustrated, reduced to performing only a concert or two a month, backed by pianist George Mesterhazy. "I can't get into the music," she said. "I just get lost."
In recent concerts, she managed to find both humor and pathos singing Paul McCartney's "Yesterday," lending multiple meanings to the line "I'm not half the girl I used to be."
So much about Shirley Horn was glacially slow, from her delivery of a song to the acclamation that came late in her career. You can't really make time stand still, but Horn managed an approximation, insisting that ballads were meant to be played slow, the better to understand the power of the story being told and the emotion of the lyric under exploration.
Horn started studying piano and composition at Howard University's School of Music when she was 12, with dreams of a career in classical music. But the realities of racism in the '40s precluded that possibility, and by the late '40s she'd become immersed in the thriving jazz scene around 14th and U streets NW. Debussy and Rachmaninoff gave way to Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Erroll Garner and Jamal. The girl piano player began to make an impression in local clubs, but even after forming her first trio in 1954, Horn was not one to advance herself.
In fact, that Horn came to sing at all was part accident -- a patron bribed her to sing "Melancholy Baby" -- and part pragmatism: A club owner gave Horn a raise on the condition that she keep singing.
That Miles Davis became a fan via Horn's 1960 debut album, "Embers and Ashes," was part miracle: few copies were manufactured and they were hard to find. Yet Davis managed to and became smitten, playing it so much at home that his kids could sing along to it. A year later, he invited Horn to open for him at the Village Vanguard, though that opportunity almost passed. When he called her and made the offer, Horn didn't believe it was really Davis. She hung up. But Davis sent her a train ticket to New York, and she went.
It could have been a breakthrough moment, but in the end, it was only a moment. Quincy Jones, who was in the opening-night crowd, would produce a pair of Horn albums in the early '60s but miscast her as a stand-up singer, denying her the comfort of accompanying herself in the trio format in which she was so adept. "Nobody knows how to play for me except me," she would complain. "I need to hear my own chords and set my own tempo."
Wider recognition didn't arrive until 1986, when she signed with Verve and began a string of critically acclaimed albums that garnered nine straight Grammy nominations.
Horn never pursued a career with the single-mindedness of such peers as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae or Betty Carter -- she simply wasn't as driven or hard-nosed or forceful. But Horn's records drew stellar guests, and she performed around the world as her health allowed. In the end, Shirley Horn's life was much like her song: She got as much music as possible out of every precious note, and in so doing made each note that much more precious.
Last December, looking back on her life, Horn suggested that she never had a choice in the matter: "I think when I was born, it's like God said, 'Music!,' and that was it. All my life, that's all I knew. It's in me, it's jammed up and it's got to come out."
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Shirley_Horn.aspx
Shirley Horn
Shirley Horn 1934–
Jazz singer, pianist
Played Piano in Grandma’s Chilly Parlor
Discovered by Miles Davis
Focused on Family, Carpentry, and Cooking
Stronger Than Ever
Honored Davis and Was Honored in Turn
Selected discography
Sources
“Songs are lucky when Shirley Horn chooses them,” wrote New York Times jazz critic John Parelis, according to www.npr.org. Horn started as a child playing the big, old piano in her grandmother’s parlor and grew to become a classically-trained pianist whom Miles Davis once called his favorite singer. According to Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, Horn possessed a “distinctive timbre and unhurried pace,” which, combined with her “subtle” work on the piano, “make for a singularly effective style.” After a two-decade break from the spotlight, Horn relaunched her career in 1988 and has remained successful since. Well into her sixties, Horn continues to tour and record music for the Verve record label. With 22 albums to her name, seven Grammy nominations, and a Grammy award, Horn maintained a tireless passion for her art, “I just want to get the music right,” she told Essence.
Played Piano in Grandma’s Chilly Parlor
Born on May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C., Horn remembered playing her grandmother’s piano when she was four years old. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was a government worker. Uninterested in playing with the neighborhood children, Horn wanted nothing than to play that piano, and would close herself off in her grandmother’s parlor, which was kept for guests and was chillier than the rest of the house. After several years of this, her mother, who admired classical music, enrolled the girl in piano lessons.
Horn was surrounded by music in her family, and admitted the majority of the songs in her repertoire are those she heard while she was growing up. She played with a choir, at Sunday school, and won a talent contest and 13-week radio engagement at age 13. Horn studied piano and composition at Howard University Junior School of Music, in Washington, from age 12 to age 18. She won a scholarship to Juilliard School of Music in New York City, but enrolled instead as a music major at Howard University, due to financial limitations.
At a Glance…
Born on May 1, 1934, in Washington, DC; married Shep Deering (a mechanic), c. 1955; children: Rainy. Education: Howard University Junior School of Music, studied composition, c. 1946–50; studied six years privately.
Career: Jazz vocalist and pianist. Performed in restaurants and nightclubs in Washington, DC, c. 1951; formed first jazz trio, 1954; released debut album, Embers and Ashes, 1959; performed throughout the DC-Baltimore, MD, area until 1980s; toured and recorded with jazz artists Miles Davis, Branford Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis, and Toots Thielemans, among others; performed in the United States and abroad at prestigious jazz venues; debuted in Paris, and at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1991.
Awards: Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline, Mayor of Washington, DC, 1987; Billie Holiday award, Academie Du Jazz, France, 1990; Edison Populair HR57 Award, for Here’s to Life, 1993; elected to Lionel Hampton Jail Hall of Fame, 1996; honored by the president of ASCAP, 1998; Grammy award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, for / Remember Miles, 1998; Phineas Newborn Jr. Award, 1999; five Wammy awards; voted Number One female vocalist, New York Jazz Critics Awards; Number One jazz vocalist,DownBeat Critics’ Poll.
Addresses: Record company —Verve Records, 1755 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Website— Official Verve Website, http://www.vervemusicgroup.com.
Horn, saying it was hers if she would only sing the classic “Melancholy Baby.” So the trained pianist was forced into singing. “I was very shy and it was hard for me to sing,” Horn said in her Verve biography, “but I wanted that teddy bear.” Horn realized she could earn more money as a vocalist, but continued to play piano and to develop her singing and playing skills, and formed her own trio in 1954. “[Horn] fuses voice and piano into a single expression,” lyricist and writer Joel Siegel told National Public Radio (NPR).
Discovered by Miles Davis
Her marriage at age 21 to Shep Deering, a mechanic, put a damper on her musical career, and Horn performed live only around Washington, and nearby Baltimore, Maryland areas. She released her first recording, Embers and Ashes, on the small Stereo-Craft record label in 1961. The album went mostly unnoticed, but caught the attention of legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, who tracked Horn down and invited her to New York to open for him at the Village Vanguard. Davis threw his weight around with the club’s owner to get the unknown Horn on the bill—he swore that he would not play if Horn was not allowed to perform. Davis drew a high-brow crowd to the shows, which included Charles Mingus, Sidney Poitier, and Lena Home, who all became lifelong fans of Horn’s.
Horn and Davis, known for his disdain for most vocalists, were drawn together by their very similar approach to music. Both artists “are recognized for their use of space—long silences between notes—to create a certain tension, particularly when doing ballads,” according to the NPR profile of Horn found online at www.npr.org. The style creates a kind of “suspense,” according to Siegel. Though the two diverged musically throughout the 1960s, Davis remained a close friend and mentor of Horn’s until his death in 1991.
Horn recorded Shirley Horn with Horns and Loads of Love with producer Quincy Jones for the Mercury record label. Mercury wanted Horn to focus on her vocal skills, and she had been signed as a vocalist, so a studio musician played piano on the recordings. The arrangement was not right for Horn, who would have preferred to play the music herself. If she had had more control, she also may have chosen slower arrangements of the songs than Jones did, a signature she developed in her later years.
Focused on Family, Carpentry, and Cooking
After her Mercury contract ran out in the early 1960s, Horn went into semi-retirement and retreated back to Washington, DC, to raise her daughter, Rainy. She continued to play live shows locally with her own trio, which included Charles Able on bass and Steve Williams on drums. Though she recorded a few albums during this time, including Travelin’ Light, A Lazy Afternoon, Violets for Your Furs, At Northsea, All Night Long, and Garden of the Blues, Horn remained out of the spotlight for the better part of 25 years. A dedicated wife, mother, and homemaker, Horn was a skilled handywoman and cook. “When I am not packing and unpacking my bags, I’m basically a homebody who is just as comfortable standing over a stove or hammering a nail as I am playing a piano,” she told DownBeat.
Horn experienced a tremendous surge in her career in the 1980s. In 1986, at the suggestion of producer Richard Seidel, the prestigious Verve record label signed Horn and her trio to a recording contract. Horn’s comeback with Verve was a live album, I Thought About You, recorded at the Vine St. Bar and Grill in Hollywood with Able and Williams and released in 1987.
The second phase of Horn’s career proved to be her most glorious. Close Enough for Love, Horn’s studio debut for Verve, was released in 1988 and officially marked Horn’s return to the jazz limelight. It did not take long for jazz fans to turn to Horn for her distinctive vocals and solid jazz skills on piano. Her audience grew quickly after these first two releases for Verve. Extensive touring in the United States and abroad at prestigious jazz venues consolidated her growing popularity, and Horn’s Paris and Carnegie Hall debuts, both in 1991, were proof that Horn was back and better than ever.
Stronger Than Ever
Almost thirty years after their first pairing, Horn and Miles Davis appeared together again on her 1990 Verve release, You Won’t Forget Me. Davis played trumpet alongside guests Wynton and Branford Marsalis. Horn then began working with arranger Johnny Mandel.
She trusted Mandel “implicitly” the first time she met him, according to liner notes from You’re My Thrill. The two worked together for the first time on 1991’s Here’s to Life, on which Mandel paired Horn with a string section and orchestra for the first time. Ables and Williams accompanied Horn again on the collection of mostly slow ballads that play off Horn’s instinct for improvisation and chord voicing. Mandel won a Best Arrangement Grammy award for his work on the recording.
A seasoned live performer, Horn was especially fond of European audiences. She recorded her album, I Love You, Paris, live in France at the famed Theatre du Chatelet. The audience proved particularly fond of Horn, as well. “They were so quiet that I was glad when someone coughed,” she told DownBeat, “because it let me know somebody was out there …. I am at a loss to explain this adoration and why I’m so popular.”
Billboard reported in 1995 that Horn was getting back to the old days of jazz to record an upcoming album, The Main Ingredient. Rather than record at a studio, Horn convinced Verve to let her do the work in her own home, in the spirit of the old jazz sessions, where musicians would drop by for informal jazz sessions and dinner parties that lasted through the night. Jazz players like Buck Hill and Steve Novosel were among those who showed up at Horn’s door for good food and good music, which was recorded by a Big Mo Studios’ mobile recording studio parked in her driveway. The group of Horn’s friends, old and new, recorded a blend of ballads and jumping, uptempo songs. On the mellow end were the Hal David/Burt Bacharach tune “The Look of Love,” a slowed version of Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” and the Melissa Manchester tearjerker “Come in From the Rain.” On the uptempo side, they captured Fats Waller’s “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now,” “Blues for Sarge,” and “All or Nothing at All.” The result was classic Horn, “once again succeeding admirably in giving favorite songs an easygoing beauty,” according to DownBeat.
Honored Davis and Was Honored in Turn
Horn was able to salute her friend and mentor, Miles Davis, on 1998’s I Remember Miles. “Full of real warmth and obvious admiration,” wrote critic Ralph Novak in People, “singer-pianist Horn’s latest album is more informed than the usual tribute.” Besides being personally close, the two musicians’ approaches to jazz were quite similar. “Horn’s minimalist affinities with Miles are so obvious,” wrote Paul de Barros in Down Beat, de Barros found it surprising she had not recording something like it before. Horn took on Davis’s renditions of “My Funny Valentine,” “Summertime,” “I’ve Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” “Basin Street Blues,” and “Blue In Green.” The mood Horn created on the record was so complete, so true to Davis, de Barros continued, that “the project makes you shiver.” The album won a Grammy award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance in 1998.
In addition to her Grammy and seven additional Grammy nominations, Horn has received many honors and accolades throughout her career. She was awarded the Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline by the mayor of Washington, D.C., in 1987, the Academie Du Jazz’s Billie Holiday Award France in 1990, and the Edison Populair HR57 Award for Here’s to Life in 1993. She was elected to the Lionel Hampton Hall of Fame in 1996 and was honored by the president of the ASCAP in 1998. She has received five Wammys, the Washington area’s music industry award, and has been voted Number One female vocalist in the New York Jazz Critics Awards and Number One jazz vocalist in Down Beat magazine’s Critics’ Poll.
In 1999 Horn was honored by an impressive array of jazz musicians at New York’s Merkin Hall, where she received the Phineas Newborn, Jr. Award for her lifelong contributions to jazz. Those honoring her included pianist Marian McPartland, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Yoron Israel. “Shirley picks beautiful songs and knows how to perform them,” McPartland told Down Beat. “I’ve never known anyone that could do a ballad that slowly and keep it musical, keep it happening.” Carrie Smith, Russell Malone, John Hicks, David Williams, Jon Faddis, and Etta Jones, among many others, also performed.
One year into the new millennium, at the age of 67, Horn released her eighth Verve recording, You’re My Thrill. A decade after they first worked together, Mandel rejoined Horn as arranger, and Abies and Williams completed Horn’s standard trio. After 29 years with Abies and 21 with Williams, Horn treasured her relationship with the two. “It takes time,” she told Down Beat, “to find the right musicians. Sometimes we are so close when we play that we are moving as one. That kind of unity is so rare. It’s magic.” Together, they alternated “lush orchestral pieces” with “vibrant small-group tunes,” wrote critic Philip Booth in Down Beat. “I Got Lost In His Arms,” “My Heart Stood Still,” “The Very Thought Of You,” “The Best Is Yet To Come,” “The Rules Of The Road,” and “Why Don’t You Do Right?” were among the album’s highlights, though “There’s a certain assured musical sophistication that defines everything Shirley Horn touches,” Booth continued. Critic Lynn Norment declared in Ebony that Horn “is the premier jazz balladeer.”
Selected discography:
Embers and Ashes, Stereo-Craft, 1961.
Live at the Village Vanguard, Can-Am, 1961.
Shirley Horn with Horns, Mercury, 1963.
Loads of Love, Mercury, 1963.
Travelin’ Light, ABC/Paramount, 1965.
A Lazy Afternoon, Steeple Chase, 1978.
Violets for Your Furs, Steeple Chase, 1981.
At Northsea, Steeple Chase, 1981.
All Night Long, Steeple Chase, 1981.
Garden of the Blues, Steeple Chase, 1984.
I Thought About You [live], Verve, 1987.
Softly, Audiophile, 1987.
Close Enough for Love, Verve, 1988.
You Won’t Forget Me, Verve, 1990.
Shirley Horn with Strings, Verve, 1991.
Here’s to Life, Verve, 1991.
I Love You, Paris [live], Verve, 1992.
Light out of Darkness, Verve, 1993.
The Main Ingredient, Verve, 1995.
Loving You, Verve, 1997.
I Remember Miles, Verve, 1998.
You’re My Thrill, Verve, 2001.
Sources
Books
Carney Smith, Jessie, editor, Notable Black American Women, Gale Research, 1999.
Cook, Richard, and Morton, Brian, Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, Penguin Books, 2000.JIG
Erlewine, Michael, editor, All Music Guide to Jazz, OM Miller Freeman, 1998.U
Feather, Leonard, and Gitler, Ira, Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Periodicals
Billboard, June 10, 1995, p. 68.
Down Beat, November 1994, p. 26; June 1996, p. 46; July 1998, p. 60; September 1998, p. 23; May 1999, p. 18; May 2001, p. 72.
Ebony, March 2001, p. 162.
Essence, August 2001, p. 60.
Interview, March 2001, p. 142.
People, June 15, 1998, p. 43.
U.S. News and World Reports, March 19, 2001, p. 62.
Online
All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (September 24, 2001).
National Public Radio Online, http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/shorn.html (September 24, 2001).
Other
Additional information was provided by Verve publicity materials and liner notes from You’re My Thrill.
—Brenna Sanchez
http://jazztimes.com/articles/20248-shirley-horn-around-the-horn-with-shirley
Shirley Horn: Around the Horn with Shirley
by Lara Pellegrinelli
Aside from a boat-sized Cadillac moored in the driveway, the white stucco house in Northeast Washington, D.C., betrays few signs of its occupants. No lights shine, inside or out. Metal bars guard first-story windows with heavy curtains drawn beneath. Grating protects a locked front door. All is quiet, the narrow street deserted on this chilly winter evening, and even the doorbell cannot be heard from the porch outside. It is impossible to tell if anyone is home.
Only after minutes pass does someone answer the door, a lanky older man with tousled gray hair. “She’s in there,” he offers gruffly, pointing back and over his shoulder. “Shirley!”
Noise from a distant television leads to the back of the sprawling house and the kitchen, where Shirley Horn sits looking at sitcoms across a boxy wooden table. “Hello,” she smiles, shifting her focus just slightly. An old scarf covers her hair, save a single curl in the middle of her forehead. Her housecoat hangs open, with several safety pins dangling from uncooperative snaps. Tiny pink rosebuds cover new white gardening gloves worn on both hands. Her lipstick is flawless.
She made some pleasant small talk about her comings and goings, but dropped in a comment meant to deter frivolous inquiries. “You know, you’ve got all the stories,” she purrs hopefully. “Do I have to go back to when I was born?”
Clearly, no is the right answer. And, to be honest, the basic outline of Horn’s career has been told and retold, beginning with her “discovery” by Miles Davis in 1960. As if on cue, Horn growls in imitation of Davis’s harsh whisper: “If she don’t play, I ain’t gonna play,” she repeats, a gleam in her eyes. Evidently Davis had been so taken with Horn’s first album, Embers and Ashes, that he refused to work at the Village Vanguard without her. When faced with this ballsy tactic, club owner Max Gordon conceded and hired her to open for him.
Another celebrated anecdote relates why the young Horn, a classically trained pianist, started singing in the first place. “It was getting close to Christmas and he sent a note up there,” she recalls, describing a polite gentleman customer. He frequented the Merryland Supper Club where she played light classical pieces after school. “He said, ‘If you sing “Melancholy Baby,” this teddy bear is yours.’ Child, I sang two choruses.”
Such familiar standbys may represent pivotal moments in her career, yet precious few articles have probed deeper questions or deviated from basic reportage on her recent activities. Fewer still present Horn in her own words at length, the voice only familiar to audiences in song. She says she doesn’t like to talk about herself—perhaps preempting less than wholehearted attempts to garner her stories—nor does she particularly care for the day-to-day business surrounding and promoting her work, like the new You’re My Thrill! (Verve).
“It’s always something,” she sighs with discontent. “The new record’s coming out and there’s a whole lot of stuff to do with that. Interviews. Photographs. That’s the hard part. But I’d never give it up. I couldn’t. I’m driven. You know, music is my life. Without it, I would perish. The first thing I remember in my life is being about three years old, almost four, going to my grandmother’s parlor and playing this big old piano.”
Finally, an opening had presented itself for a seemingly innocent question: “Your grandmother played piano?”
“She played piano and organ, by ear,” Horn replies. “Mama [her grandmother] played hymns in church. She was a really short thing and it was hard for her to reach the pedals on the organ. After I got married, whenever I had a party with my friends, she’d come over and play the piano at the party. All my musician friends loved her. She was a dear lady.
“And she told my mother to give me piano lessons. I was only four years old—I couldn’t read or write—but this man took me: Mr. Fletcher, I even remember his name. Maybe he’s still living? Well, he took me as far as he could. But by the time I was about 11 years old, my uncle, who was a very rich doctor here in town, went to Howard University and started the junior school of music because there were no teachers left who could teach me anything. I went to school and then I went to Howard University every day. It wasn’t anything like it is now. I had to get on the streetcar and go up to the university to this old house. They had a building, a special building that had the Steinway piano.”
She talks quietly, pausing here and there to keep the facts straight. “The teacher I remember there most is Dr. Frances Hughes,” she goes on after a minute of thought. “I’ll never forget her. I was afraid of her at first, but I respected her because she was a positive teacher. You know what I mean? She started me right off with Chopin. Didn’t give me any little dingle-ingle-ingle stuff. And I loved it.
“Well, I was in that junior school of music at Howard from 12, 13, 14, until I was 18,” she counts. “Then I got the scholarships—one from Xavier and from Juilliard—but my mother wasn’t going to let me go anywhere, you know. My father said, ‘Okay,’ but my mother said, ‘No, you can’t go to Juilliard.’ There was no one living in Manhattan for me to stay with. That was a no no.” Had Horn attended, she would have overlapped with singer/pianist Nina Simone and organist Trudy Pitts.
As we sit opposite each other, smoke from Horn’s cigarette rises like a veil before her soft hazel eyes. Not only does she speak quietly, she speaks slowly. Somehow, though, having accepted her pace, having entered her sense of time, it does not feel slow. Rather, it seems suspended. Silence punctuates her sentences—the same governing of space that brokered her relationship with Miles Davis. It assumes musical properties here as well. Her phrases echo, imparting their words with deeper meaning or at least a moment in which to contemplate them. Some cast long shadows.
Would Julliard have significantly changed Horn’s life, her work? No one can know. But her family proved essential in shaping her musical path. Since her toddler’s steps to her grandmother’s piano, the two have always been intimately connected.
“It was mostly about her baby going away,” she reasons in hindsight. “I have no regrets. I was a baby. I was kept close to home. My mother, she was there for me. I never had to open a door to come in by myself or anything. She was there with the food for me and I loved her dearly. That’s what’s wrong with a lot of situations now. There is no mother at home.”
Although she had excelled at her musical education, her parents’ expectations did not exceed what would be typical for their daughter in the 1950s. “Mother thought I was going to wait a few years and then go out and get married; that’s what she was hoping. But that wasn’t on my mind. That’s the first man I ever dated,” she says, indicating her husband, Shep Deering. He had been wandering in and out of the room since he first deposited me in the kitchen. “Been married to him all these years. He’s like a father. We got married in—’56? I forget, and he gets so mad. And I grew up in those next four years because I was free from my mother. That’s a shame to say that. She was very, very, strict.
“I knew how to handle boys. I’ve got two younger brothers. They were pests, both of them. My father was quiet like me and didn’t go for any noise. In high school, I really got a name because I only associated with the musicians, who were just about all guys. There was one girl, brilliant violinist. She went on to study. Went to New York, got pregnant and came home. What a shame.”
The cordless phone rings from where it had been standing upright on the glass tabletop. Horn utters an apology as she scoops it up, narrowly missing a napkin holder stuffed with receipts and loose slips of paper. The kitchen clearly forms a center of activity. “I’m sorry, I have to do this. Hello? Yeah, babe. I just called your name. Called you a pest.” Her tone switches to that of the teasing older sister. But she soon lets her younger sibling off the hook. “Listen, are you home? I’ll call you back. Okay, baby. Bye.
“That was my youngest brother, who lives around my mother’s old house right there,” she explains, pointing over her shoulder to the right. “And my oldest aunt’s house is right there. I’ve lived here all my life in Washington, D.C., in the Northeast area. I never wanted to live anywhere else. I love to live here. Close to my family and everything.” For much of the 1960s and ’70s, Horn performed only locally, sticking close to home and the little girl she raised. Daughter Rainey also lives a stone’s throw away with her husband and their two nearly grown boys. She called about 20 minutes later. “Hello?” Horn answered. “This is your mother. Yes it is.” Like there could really be any doubt.
As Horn thinks back to the home where she grew up, she mentions that she never sang around the house. “No, I just played the piano. But the singing came because my mother sang all the time. She wasn’t a vocalist, but she sang around the house. I knew the songs because I was always listening to her sing. And my mother put on the best records. None of this juggity-juggity-juggity stuff. The Basie band and Ellington; all the good singers. That’s what I heard. My people loved Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, right? Dinah Washington.
“Why didn’t I want to sing before? I was just shy around people my own age. I was mousy, I guess. A mama’s child. I didn’t have any girlfriends. But I was the first one to get ready to go fishin’ at four o’clock in the morning. And I had two uncles who just adored me. I was kind of the favorite in the family
because I played the piano. ‘Don’t you want to play like your cousin Shirley?’ All the little cousins had to take lessons and they hated me. But I hung out with my uncles and they were all builders.” Evidence of Horn’s formidable handiwork—she learned carpentry early as well—can be found at every turn in and outside of the house: a carport sheltering the Caddy; the piano room in which she parked her Steinway D; the very table at which we sat.
If she sometimes gives the impression that she led a lonely, almost patrician existence, Horn had her outlets, too. By her later teens, she started sneaking out to go to jam sessions and sit in. She would head down to places like the 7th and T Lounge around the corner from the old Howard Theater. There she met tenor saxophonist Buck Hill, a frequent guest on later albums. “I used to go and try to sit in and the only person who was nice to me was Buck. The bass player would say, ‘Oh, here she comes again. Umm hmm.’ I did what I could do. I got over my fear of singing. But I was fresh out of the classics.” She eventually wound up with a steady gig there and other clubs around town such as the Bohemian Caverns, now recently reopened.
“I just knew, ‘I got to play that piano,’ right?” she says, describing how she acquired her jazz chops. “Then I got interested in Erroll Garner and started listening to him. I knew his things note for note. And slowly I learned. I met Stuff Smith. He was in Washington and came to hear me all the time. And he knew my father—my father’s also from St. Louis. He’d come to the house. He always smelled like cigars. But he’d play that violin and people’d sit out front. Mother used to ask, ‘Mr. Smith, would you go? It’s 11 o’clock.’ That was late. But he would pack up his things. And he’d come back ‘cause mother would feed him, you know. And as I grew up, I got to know him better.”
In fact, she made her earliest recording under his leadership: Cat on a Hot Fiddle (1959), reissued for the first time on The Complete Verve Stuff Smith Sessions by Mosaic. She played and sang on the all-Gershwin affair, also accompanying Smith’s one novelty vocal, “Somebody Loves Me.” Her current performances remain stylistically consistent with these beginnings: well-placed block chords complement mellow, spare melodic lines.
Unfortunately, Horn’s playing was falsely credited to pianist John Eaton on the original release, the correction only made with the recent reissue. “I don’t know if I want to hear that again or not because that brings back terrible memories for me,” she says, remembering the disappointment and frustration. “I’d been taken advantage of.”
As she looked through the set’s accompanying booklet, Horn stares at an old photo showing Smith with bassist John Levy and pianist Jimmy Jones. “Is that John Levy?” she asks with surprise. He would become her manager around that time. “It sure is. Isn’t that somethin’. He still looks the same. Sharp dresser. Ah! This is Jimmy Jones. They all played together. Oh, Lord. That’s old stuff. I first got to know Jimmy Jones through his music accompanying Sarah Vaughan. Jimmy Jones played piano like an angel. I’d sit down and sing with him anytime. I think he was only with me once. And I fell in love with him immediately.
“Right now, John Levy is 87 years old. He just wrote an autobiography. I’m gonna check the book,” she teases, implying he’d better have minded his p’s and q’s. “He came to see me right after Miles. John Levy had Cannonball Adderley—first Joe Williams—Nancy Wilson, Wes Montgomery. Hey, he was a big man. All the guys loved him. Number one, he knew music. He was a bass player. John played with George Shearing. And [because he was blind] George couldn’t read contracts, so John started doing the contracts and stopped playing the bass. That’s how he got started.
“See, John Levy heard the first record that I did. It was called Embers and Ashes. And he came to Washington to see who Jimmy Jones was playing for, and there I am, you know. Still, a lot of times people call and ask, ‘Uh, who’s playing piano for you?’ And I laugh. They take out big ads: Shirley Horn and Her Trio. That’s four people!
“John introduced himself to me. Then later he called. ‘Ms. Horn, would you like to come to New York?’ And I said, ‘Well, Mr. Levy, what for?’ He said, ‘You want to record with Quincy Jones?’ ‘Yeah, I’d like to record for Quincy Jones’ [then the A & R man for Mercury Records]. He said, ‘Write a list of songs you’d like to record.’ That’s beautiful. ‘Cause anybody else would have said we want you to record this and this and this and that and that. But here’s the big thing that happened when I got there: ‘You need to stand up.’ They wanted to turn me into a stand-up singer! But I couldn’t get away from that piano.”
The relationships Horn developed with Levy, Quincy Jones and Jimmy Jones resulted in two albums: Loads of Love and Horn With Horns (1963). Jimmy Jones wrote the arrangements for Loads of Love, scoring them for strings, reeds and brass. He accompanied her for two tracks and, by her recollection, also sat in for a couple on Horn With Horns. The pianists hired for the two dates were Hank Jones and Bobby Scott, respectively. At the time, few notable singer/pianists would have accompanied themselves, either in performance or on record.
“After a concert, Carmen [McRae] might sit down and do one song by herself on piano. Sarah [Vaughan] was a bad pianist. Dinah [Washington] was the baddest; Sarah was next. They had a knowledge of the piano, you know. But the record companies, they wanted somebody to stand up and sing. I heard somewhere they were pushing Nat [Cole] to do that. And that’s what Mercury wanted with me. Stand up! Piano playing is secondary. Piano player’s just one of the band. I didn’t—I couldn’t handle anyone playing for me. Because they don’t hear what’s up here and you have no way of knowing what’s going on up here with me,” she points out, her index finger thumping her temple. “I’m my best accompanist. I always know where I’m going.”
Horn decides she needs a glass of water and break. This leads her to ask some of the questions for a change: “Are you hungry?”
“A little bit,” I say.
Shep had come back in the room. “What’s in the refrigerator?” she grills him. “Well, what did we have yesterday? Oh, we had pig feet. You don’t eat pig feet, do you?” Her question is met with wide eyes. That would be a no. She and Shep chuckle. “Etta Jones was in town. See, every time she does a show, we get together here and we cook those big pig feet. Then Etta, a couple of girlfriends and I, we sit around and talk stuff and drink liquor and carry on.
“I don’t have any meat cooked. You like salami? Okay, well that’s a start. You like potato rolls? Turnip greens? Okay, why don’t you make her a sandwich?” she says, enlisting Shep’s help. He, no doubt, surveyed this scene with amusement. “Do that. Some greens and a salami sandwich. Do you like mustard or mayonnaise on a salami sandwich?”
“On salami, mustard.”
“Salami mustard?” queries Shep smartly. “Never heard of salami mustard.”
“Yeah, get the plate out and make the sandwich. He gives me no respect!” she kids. “We’re not recording now, right?”
The greens arrive first, with some malt vinegar on the side. The construction of the sandwich somehow takes longer. When it arrives, the half moons of salami faced in the opposite direction as their potato roll counterparts hang out the sides. It was still tasty.
“You know, it’s been so busy. I should have fixed you a nice meal. Well, next time. You can come back again. I’ve had some here—this guy came in to interview me: ‘Where were you born?’ ‘Why were you born?’ God damn it! Why? It’s very rare that I get someone who’s writing about the music. That’s what it’s all about. ‘She smokes a lot.’ Somebody wrote that. What difference does it make? And oh, I was hard to get along with one time. Damn right!
“One woman wanted to know ‘Did you and Miles Davis have an affair?’” Horn mimicked the journalist’s voice, projecting an unfortunate combination of nerve and curiosity. “Can you believe it? I wanted to tell her yes, you know? It was stupid, so I just smiled at her. Some of the stuff I have here just tears me up.”
Horn speaks fondly of Davis and the early days she spent in New York at the Vanguard. “I worked six days a week, I don’t remember how many weeks,” she begins. “It was like being in a fantasyland because every night there was something to look forward to: seeing another person’s face I had on a record. Miles would introduce me to all these people.
“See, that’s when I lived to go to work. I learned about swinging. And I learned that from Wynton Kelly and Philly Joe Jones. Paul [Chambers] wasn’t around long after I got there. They knew how to swing. You could just feel it. Lord have mercy. You would get down on your knees. I can’t remember what they were playing because I was somewhere else—a little piece of heaven.”
One night, Kelly deftly convinced her to take his place. “Wynton said, ‘I hurt my hand! Sit in with me for a minute.’ He was playing a blues. I’m sitting right in front and he fooled me. So, I went up there and got behind the guys. And everybody applauded. ‘Oh, Lord, what am I going to do?’ But I finally brightened up. Miles wanted me to do the second tune and then I had to come off. There was nobody against me, but I was scared, simple as that. Everybody on the stage was a giant. Everybody in the audience, I know from records. I felt too much pressure.”
She shakes her head when asked why Davis didn’t particularly care for singers. “I don’t know. A lot of singers wanted him,” is her rationalization. “He didn’t talk nicely about singers at all, you know. He liked to listen to me just sing a song. It’s something about the way I use space. He’d sit for a long time. Part of me was gone when he died; he was so dear. We loved each other. We loved the person in the music. And he left me! Jive turkey. Did you know he was going to record some more songs with me?” Davis appeared on perhaps her most exquisite album, You Won’t Forget Me (Verve; 1991), and she paid him fitting tribute with I Remember Miles (Verve; 1998).
What, strangely, does she remember about the time spent outside the club, her first extended stay in New York? “I looked at television. I cooked. Yeah, I cook in hotels, honey! I’ve been staying in this one place for 17 years and they know I’m gonna cook greens.” When Horn needs to be far away, she makes herself feel at home. “And I don’t like to go out during the day. If I want to have something to eat, I want to be quiet someplace and look at my stories. You know I look at The Young and the Restless. Yes, indeed. As the World Turns, The Bold and the Beautiful, Guiding Light.”
The soap opera habit may actually have some relevance, too. With about 40 years of regular viewing under her belt, the daytime devotee may have picked up some tricks of the trade and put them to work in her songs. “I’ve done a lot of heartbreaking songs and I have not lived what I sing,” she states. The muted TV is on all this time in the background. “I’m a good actress. And I didn’t have to beat doors down and pound the streets of New York to get into this business. I was brought in on a carpet. There’s Quincy Jones, Miles Davis, John Levy. Who else do you need?
“I came from a loving family. My mother and father loved each other and I saw a lot of love. All my life I’ve just felt like I was in my family’s arms. But I’m an emotional person and I love people. I love hard. So, if I haven’t been in that situation, I can imagine somebody else going through whatever the story is all about. Sometimes in San Fransisco, we do Yoshi’s and they come in and they cry and I feel bad. ‘Come on, don’t do that.’ But they’re all happy and eyes tearin’ and snottin’ and all that when they leave.” She has her more lighthearted moments as well.
“You tired of me runnin’ my mouth yet?” she purrs hopefully. Clearly, no is the right answer. The last question of the evening has finally come. The once reluctant storyteller seems like she is ready to field questions on at least a few more decades, but she has worn out her interviewer.
It is now pitch black outside, and the gentle lady of the house turns on the lights, opens the door and expresses her wishes for a safe journey home.
http://www.manythings.org/voa/people/Shirley_Horn.html
Shirley Horn, 1934-2005:
One of the Great Jazz Singers of '50s and '60s
I'm Faith Lapidus. And I'm Steve Ember with PEOPLE IN AMERICA IN VOA Special English. Today we tell about jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn.
Shirley Horn was considered one of the great jazz singers of the nineteen fifties and sixties. She was often compared to the famous singers Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. She performed for more than fifty years.
Shirley Horn's voice was smooth and expressive, but never hurried. She was one of the slowest singers in jazz. When she sang a song, she wanted the audience to feel it in the same way she did. She had a small voice. But her songs had a big effect.
Here, Shirley Horn sings her popular song "You're My Thrill."
Shirley Horn was born in Washington, D.C. in nineteen thirty-four. She lived all her life in and around Washington. Shirley began taking piano lessons when she was four years old. Her mother recognized her skill and love for the instrument.
Shirley Horn said most of the songs she performed were ones she grew up with. She said her family loved music and there was always music by the greatest singers and bands playing in her home. Horn said she lived for music. She said it was like food and water to her.
Shirley Horn studied classical music as a teenager. When she was seventeen, she had a chance to attend the famous Juilliard School in New York City. But financial difficulties prevented her from going. Instead, she studied classical music at Howard University in Washington.
Shirley Horn had planned to have a career playing classical music on the piano. But she said all that changed after she began going to jazz clubs in Washington. She said she was influenced by some of the greatest jazz artists, such as Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal.
When asked about her change from classical music to jazz, she would later say: "I loved Rachmaninoff, but then Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninoff. And Ahmad Jamal became my Debussy."
Horn did not plan to be a singer. She said it happened by accident when she was seventeen and playing classical music on the piano at a restaurant. A man offered to give her a huge toy teddy bear if she would sing the song "Melancholy Baby." Although she had never sung in public before, she agreed. She later realized that she could make a living singing and playing jazz. Here she sings the famous song by Cole Porter, "Love for Sale."
In nineteen fifty-four, Shirley Horn began to sing jazz in clubs and started her own jazz group. In nineteen sixty, she recorded her first album, called "Embers and Ashes." The album did not get a lot of attention. But the famous jazz musician, Miles Davis, heard it. He liked it so much that he invited Horn to play music with him in New York City. She sang as the opening act before his performance at New York's Village Vanguard nightclub. Davis had refused to play unless the club owner let Horn sing. Shirley Horn and Miles Davis developed a close friendship over the years. Here she sings and he plays the trumpet on the song "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying."
Shirley Horn's performance with Miles Davis in New York led to a record deal with Mercury Records. She was soon performing around the United States. She also recorded with Quincy Jones and other top musicians. But Horn soon left Mercury Records because of creative differences. She wanted to play the piano on all her recordings, but the record company did not agree.
Shirley Horn stopped performing around the country in the nineteen sixties so she could spend more time at home with her husband and daughter. She played at local nightclubs in the Washington area during the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Shirley Horn rebuilt her career in the nineteen eighties. She began performing more widely at jazz festivals and concerts around the world and received strong praise. In nineteen eighty- seven, she signed a record deal with Verve Records and remained with the record company for the rest of her career.
In nineteen ninety, Horn reunited with her good friend and teacher, Miles Davis, on the song, "You Won't Forget Me." She went on to record several successful albums and performed around the world.
She also worked on several soundtracks for movies. Here are Shirley Horn and Miles Davis with "You Won't Forget Me."
Shirley Horn was nominated for several Grammy Awards. In nineteen ninety-eight, she won the award for the album, "I Remember Miles," in memory of Miles Davis, who died in nineteen ninety-one. Horn received many honors during her career. But her last years were difficult. She had a series of health problems, including treatment for breast cancer. And in two thousand two, she had her foot removed because of problems caused by diabetes.
Shirley Horn continued to sing for audiences, but she did so in a chair, with someone else playing the piano. The loss of her foot made it difficult for her to work the pedals that control the way the piano sounds. However, during her last performances, she returned to playing the piano with the help of a device that took the place of her foot. In June of two thousand five, Horn suffered a stroke. She died four months later at the age of seventy-one.
Critics say Shirley Horn influenced many young jazz musicians of today, including Diana Krall and Norah Jones. Critics say she will be remembered as one of the best singers in a great period of American jazz. In two thousand five, Verve Records released a collection of her work, called "But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn." We leave you now with a song from that album called "Here's to Life."
This program was written and produced by Cynthia Kirk. I'm Faith Lapidus.
And I'm Steve Ember. Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.
Shirley Horn
composer, singer, pianist
Born; Washington, D,C., 5-1-1934
Died; Washington, D,C., 10-20-2005
A child prodigy, Shirley Horn began playing piano at age 4 and the next year started formal musical training. She became so obsessed with the piano that her mother offered her bribes in an attempt to get her away from the instrument so she would play with the neighborhood children.
At just 12 years of age Horn studied composition at Howard University and at 18 was awarded a scholarship to study at Julliard in New York. Unfortunately her family was unable to afford her money for living conditions in New York. Instead she entered a special music studies class at Howard, leaving after several years to work full time in Washington D.C.
In 1960 Horn traveled to New York to record her first album “Embers And Ashes.” Although the record appeared on only a small label and received limited distribution it immediately established her as a gifted and sensitive jazz artist. So impressed was Miles Davis when he heard the disc he brought Shirley back to New York to appear with him at the Village Vanguard, a popular jazz venue in the city. Soon she was working in major clubs throughout the U.S., recording with Quincy Jones for Mercury Records, and singing on the movie soundtracks of “For Love Of Ivy” and “A Dandy In Aspic.”
Creative differences with Mercury and domestic life, in particular her young daughter Rainy, called her back home, and for more than a decade, she restricted her appearances to Washington D.C. area clubs and concerts.
In 1981, Paul Acket, director of Holland’s North Sea Jazz Festival, caught her impromptu performance at a Jazz Times convention at the Shoreline Hotel. He arranged for her European debut at the Holland festival, where delighted audiences and overwhelming critical approval inspired her to revitalize her career.
With her daughter Rainy grown and married, herself the mother of two children; Horn was now at ease to go back on the road. She was soon working with her trio at some of the most prestigious jazz clubs and she recorded four albums. Her association with Verve records, beginning in 1986, cemented her rise in popularity and helped establish her as a top-notch artist worthy of national and worldwide notoriety and fame.
In later years, Ms. Horn performed with artists ranging from Davis, who reunited with her for a rare appearance as a sideman on her 1991 album ``You Won't Forget Me,'' to Wynton Marsalis.
She was nominated for multiple Grammys and won the award in 1991 for best jazz vocal performance. In 2004, Horn was honored by National Endowment for the Arts as a jazz master.
Shirley Horn’s piano playing drew on the influences of Ahmad Jamal and Wynton Kelly. Her intricacies in harmony bring to mind Duke Ellington. Her notes were always chosen wisely, placed expertly at well-chosen times. She had the rare ability to utilize rhythm through silence much as Count Basie and the aforementioned Jamal. Although these behemoths may come to mind when listening to Horn, she claimed the utilization of those manifestations as very much her own art. She was not an imitator.
Vocally Shirley Horn does not sound like anyone else. Although the way she carried out her vocals was akin to the personal relationship and intensity one feels when listening to Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae, King Cole, or even Louis Armstrong; Shirley Horn was an original. Not a scat vocalist but rather a sensitive vocalist: she presented her lyrics with improvisational bending and changing of notes in an artistic style that is the essence of true jazz.
Shirley Horn died Thursday night October 20th, 2005 in her native Washington, D.C., after a long illness.
Click here to read one of the finest Shirley Horn biographies on the net from the Washington Post.
http://www.newsweek.com/ballads-shirley-horn-202374
News
The Ballads Of Shirley Horn
by Newsweek Staff
4/28/91
At long last, a jazz legend gets her due
Shirley Horn was at her mother-in-law's house in Washington the day Miles Davis called. This was 30 years ago, but she remembers that there were buttermilk biscuits and red-eye gravy on the table and that she didn't believe it was really him. She'd recently released "Embers and Ashes," the first collection of her delicately understated piano playing and smoky ballad singing. Davis loved it and wanted her to come to New York and open for him at the Village Vanguard.She didn't believe it was him, but she came anyway, and when she got to his house, she says, "He had his kids sing me the songs off the 'Embers and Ashes' album." For a charmed period, she picked up such accolades wherever she turned. She played the Vanguard: "Everybody in the world was there. Lena Horne was floating around in a red outfit. Charlie Mingus was standing by the door-biggest man I ever saw. Sidney Poitier came up and said he enjoyed my music." She soon signed a recording contract with Mercury.It looked like an overnight success story. But only now, at 56--with her deservedly No. 1 album "You Won't Forget Me"--is Horn enjoying the stature that must have seemed within easy reach 30 years ago.
Horn's earliest memory is of the piano in her grandmother's parlor. The room was cold in the winter, and she remembers sitting at the piano's round stool in a heavy coat. At 4, she began lessons on this piano and as a teen studied classical music at Howard University. She later earned a scholarship to Juilliard in New York but couldn't afford to go; only thanks to her uncle, a doctor, could she afford Howard. She picked up jazz on her own, sneaking dinner shows at a place called Olivia's Patio Lounge. With the Vanguard date, she seemed on her way.
But jazz history is full of dreams deferred or shattered. The Mercury records weren't what she'd expected--the label saddled her with big-band arrangements--and she sat out the contract after making two of them. She had a baby. She didn't like touring and didn't like the business. She built a reputation as a piece of work; if she didn't like a crowd, sometimes she'd walk off stage in midset and call a cab home. Though she insists she never retired, she rarely recorded, or played outside of the Beltway area, for much of the '60s and '70s. Since 1981, though, she's made herself more visible, and in the last four years has made three striking albums for Verve. "You Won't Forget Me" makes it easy to hear what attracted Davis to her. Horn barely fingers the edges of her tunes, investing them with space rather than easy melodies. On the proud "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'," featuring Wynton Marsalis on trumpet, she slows the tempo until each note becomes a statement, each line a surprise. "In my early years," she says, "I listened to a pianist who played a lot of notes, but it just left me cold. Then I heard Miles Davis play one note, and it made all the difference in the world."
Davis adds a solo to the album's title track, the first time he's backed a singer in 20 years. It is a touching show of support, but an extraneous one. Horn's career, come to fruition at its own pace, can now proceed under its own power.
NEA Jazz Masters: Live In SF This Month!
April 2005
The nation’s highest honor for jazz is the National Endowment for the Arts’ “NEA Jazz Masters” program, a pantheon of jazz artists and advocates immortalized for their “enormous and profound contributions to the jazz field.” This spring, SFJAZZ is proud to present a number of these great NEA Jazz Masters in concert, including Sonny Rollins (inducted 1983), Ahmad Jamal (1994), Roy Haynes (1995), and McCoy Tyner (2002). This month alone, the SFJAZZ Spring Season line-up is graced by two of these nationally recognized living legends: the great pianist and composer Dave Brubeck (inducted 1999) and one of 2005’s six newly inducted NEA Jazz Masters, singer/pianist extraordinaire Shirley Horn.
SHIRLEY HORN
Friday • April 29 2005
8pm
Masonic Center
San Francisco, California
“Shirley Horn is a quintessential singing piano player,” writes the NEA in the biography accompanying Horn's 2005 induction into the ranks of the NEA Jazz Masters. “Her skills at the keyboard are legendary for her sense of space, and proper note placement; always injecting the ‘right' chords. Shirley's piano skills are legendary, so much so that the great jazz singer Carmen McRae once enlisted Horn as her piano accompanist for an album project; the ultimate compliment coming from a fellow vocalist. Ms. Horn is blessed with a wonderful sense of vocal drama, an ability to engage the listener to actually feel the lyrics and grasp their message; she never rushes the tempo and has a languid sense of balladry that has won her a legion of admirers.”
One of Horn's earliest—and most influential— admirers was the great trumpeter and band leader Miles Davis, who heard the young Washington, D.C.-based singer's debut album, Embers and Ashes (1960), and secured a career-making gig for her at New York's Village Vanguard. Also supported by early mentors like Quincy Jones, Oscar Peterson, and Ahmad Jamal, Horn seemed poised for stardom when she made the decision to step out of the national spotlight and focus on raising her daughter. But in 1987, after signing to Verve Records, Horn launched a comeback that led to a string of hit albums, including 1998's Grammy-winning I Remember Miles , a tribute to her onetime mentor and ongoing musical inspiration.
“Pianist/vocalist Shirley Horn's career reads like a Hollywood movie,” wrote Down Beat in response to Horn's triumphant comeback. “A young musical genius is discovered by a jazz legend, but postpones major stardom to raise a family, only to emerge in her mature years as a superstar on her own terms.”
Shirley Horn's “movie” would soon take another dramatic turn, however. As a result of diabetes, Horn was obliged to undergo the amputation of her right leg below the knee early in the new century. Many wondered if she would ever perform again. After a period of recuperation, however, Shirley Horn once again demonstrated her great resiliency, picking up where she left off with the fittingly titled disc May the Music Never End and new concert appearances. As The New York Times wrote upon Horn's June 2003 return to the stage: “As her voice and piano engage in a reflective dialogue, the artful hesitations and wide-open spaces between phrases conjure a state of meditative suspension into which feelings spontaneously bubble up and subside…. Ms. Horn exuded the authority of an amused grande dame, serenely but firmly in charge.”
THE MUSIC OF SHIRLEY HORN: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH SHIRLEY HORN:
℗ 2000 The Verve Music Group, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc.
MIX--Shirley Horn - "Here's To Life"
From 1993, jazz legend Shirley Horn performs "Here's To Life" with John Williams and The Boston Pops:
Shirley Horn - "I Thought About You":
CD: "Embers & Ashes:Songs of Lost Love (1960)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgjDL7AkI9U
Shirley Horn - Full Concert - 08/15/92
Newport Jazz Festival (OFFICIAL):
Mix - Shirley Horn - Full Concert - 08/15/92 -
Newport Jazz Festival
Shirley Horn--"You're My Thrill"
℗ 2000 The Verve Music Group, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc.
Released on: 2001-01-01:
Mix - Shirley Horn Trio - Corcovado - Heineken Concerts - São Paulo - 1999:
Shirley Horn - "I Loves You, Porgy/Here Come De Honey Man"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5mVI_B_cy0
Shirley Horn - "All My Tomorrows":
Shirley Horn: "Live" at the Village Vanuard (1961):
1. Sometimes I'm Happy
2. If I Should Lose You
3. Summertime
4. Good for Nothin' Joe
5. Day In, Day Out
6. 'Round Midnight (Instrumental)
7. He Needs Me
8. Makin' Whoopee
2. If I Should Lose You
3. Summertime
4. Good for Nothin' Joe
5. Day In, Day Out
6. 'Round Midnight (Instrumental)
7. He Needs Me
8. Makin' Whoopee
"Summertime" - Shirley Horn:
Album - I Remember Miles (1998)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XuZh_YlHMA
Shirley Horn - vocal, piano
Toots Thielemans - harmonica
Ron Carter - bass
Al Foster - drums
http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/archive/horn_s.html
Jazz Profiles from NPR
Shirley Horn
Produced by Margot Stage
|
New York Times music critic John Pareles once wrote that "songs
are lucky when Shirley Horn chooses them." Horn is known for her ability
to get inside a lyric, transforming it into a deeply emotional and
personal expression of jazz -- a skill that has allowed her to have a
career built on love songs.
|
 |
Listen to
arranger Johnny Mandel, drummer Steve Williams, poet and jazz critic
A.B. Spellman, and A&R director Richard Seidel talk about Shirley's
music
Shirley grew up in a musical household and has fond memories of both her
parents singing love songs around the house throughout her childhood.
As a toddler she would visit her grandmother and play the piano that was
in the parlor.
Born May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C., Shirley attended Howard
University's Junior School of Music as a teenager, where she studied
classical piano -- particularly the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff and
Claude Debussy. But she was eventually seduced by jazz and began
listening to pianists like Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal.
Shirley began playing piano gigs at local nightclubs and restaurants. One day, a gentleman with a giant teddy bear walked in a dining room where she was performing and promised to give her the bear if she would sing "Melancholy Baby" for him -- it was the start of her career as a vocalist.
Vanguard owner Max Gordon had never heard of a singer named Shirley Horn
and was reluctant to grant the trumpeter's request. But Davis insisted,
telling Gordon that if Horn didn't sing, he wouldn't play.
|
Davis saw in Horn's singing style an approach to music not unlike his own. Both artists are recognized for their discriminating use of "space" -- the silences between the sounds -- to create a dramatic tension, particularly in the performance of ballads.
Davis remained a close friend and mentor to Horn until his death in 1991. Following her performance at the Vanguard, Horn recorded several albums with producer Quincy Jones for the Mercury label. But Horn had been signed as a vocalist, and had to leave the piano playing to someone else.
After her Mercury albums, Shirley returned to Washington -- far enough from New York to allow her to focus on her personal life, yet close enough to still be in touch with the city's vibrant jazz scene. Her decision to move saw her recording opportunities dwindle, but in 1986, Verve Records took the advice of producer Richard Seidel and signed Horn and her trio to a contract.
Her trio recordings emerged with numerous Grammy Award nominations, including one for her most popular album to date, You Won't Forget Me, which featured cameos by Miles Davis and harmonica player Toots Theilemans. A memorable performance in Paris yielded yet another well-received Verve release in 1992: I Love You Paris.
That was also the year Shirley fulfilled a long-held ambition to work with celebrated arranger and composer Johnny Mandel. Their album together, Here's to Life, hit number one on the Billboard charts for a record-breaking 17 weeks.
Throughout her career, Shirley Horn has never compromised her music or her personal life in pursuit of fame. She took her time with success in the same way she controls a slow and shifting tempo on one of her ballads. But all the while, she fulfills her heartfelt ambitions by doing what she loves—making music.
SHOW PLAYLIST
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NPR RESOURCES
|
 Browse the NPR Jazz Feature on Shirley Horn
Listen to an NPR Jazz review of Horn's 2001 CD Your're My Thrill
|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Horn
Shirley Horn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Shirley Horn | ||
|---|---|---|
Publicity photo from 1961 by Bruno Bernard
|
||
| Background information | ||
| Birth name | Shirley Valerie Horn | |
| Born | May 1, 1934 Washington, D.C., U.S. | |
| Died | October 20, 2005 (aged 71) | |
| Genres | Jazz Blues music | |
| Occupation(s) | Musician | |
| Instruments | Vocals, piano | |
| Years active | 1959–2004 | |
| Labels | Stere-o-craft (1960) Mercury (1963) ABC-Paramount (1965) Perception (1972) SteepleChase (1978-81) CBS (1985) Verve (1987-2005) | |
| Associated acts | Miles Davis Charles Ables Steve Williams | |
Shirley Valerie Horn (May 1, 1934 – October 20, 2005) was an American jazz singer and pianist.[1] She collaborated with many jazz greats including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Toots Thielemans, Ron Carter, Carmen McRae, Wynton Marsalis and others. She was most noted for her ability to accompany herself with nearly incomparable independence and ability on the piano while singing, something described by arranger Johnny Mandel as "like having two heads", and for her rich, lush voice, a smoky contralto, which was described by noted producer and arranger Quincy Jones as "like clothing, as she seduces you with her voice". Although she could swing as strongly as any straight-ahead jazz artist, Horn's reputation rode on her exquisite ballad work.
Contents
Biography
Shirley Horn was born and raised in Washington, D.C..[2] Encouraged by her grandmother, an amateur organist, Horn began piano lessons at the age of four.[3] Aged 12, she studied piano and composition at Howard University, later graduating from there in classical music.[3] Horn was offered a place at the Juilliard School, but her family could not afford to send her there.[3] Horn formed her first jazz piano trio when she was twenty.[3] Horn's early piano influences were Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal, and moving away from her classical background, Horn later said that "Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninov, and Ahmad Jamal became my Debussy."[3] She then became enamored with the famous U Street jazz area of Washington (largely destroyed in the 1968 riots), sneaking into jazz clubs before she was of legal age.
Horn first achieved fame in 1960, through her association with Miles Davis. Davis' praise had particular resonance in two respects: because he was so highly respected as a musician, and because he rarely offered public praise for fellow musicians at that time. Horn had, though, recorded several songs with violinist Stuff Smith in 1959 both as a pianist and a singer. After her discovery by Davis, she recorded albums on different small labels in the early 1960s, eventually landing contracts with larger labels Mercury Records and Impulse Records. She was popular with jazz critics, but did not achieve significant popular success.
Quincy Jones attempted to make Horn into a pure vocalist in several recording sessions, something he later hinted may have been a mistake. Horn was also disturbed by the changes in popular music in the 1960s following the arrival of The Beatles. Largely rejecting efforts to remake her into a popular singer, she stated: "I will not stoop to conquer".[4] From the late-1960s, she concentrated on raising her daughter Rainy with her husband, Shepherd Deering (whom she had married in 1955), and largely limited her performances to her native Washington, D.C.
Miles Davis made a rare appearance as a sideman on Horn's 1991 album You Won't Forget Me.[5] Although she preferred to perform in small settings, such as her trio, she also recorded with orchestras, as on the 1992 album Here's to Life, the title song (lyrics by Phyllis Molinary, music by Artie Butler) of which became her signature song. A video documentary of Horn's life and music was released at the same time as "Here's To Life" and shared its title. At the time, arranger Johnny Mandel commented that Horn's piano skill was comparable to that of the noted jazz great Bill Evans. A follow-up was made in 2001, named You're My Thrill.
Horn worked with the same rhythm section for 25 years: Charles Ables (bass) and Steve Williams (drums). Don Heckman wrote in the Los Angeles Times (February 2, 1995) about "the importance of bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams to Horn's sound. Working with boundless subtlety, following her every spontaneous twist and turn, they were the ideal accompanists for a performer who clearly will tolerate nothing less than perfection".
Her albums Here's to Life, Light Out of Darkness (A Tribute to Ray Charles) and I Love You, Paris all reached number one on the Billboard jazz charts.[5]
Due to health problems in the early 2000s, Horn had to cut back on her performances. After 2002, a foot amputation (from complications of diabetes) led her to leave the piano playing to pianist George Mesterhazy. In late 2004, Horn felt able to play piano again, and recorded a live album for Verve, at Manhattan's Au Bar with trumpet player Roy Hargrove, which did not satisfy her.[citation needed] It remains unreleased except for tracks on But Beautiful - The Best of Shirley Horn.
A breast cancer survivor, she had been battling diabetes when she died of complications from the condition, aged 71.[6] She is interred at Ft. Lincoln Cemetery in Washington, D.C.[7]
Awards and honors
Horn was nominated for nine Grammy Awards during her career, winning the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance at the 41st Grammy Awards for I Remember Miles, a tribute to her friend and mentor (the album's cover featuring a Miles Davis drawing of them both).[6]
She was officially recognized by the 109th US Congress for "her many achievements and contributions to the world of jazz and American culture", and performed at The White House for several U.S. presidents. Horn was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree from the Berklee College of Music in 2002.
She was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award in 2005 (the highest honors that the United States bestows upon jazz musicians).
Discography
As leader
- 1960: Embers and Ashes
- 1961: Live at the Village Vanguard (live)
- 1963: Loads of Love (Mercury)
- 1963: Shirley Horn with Horns (Mercury)
- 1965: Travelin' Light (ABC-Paramount)
- 1972: Where Are You Going (Perception)
- 1978: A Lazy Afternoon
- 1981: All Night Long (live)
- 1981: Violets for Your Furs (live)
- 1984: Garden of the Blues (live)
- 1987: All of Me
- 1987: Softly
- 1987: I Thought About You (Verve, live)
- 1989: Close Enough for Love (Verve)
- 1991: You Won't Forget Me (Verve, with Miles Davis)
- 1992: Here's to Life (Verve)
- 1993: Light Out of Darkness (A Tribute to Ray Charles) (Verve)
- 1994: I Love You, Paris (Verve, live)
- 1994: Live at the 1994 Monterey Jazz Festival (Verve, live, released 2008)
- 1996: The Main Ingredient (Verve)
- 1997: Loving You (Verve)
- 1998: I Remember Miles (Verve)
- 1999: Quiet Now: Come a Little Closer (compilation) (Verve)
- 1999: Ultimate Shirley Horn (compilation) (Verve)
- 2001: You're My Thrill (Verve)
- 2003: May the Music Never End (Verve)
- 2005: But Beautiful-Best of Shirley Horn (Verve)
As sideman
- With Stuff Smith
- Cat on a Hot Fiddle (Verve, 1959)
- With Antonio Carlos Jobim
- Antonio Carlos Jobim and Friends (live, 1985) - 2 songs
- With Joe Williams
- In Good Company (Verve, 1989) - 2 duets
- With Carmen McRae
- Sarah: Dedicated to You (1991) - as accompanying pianist
- With Toots Thielemans
- For My Lady (1991) - accompanying pianist, vocal on 1 track
- With Jeffery Smith
- Ramona (Verve, 1995)
- With Oscar Peterson
- A Tribute to Oscar Peterson – Live at the Town Hall (Telarc, live, 1996)
- With Charlie Haden
- The Art of the Song (1999) - 4 songs
- With The Legacy Band
- The Legacy Lives On, Vol. 1 (2000) - 2 tracks
- With Clark Terry
- Clark Terry Quintet: Live On QE2 (2001, live)
- With Bill Charlap
- Stardust (2002) - 1 track
Concert DVD
- Shirley Horn - Live at the Village Vanguard (a 1991 recording/video) (Lucy II Productions, 2006)
See also
References
External links
- NEA Jazz Masters biography
- Artist Page at Verve Music
- Shirley Horn Discography at www.JazzDiscography.com
- "Jazz star Shirley Horn dies at 71", BBC News
- H.CON.RES.300
- Shirley Horn's Jazz Profile at NPR
- Shirley Horn in 2002 on WBUR-FM The Connection
- VOA "Special English" program on Shirley Horn (2005)
- NEA Jazz Masters video biography of Shirley Horn