A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, March 24, 2018
Jon Hendricks (1921-2017): Legendary, iconic, and innovative singer, songwriter, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
The genius of vocalese, Jon Hendricks'
ability to write coherent lyrics to the most complex recorded
improvisations was quite notable, as were his contributions to the
classic jazz vocal group Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Hendricks
grew up in Toledo, Ohio, singing on local radio. After a period in the
military (1942-1946), he studied law but eventually switched to jazz. He
spent a period of time playing drums before becoming active as a
lyricist and vocalist. In 1952, his "I Want You to Be My Baby" was
recorded by Louis Jordan. In 1957, Hendricks made his recording debut, cutting "Four Brothers" and "Cloudburst" while backed by the Dave Lambert Singers. Soon, he teamed up with fellow singers Dave Lambert and Annie Ross to form their vocal trio, starting off with a re-creation (through overdubbing) of some of Count Basie's recordings. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross (after 1962, Yolande Bavan took Ross' place) stayed together up to 1964, and were never topped as a jazz vocal group, influencing those who would follow (including the Manhattan Transfer). In 1960, Hendricks
wrote and directed the show Evolution of the Blues for the Monterey
Jazz Festival; he would revive it several times during the next 20
years. During 1968-1973, he lived and worked in Europe. After returning
to San Francisco, Hendricks wrote about jazz for The San Francisco Chronicle; taught jazz; and formed a group with his wife Judith, children Michelle and Eric, and other singers (including for a time Bobby McFerrin)
called the Hendricks Family, which was active on a part-time basis for
decades to come. Although he never recorded often enough, Hendricks did cut a classic Denon album featuring McFerrin, George Benson, Al Jarreau,
and himself, re-creating all the solos in the original version of
"Freddie the Freeloader." He also recorded through the years as a leader
for World Pacific, Columbia, Smash, Reprise, Arista, and Telarc. Jon Hendricks died in Manhattan on November 22, 2017; he was 96 years old.
"The language that one speaks attains its height in poetry; a person
reads a great poem and his soul is ennobled. The Bible is poetry, great
literature is poetry. A good lyricist is a poet."
This article was first published at All About Jazz on April 18, 2008.
Scat
and vocalese master Jon Hendricks and his wife Judith have maintained a
residence at Gateway Plaza in Battery Park City for a quarter century.
Their high-rise apartment overlooks the Hudson River going north. From
the living room window you see the Battery Park City promenade directly
below and the New Jersey shoreline across the river. The view is so
expansive that the petite size of the place, with walls lined with
framed posters of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and
of Jon Hendricks performing with daughters Aria and Michelle, isn't
important.
Hospitality and warmth greet you upon entering, as
Judith Hendricks gracefully says, "Come in Greg and make yourself
comfortable." Her husband soon makes a grand entrance, clad leisurely in
a robe. Small talk follows the firm handshake and hearty hug, after
which we sit down at the dining room table, joined also by Kristina,
Judith's assistant from Ohio. Nuts, berries, whole grain bread, cups of
mayonnaise and Dijon mustard and white meat chicken slices adorn the
table and are washed down with tasty Earl Grey tea. These items are
components of the protocols designed for Judith by the Gerson Institute
after she was diagnosed with melanoma in January 2006. (A recent
ultrasound revealed that her tissue has returned to normal.) Then we
start swingin': "My class, 'Jazz in American Society,' is still
number one on campus, at the University of Toledo," Jon Hendricks says,
beaming with pride. "My course is considered an easy A because, I tell
them, I think anyone who registers to take a jazz class has earned an A
as far as I'm concerned."
In 2000, he returned to his hometown
of Toledo, Ohio to teach bright-eyed freshman the bliss and blues of
jazz. The University of Toledo awarded him an honorary Doctorate of the
Performing Arts and appointed him Distinguished Professor of Jazz
Studies. In the '70s Hendricks taught at several universities in
California; hence, he's no stranger to the classroom.
"And this
is how I continue, on day one: You will earn an automatic A just for
taking this class because this is the only country in the world that
systematically degrades its own cultural art form. And while it does
that, it pays servile attention to all the world's other art forms. When
I say servile, I mean they spend millions of dollars on huge ornate,
gaudy opera houses. That's Italian. Each city has a grandiose, sumptuous
art museum. That's French. Cities, towns and municipalities subsidize
ballet companies. And that's very cultured and very wonderful. Except
that's Russian. And they all have symphony orchestras that play
symphonic music. That's Russian too. And they have Shakespearean
theatres. That's English."
"Remember, this is me talking to
freshman kids: And what do they have for American culture? Dark cellars,
mostly funky bars where women and drugs are for sale. And then on top
of that, with their lying selves, they tell you and anyone else within
earshot, that that nigger music was born in the whorehouses of New
Orleans. The truth is that jazz is the secular music of our Christian
church."
After he explains how Ray Charles transformed the
spiritual "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" into "I Got a Woman" he
continues: "The music is spiritual. Only the words are changed, to
protect the guilty. That's why you have to sit up here, all 200 of you,
in the largest lecture hall in this university and listen to stories
about your culture while six-year old children across the world can show
you the houses of their culture. But our own, they ignore completely.
The last thing is, every other country, whose cultural ass they kiss,
adores the culture that they spurned, which is jazz."
Hendricks
says that his time at the University of Toledo has given birth to a
missionary zeal to reveal the cultural value of jazz. This fervor is a
natural product of a 70+ year career, which began for him in Toledo,
Ohio singing on the radio as a teen, rehearsing and being mentored by
the great Art Tatum, also from Toledo. Charlie Parker
heard him there and urged him to come to New York. Several years later,
when he moved to the Big Apple, he searched for Bird, who upon seeing
him said "Hey Jon! What took you so long?"
In 1958, he collaborated with fellow vocalists Dave Lambert and Annie Ross to form Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Their path-breaking recording Sing a Song of Basie
established them as the most successful jazz vocal group in history and
was one of the first recordings to utilize overdubbing. They took the
art of vocalese—putting lyrics to instrumental jazz solos and
arrangements—to another level. According to Hendricks, King Pleasure
originated the practice in the early 1950s with "Moody's Mood for Love,"
based on James Moody's
improvisation on "I'm In the Mood for Love." Yet never before had a
vocal group taken entire big band arrangements and performed vocalese
lyrics to every note.
By his own count, Hendricks has composed
300-400 vocalese lyrics. He has written lyrics to songs and arrangements
by Basie, Ellington, Monk, Jobim, Quincy Jones, Horace Silver
and many others. He has even written a vocalese version of
Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" and Rachmaninov's "Piano Concerto No.
2." Premier examples such as "Freddie Freeloader" and "Joy Spring" are
perennial classics of the form. In the former, found on Hendricks' album
of the same title, he tells a cautionary tale about Fred Tolbert, a
bartender at a jazz spot in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Freddie was known
and loved by the jazz musicians back then because he liberally gave
away drinks and allowed the musicians credit. Hendricks structures the
tale by using an all-star cast who start the number (found originally on
Miles Davis' classic, Kind of Blue)
like a Greek chorus, intoning Freddie's name. Next are the solos, for
which Hendricks wrote lyrics that he says are "character analyses" of
each of the soloists. Bobby McFerrin sings the vocalese lyrics to Wynton Kelly's solo, giving a glimpse into Kelly's tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and sense of humor, followed by Al Jarreau, displaying Miles Davis's candor. In an incredible exhibition of vocal dexterity, Hendricks reveals John Coltrane's focus on matters serious and spiritual. George Benson's take on Julian "Cannonball" Adderley demonstrates Adderley's devil-may-care attitude. Freddie gets the last word, explaining why he gave away drinks.
It's a cautionary tale ("Free booze, free dues, free blues") because, as Hendricks tells it, Freddie ended up homeless.
Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring," amended by Hendricks as "Sing Joy Spring" on Manhattan Transfer's multi-Grammy award winning recording Vocalese
(with all of the lyrics composed by Hendricks) is perhaps the ultimate
vocalese masterpiece. The metaphorical and symbolic density Hendricks
displays here is simply stunning. "To me, 'Joy Spring' meant two things.
It could mean a spring from which instead of water, we ladled up joy
for your spirit," elucidates Hendricks. "Or we drank joy from the
spring. Or we waded in the joy spring; we bathed in the joy spring. So I
started to philosophize it. First, I had to define the text in the
first part of the song. The first chorus had to be a definition of what
this thing was. Then the solos had to be commentaries on that first
chorus... different horns make different commentaries."
Hendricks
takes us on a magic carpet ride, in between reincarnations, then
through the current incarnation, in which the key question remains: will
you make your life meaningful by tapping into the spiritual joy within
or will it signify nothing because you forgot the role of the soul in
relation to its temporary dwelling place, the body? By the time
Hendricks pens the vocalese commentary on Brown's solo, we are on a
metaphysical journey in which Ponce de Leon (who searched for the
"fountain of youth"), the Brothers Grimm (Snow White), Buddha, Francis
Bacon and Shakespeare all contribute to the realization that joy is the
eternal spring of life and the soul.
"As a jazz musician, I
would like to be remembered as a poet. That's the highest level, because
poetry is the highest use of the word," Hendricks asserts. "The
language that one speaks attains its height in poetry; a person reads a
great poem and his soul is ennobled. The Bible is poetry, great
literature is poetry. A good lyricist is a poet. Johnny Mercer was a
poet: 'Footsteps that you hear down the hall, the laugh that floats, on a
summer night, that you can never quite recall.' That's poetry. So if I
can be remembered as a poet, I'll be happy."
Al Jarreau calls
Hendricks "pound-for-pound the best jazz singer on the planet—maybe
that's ever been." Most critics and scholars of jazz acknowledge
Hendricks' talents, although they may have slept the true depths of his
lyrical genius. Saxophone and flute legend James Moody hasn't though,
which is why he invited Hendricks to join him as a special guest for his
gig at the Blue Note from April 1-6, 2008. "For that week, to have
someone of his stature is wonderful," comments Moody. "He's got a great
sense of humor. He's a top-notch lyricist and a hell of a scatter."
Hendricks thinks very highly of Moody as a musician and scat singer too.
"We were at Wolf Trap celebrating Dizzy's 70th birthday. Everybody was there—Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, Jon Faddis, Sonny Rollins, Carmen McRae,"
recalls Hendricks. "Backstage, I told Moody, man you lucky I don't pick
up a brick and split your skull! He come up there and cut everybody!
Dizzy, me, Wynton, Freddie Hubbard. He comes up there talkin' about,
flop, skibe dibi bop, tu slop, blip! I said to Diz, I oughta cut his
throat. Diz says, I been thinking about that. Moody tore all of us up.
Boy, that cat was baaad. Every phrase was exact, pronounced.
There was no stumblin' or skimpin' or slurrin.' I love Moody, always
did. I love his wife Linda. He found a Judith."
Like jazz,
Hendricks combines vernacular and fine art elements with felicity. He
swings, in conversation and in composition, mightily. But since becoming
a tenured professor, his future plans have changed. Why? "Because
teaching jazz, I have realized how de-culturalized America really is.
This is America, with a culture of its own, that comes from its African
people. I am intently concerned with acquainting the American people to
the fact that not only do they have a culture, but if they are not up on
that culture, how stupid they are, because there's not a country on this planet that does not love our culture."
"I
want the whole world to know this, starting with the United States. I
would like to become a Visiting Professor at Harvard, Yale or
Princeton." He also mentions several institutions in New York at which
he's open to teaching, especially since these institutions have thriving
jazz programs: Columbia University, NYU, the New School, Manhattan
School of Music and Juilliard. "They should be all looking at the light
shone by our own culture and not on the rest of the world, like it is
now. So that artists in our own culture have to go overseas so they can
earn money. That's got to stop. And only knowledge can change that. All
of this exists because the people who would change it don't know. I want
to shout it out loud!"
Recommended Listening:
Jon Hendricks, Boppin' at the Blue Note (Telarc, 1993) Jon Hendricks, Freddie Freeloader (Denon, 1989-90) Jon Hendricks, Tell Me the Truth (Arista, 1975) Jon Hendricks, Recorded in Person at the Trident (Smash, 1963) Jon Hendricks, Evolution of the Blues Song (Columbia, 1960) Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, Sing a Song of Basie (ABC/Paramount-Impulse, 1957)
Jon
Hendricks, a singer, songwriter and lyricist who pioneered vocalese—the
art of crafting words to famed jazz solos—and was a co-founder of the
vocal group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, died November 22. He was 96. Jon died on the same day as producer George Avakian. (See my obit and complete interview with George here.) I interviewed Jon in 2009 for JazzWax. Here is my complete interview with him: Jon Hendricks' pure sense of swing, poetic word-play and conversational vocalese remain unmatched.
Truth be told, Jon' s splendid contribution to jazz has never been
fully acknowledged or appreciated. Jon not only has written the words to
dozens of songs based on famous jazz solos, he also has perfectly
captured their infectious intent by singing every nuance of the original
instrumentals. Which requires enormous skill, sensitivity and depth. If
you wave off Jon's gifts as nothing more than a vocal magic trick, try
this exercise: Grab the lyrics to Cloudburst or Everyday
and sing along with the record. Not so simple, right? Jon can swing,
he's bop hip, and since the early 1950s has been jazz's
impersonator-in-chief, getting saxophone, trombone and trumpet solos up
on their hind legs and walking. Jon's recording career began in earnest in 1954 on a King Pleasure
session that featured vocalese singer Eddie Jefferson and the Three
Riffs. In 1955, Jon and the Dave Lambert Singers recorded three tracks.
But his big break came in 1957, when a failed recording session led to
the formation of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. The group's first album, Sing a Song of Basie, won a Grammy Award and ignited a fresh vocal concept that was both fun and sophisticated.
JazzWax: Where did you grow up? Jon Hendricks: I was born in 1921, in a railroad switch town called Newark, Ohio. It was just a hamlet with a dirt
road running through it. My father was pastor of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church, which served the area. No one was famous there. If you
were alive back then in the Depression, you were a celebrity [laughs].
There were 17 of us—14 boys and 3 girls. There was no TV then, so
getting along with each other was necessary and easy. You had no choice.
JW: That’s a lot of brothers and sisters. JH:
In number only. There was a lot of love in my family. There also were
strict rules of living. In the morning, we had a crowd of children who
needed to use the bathroom. So we lined up according to height and age,
with the smallest in the front of the line. And it worked. Order always
works. You can have a mob, but if they’re ordered, they can break down
the strongest wall. Like everyone else in our neighborhood, we had a
vegetable garden that helped put food on the table.
JW: Did your family remain in Newark, Ohio? JH: No. My father could preach better than Peter, so the
church moved my father to many different parishes to energize
congregations. I went to 13 different schools. The church paid for our
relocation, and there was always a parsonage that went with the church,
so we always had a house. We had to sleep three to a bed, of course, but
we were used to that. That’s good for a family. It forces closeness.
[Bishop Richard Allen, founder of the A.M.E. Church]
JW: What did your father do to keep all of you in line? JH:
Nothing. We were just exhorted to love one another. We had no problem
with that. The problem came when my father would get all 17 of us
downstairs on our knees to pray. We didn’t stand up or sit in a chair or
anything like that. We got down on our knees to supplicate to a power
that was bigger than us. Every morning he prayed for good and for the
safety of all the world. And he exhorted us every morning to know, not
to believe, to know that we were alive by the grace of god. He told us
that there's nothing living that we can dislike.
JW: What was the problem? JH:
My father told us that every living thing is our brother and sister. He
warned us that outside our front door, nobody believed that. So he said
our task was to take that knowledge with us when we went outside, so
that we behaved that way whenever we met someone. The problem was the
real world didn’t always work that way or respond in turn to kindness
and love.
JW: But your father's message helped you. JH: Oh
yes. My father taught me to fight for the right things, not the wrong
ones. My father’s way of looking at life gave all of us a strong
humane-ness. Everybody to this day likes my brothers and sisters.
JW: What was your first instrument? JH: When I was a teen I took up the drums.
JW: What did your father think? JH: I
never knew what he thought. He never imposed anything on us. He told us
how he expected us to behave but never said we could only do one thing
and not another. He just urged us to be kind. If we were, he said, most
men and women would like us and respect us. The problem is he never
taught us how to go about doing that, except simply to treat everyone as
a brother and sister.
JW: Eventually your family settled in Toledo, Ohio. JH: Yes. And Art Tatum lived five houses from ours. He
was from Toledo, too. When I started to sing as a kid, he accompanied
me on the radio. Soon he began calling me for gigs. Can you imagine? Art
Tatum calling me to sing with him? When I was 9 years old, I was known
as Little Johnny Hendricks and sang at the Rivoli Theater in Toledo. Art
was 21 years old.
JW: What was it like to sing with Tatum? JH: Like
singing with the Minneapolis Symphony. I once asked Tatum how had
learned to play like that. He said his mother had bought him a piano
roll featuring two pianists. Tatum, being blind, didn’t know that. He
just listened and learned the piece being played on the roll. It turned
out to be two guys playing at once. He had learned to play four hands
anyway and didn’t think anything of it [laughs].
JW: When did you first hear bebop? JH: On the boat coming home from Europe after World War II. I had just won $300 playing craps and was in my
bunk reading when I heard someone playing Charlie Parker’s records. His
music made complete sense to me because I was already familiar with Art
Tatum. When Dizzy [Gillespie] and Bird [Charlie Parker] came on the
scene, they were just following Art Tatum. Most people don't realize
that Tatum was the father of bebop.
JW: How so? JH:
In later years, when I asked Bird where he had learned all the things
he was playing, he said he had worked as a dishwasher at the Onyx Club
on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play. Then, he
said, he went back to Kansas City and learned to play with all the
creativity and wisdom and speed of Tatum. And that’s what he did.
JW: What did you do after the transport ship docked in New York? JH: When
I got back in 1946, I moved back home and enrolled at the University of
Toledo on the G.I. Bill. I majored in English and minored in history
and was studying pre-law. I got all A's in English—including the only A
awarded in creative writing in seven years. My English professor was
Milton Marks, who had written a book on creative writing used in all the
universities.
JW: Eventually you decided to move to New York. Why? JH:
Racism. I had married an Irish girl in Ohio, and we had a son. I had a
3.5 average at the university and was on track for law school. Because
of my high academic average, I was to going to be appointed Juvenile
State Probation Officer. That would have given me the privilege of
socializing with police court and juvenile court judges. They didn't
want that because my wife and I were an interracial couple. But they
couldn’t just dismiss me. I had earned the grades I got and the position
I was to receive. So they got the guy with next highest grades, a black
guy. They told him that if he didn’t convince me to move out of town,
they were going to fire him.
JW: What happened? JH:
The guy came over to my house and laid out the situation for me. He
said he had a wife and two kids and that they told him to come over to
my house and threaten me or he'd lose his job. The guy said to me, “I’m
not going to do that. I’m just going to say that if you prevail and stay
on your job, they're going to fire me. I have two kids. But I’m just
going leave it with you.” So I decided to leave. Didn't make much sense
staying after that.
JW: Why New York? JH: Because of Bird. I had sung with him first in Toledo. He came through on a tour in 1949. I scatted with him.
Miles had just left the quintet and Kenny Dorham [pictured] replaced
him on trumpet. Al Haig took Duke Jordan’s place. I had Bird’s records
and had researched everybody in the group. So when I went up to sing
with him, I took about eight choruses. Then I started to exit the stage.
But I felt this hand on my coattail. Kenny was up taking his solo so
his chair was empty. I looked back and saw my coattail was in Bird’s
hand. Bird motioned for me to sit in Kenny’s chair.
JW: What happened after the set? JH:
Bird asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to be a lawyer.
Bird said, “You ain’t no lawyer. You’re a jazz singer.” I said, “What
can I do with that?” Bird said, “You have to come to New York.” I said,
“I don’t know anybody there.” Bird said, “You know me.” I said, “Where
will I find you?” Bird said, “Just ask anyone” [laughs]. I left thinking, “This guy’s crazy.”
JW: So you never forgot that invitation. JH:
Right. So two years later, when that guy came to my house and told me
to quit and get out of town, I decided I would first go with my wife and
son to Canada to live. Racism didn’t seem to exist up there. I had $350
in my pocket. But when we arrived at the border, they wouldn’t let us
into the country to emigrate unless we had at least $1,000.
JW: What did you do? JH: My wife, child and I drove to Buffalo, N.Y. But our car
broke down. We went to the bus station and, remembering what Bird had
said, bought tickets and took the bus to New York City. When I arrived, I
had only my wife and son, and a set of drums.
JW: What did you do when you arrived in New York after leaving Toledo, Ohio? JH: Right
away I called Joe Carroll, Dizzy Gillespie's singer. I knew Joe because
he was with Dizzy when Dizzy offered me a job years earlier, when I was
still in school. That's when Dizzy came to Detroit. I sang with him
there. I knew what they were playing at the time because it was what Art
Tatum had taught me.
JW: What did Carroll say? JH: He said to stay at a hotel up at 116th and Broadway near Columbia University that charged $18 a week.
JW: Did you ask Carroll for a job? JH: No. All I asked Joe was, “Where’s Bird?” Joe said “At 125th and 7th Ave., at the Apollo Bar.” So I went uptown
to see Bird. When I arrived at the bar, I put my hand on the doorknob
but pulled it back. I started to feel silly. I thought, “This cat was
doing one-nighters all over the Midwest. He’s not going to remember me."
So I started to walk away from the bar, toward my hotel. But soon I
stopped. I said to myself, “The only guy who knows what I do is in that
place. I have to go in there.”
JW: Did you go back? JH: Yes.
I went back, gritted my teeth and walked in. Roy Haynes was on drums,
Curly Russell was on bass, Bud Powell on piano, and Bird and Gerry
Mulligan were playing. You had to walk right past the bandstand in that
place to get to the tables.
JW: What happened? JH: Bird
stopped playing when he saw me walk by the stand. He shouted out, “Hey
Jon, want to come up here and sing something?” It was two years and four
months since I had seen him last during that one-nighter in Toledo. And
he had remembered me.
JW: Parker had some memory, didn't he? JH: Oh, man. Amazing. The guy had a great mind. Back in 1945, the British publisher of Cherokee wouldn’t let Bird record the song because they
thought it would be a desecration of the copyright. So Parker played
the same chord changes but made up a different melody. Parker told Teddy
Reig, the [Savoy Records] producer of the session to call it Ko-Ko. Years later, Teddy asked Bird what Ko-Ko meant. Bird said it was the name of the Lord High Executioner in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado [laughs].
Charlie Parker not only knew the work but the irony of the name and its
use for the song. He was an intellectual. Later Bird kept a tape in his
luggage of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. He liked the part where the woman screams [laughs].
JW: Did you go up and sing with Parker and the group? JH:
First I sat down at a table. When they got off the set, the musicians
went off in different directions to buy their stuff. Roy didn’t use. He
sat with his girl at the bar. Then they all came back. It was the last
set.
JW: What did Bird say to you? JH: He
said, “We’ll play a few tunes first and then call you up.” On the third
tune, Bird announced, “In Toledo, Ohio, an amazing young cat jumped up
on stage and scatted. He happens to be here tonight. Come up, Jon.”
JW: Sounds like a confidence-building introduction. JH: It was—until Roy Haynes [pictured] said real loud, “No, no, we don’t want no singers, Bird.” Parker said,
“Roy, cool it and sit down and play the drums.” I got up with them and
sang three numbers, and the house went wild. I’ve always thought of
myself as a horn, so that’s what I did. I scatted as though I were
another horn in the group. They loved it.
JW: In December 1954, you recorded a track with vocalese pioneer King Pleasure. JH: King Pleasure [pictured] brought me onto the record date. I had met him uptown at the Turf Bar a week or so earlier. He gave me a sheet of paper with his words to Stan Getz’s solo on Don't Get Scared,
which Stan had recorded in '51 with his Swedish All-Stars. I said, “I
see your words, but where are my words?” King Pleasure said, “You’re a
writer. Write your own words.” So I did. That’s why when you listen to
the recording, his words sound like a father talking to his son and I'm
responding. I came up with that concept after leaving the bar. Quincy
[Jones] arranged that session.
JW: You’ve always been a fast thinker and lyric writer. JH: I write on demand like that. That’s how I wrote the words to Four Brothers
around that time. I lived in New York and was on the streets for years
before I got famous. I worked first in a newsprint factory. On my lunch
break I’d hang out on Broadway in the 50s, where the songwriters were.
They’d surround me and say, “Jon, what are you working on?”
JW: What would you tell them? JH:
I’d sing a ditty using my way of putting words together. Soon I'd hear
what I sang on the radio a few weeks later. They were stealing my stuff.
JW: You had quite a fast mind. JH:
I did. I took pre-law at the University of Toledo because of my mind.
When I was 9 years old I got all A’s in English. I loved books and
always was adept at the
language. My father always chose me to help him with the text for his
Sunday sermons. He’d ask me to copy out text from the bible each week.
This made me curious about everything and eager to research whatever I
didn’t know. If I’m onto something, I don’t stop until I get to the
truth. I do the same thing with my lyrics. I’ve always had a love of
words and word combinations. After spending time on the streets and in
the clubs of New York in the early 1950s, it all came together.
JW: How did Sing a Song of Basie come about—Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’ first album. JH:
Dave Lambert and I were like brothers. But when we first went in to
record that album, Dave brought too many Dave Lambert Singers. They
didn't swing. They were like a commercial choir, without that hip
feeling. After a while, it wasn’t working. I told Dave, “We have to get
some more African-Americans in here" [laughs]. Dave said,
"Well, I guess so." Creed said, “No, no, no more singing. No more mass. I
don't have any more money. Whatever we do, you three have to do it.”
JW: What did you say? JH:
Dave said, "We'll multitrack." Annie, me and Creed looked at each other
and said, "What's that?" Dave said, "Well, we'll put three voices on a
roll of tape. We'll do it four times and we'll have the 12 pieces of the
Basie band and that will be it." We already had the rhythm section
track recorded.
JW: You guys had never multitracked before, had you? JH:
Nobody had [to that extent with vocals]. And nobody had ever put the
lyrics on the back of an album before. I invented that. I said this will
let the listeners follow along. It will be better than some disc jockey
writing about how great or not great the album is.
JW: So Creed saw the genius of that right away? JH: Yeah.
JW: So did you write all your parts? JH: I can't write music. I can't read music. I just sing music. Dave did all the writing.
JW: How did you sing all the parts without reading music? JH: Dave gave me the tapes of the Basie parts and I learned them. I learn very fast.
JW: So in the tape, you could hear what each saxophone was playing through the band? JH: Well, Dave isolated all the different parts on one tape.
He'd just take off the different parts he needed right from the
recording. Instead of the whole band, you'd hear just one saxophone—the
first alto and the second alto, the first tenor and the baritone, one
after the next. Annie had the same thing but with the trumpets, and Dave
had the trombones.
JW: So
you'd learn the four parts. You'd put down the lead track first and
then come back and sing the other harmonizing saxes until all four parts
were recorded. What an amazing invention. JH: It was. I don't even know the right word to describe it. It was god at work.
JW: If any one of you couldn't pull that off, you would have been in trouble. JH: Well, Annie had already recorded the way we sang. Twisted was out already. She was singing vocalese before Dave and I did.
JW: But not the multitracking. JH: No. But that's not a creative process. That's just a creative use of electricity [laughs].
JW: But it was still tricky to pull off. JH: Well, I guess so. But for us it was so easy, it's hard to see the difficulty in that now.
JW: What happened next? JH:
We recorded the tracks over the next month and a half. But when Dave
put all the tracks together and we came in to hear it, the master was a
mess. [Jon imitates the sound of the distorted voices on the tape].
When assembling all the parts onto one master tape, we had put the
least-heard voices—the alto, the second trombone and the baritone
parts—on top. And the others next. So it was inaudible. There was no
blended order to the parts. We should have recorded each section
separately and then brought them together by modulating the sections by
the dials.
JW: Did you three flip out? JH: We were a little stunned. Creed [pictured] started moaning, “Oh god, I’m going to lose my job.” He was in tears. Creed was
such a sweet cat. We all loved him. So Dave said, “Give us another
month and a half. What time do you close?" Creed said, "At 8 [p.m.].
Dave said, "We’ll be in here at 8:15 p.m. What time do you open?" Creed
said, "At 7 [a.m.]." Dave says, "We'll leave at 6:45. Just give us the
time." Creed said, "I won't be able to come up with any more money."
Dave waved him off, saying, "We don't need the money. Just give us the
time and we'll come in and do this right.”
JW: What did you three do? JH:
We came in and re-recorded everything at night, the way it should have
been done in the first place. And when we heard the master the next time
around, all four of us sat down and cried like babies. You could hear
instantly how good it was. And to this minute, till right now, I can
truthfully say that it’s the best vocal album I have ever heard in my
entire life.
JW: It can't be duplicated, that's for sure. JH: Nope. Annie and I will be brother and sister for the rest of our lives. Dave, too, bless his heart.
JW: So you worked through the night, every day for a month and a half? JH: That's right [pause]. What else did we have to do? [roaring laughter]. Those were good days.
Jon Hendricks is not only one of the world's favorite jazz vocalists,
but is widely considered to be the “Father of Vocalese”, the greatest
innovator of the art form. Vocalese is the art of setting lyrics to
recorded jazz instrumental standards (such as the big band arrangements
of Duke Ellington and Count Basie), then arranging voices to sing the
parts of the instruments. Thus is created an entirely new form of the
work, one that tells a lyrically interesting story while retaining the
integrity of the music. Hendricks is the only person many jazz greats
have allowed to lyricize their music, for no one writes hipper, wittier,
or more touching words, while extracting from a tune the emotions
intended by the composer, more sympathetically than Hendricks. For his
work as a lyricist, jazz critic and historian Leonard Feather called him
the “Poet Laureate of Jazz” while Time dubbed him the “James Joyce of Jive.”
Born in 1921 in Newark, Ohio, young Jon and his fourteen siblings were
moved many times, following their father's assignments as an A.M.E.
pastor, before settling permanently in Toledo. As a teen Jon's first
interest was in the drums, but before long he was singing on the radio
regularly with another Toledo native, the extraordinary pianist Art
Tatum. After serving in the Army during WWII, Jon went
home to attend University of Toledo as a Pre-law major, courtesy of the
G.I. Bill. Just when he was about to enter the graduate law program, the
G.I. benefits ran out, and he realized he'd have to chart a different
course. Recalling that Charlie Parker had, at a stop in Toledo two years
prior, encouraged him to come to New York and look him up, Hendricks
moved there and began his singing career. In 1957 he teamed with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross to form the legendary vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross.
With Jon as lyricist, the trio perfected the art of vocalese and took
it around the world, earning them the designation of the “Number One
Vocal Group in the World” for five years in a row from Melody Maker
magazine. After six years the trio disbanded for solo careers, but not
before leaving behind a catalog of legendary recordings, most of which
have never gone out of print. Countless singers cite the work of
LH&R as an influence, from the Manhattan Transfer to Al Jarreau to
Bobby McFerrin. Pursuing a solo career, Hendricks moved
his young family to London in 1968, partially so that his five children
could receive a better education. While based in London he toured Europe
and Africa, performed frequently on British television, and appeared in
the British film Jazz is Our Religion and the French film Hommage a Cole Porter.
His sold-out club dates drew fans such as the Rolling Stones and the
Beatles. Five years later the Hendricks family settled in California,
where Jon worked as the jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle
and taught classes at California State University at Sonoma and the
University of California at Berkeley. A piece he wrote specifically for
the stage about the history of jazz, Evolution of the Blues,
ran an unprecedented five years at the Broadway Theatre in San
Francisco and another year in Los Angeles. His television documentary, Somewhere to Lay My Weary Head, received Emmy, Iris, and Peabody awards.
Hendricks recorded several critically-acclaimed albums on his own, some
with his wife Judith and daughters Michele and Aria contributing. He
collaborated with old friends The Manhattan Transfer for their seminal
1985 album, Vocalese, which won seven Grammy Awards. He's
served on the Kennedy Center Honors committee under Presidents Carter,
Reagan, and Clinton. In 2000, Hendricks returned to
his hometown to teach at the University of Toledo, where he was
appointed Distinguished Professor of Jazz Studies and received an
honorary Doctorate of the Performing Arts. He was recently selected to
be the first American jazz artist to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris, a
university established in the year 1248. His fifteen voice group, the
Jon Hendricks Vocalstra at the University of Toledo, performed to a
standing ovation at the Sorbonne earlier this year. As if perfecting one
original art form weren't enough, Hendricks now finds himself happily
penning lyrics to some of the world's most beautiful classical pieces.
The Vocalstra is currently preparing to give the world premiere of a
vocalese version of Rimsky-Korsakov's lush “Scheherazade” with the
Toledo Symphony in February 2003. Summer of 2003 will
find Jon on tour with the “Four Brothers”, a quartet consisting of
Hendricks and three of the best-known male vocalists in jazz: Kurt
Elling, Mark Murphy, and Kevin Mahogany. Next for Dr. Hendricks is
lyricizing and arranging Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, as well as
work on two books, teaching, and continued touring with his Vocalstra.
He also makes an appearance in the upcoming Al Pacino film, People I Know.
Jon Hendricks – one of the originators of jazz vocalese – died on
Wednesday, Nov. 22, in New York City. Perhaps best known for his
collaboration with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross in the vocal group
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, Hendricks was 96 years old. He had been
hospitalized with broken hips. The death was confirmed by the vocalist
Kurt Elling, who considered Hendricks a mentor and major influence. “Jon Hendricks always will be the greatest of jazz lyricists,” Elling
said. “I can’t imagine him being surprised that his wife, Judith,
thought of him as a mystical offspring of William Shakespeare. His
ingenuity and mother wit were always on full display, and his word-twist
devices were nothing short of miraculous. His command of the jazz
language and the interpretive nature of his improvisation were parallel
to the greatest instrumentalists. He was as generous with his words as a
lyricist as he was as a mentor and friend to all the jazz singers who
have followed him. The last I encountered Jon was in his final days, and
he was in the same spirit of joy and interaction.” Hendricks was born on Sept. 16, 1921, in Newark, Ohio, one of 15
children. His father was a pastor and eventually settled in Toledo,
which was where Hendricks developed as a musician and singer. “I started
singing when I was 6,” Hendricks told Roseanna Vitro in an interview
for JazzTimes.com. “My father was the pastor at Warren AME Church.”
Remarkably, the young Hendricks was an early adopter of the legendary
pianist Art Tatum—or, perhaps more accurately, it was the other way
around. “I was about 12 years old, and I used to come out of junior high
school past his house,” he told Vitro. “One day I was walking by and he
came out of his house and invited me in. He asked me what I was doing,
and I told him I was coming from school. He said, ‘Oh, you go to
Robinson? My brother goes there.’ So I would stop and see him after
school sometimes. After a time, I asked him what he was up to and he
said he was playing all night in a little joint downtown where artists
would stop and jam when they were crossing the country. So I was talking
to him and I said, ‘You wanna work in your hometown? You want to be
close to your family?’ I told him he should get a gig at this
after-hours joint over on Indiana Avenue that I was working in. ‘You get
the house bassist and drummer and you have two sets, and you play my
two numbers that I sing.’” He continued: “My mother would save my supper for me, because she
knew I was up at Art’s getting my nightly lessons. I’d leave about 9
p.m. and I wouldn’t come back until 2 or 3 a.m. the next morning.
Everybody of any consequence who played an instrument, that means all
the great bands, Benny Goodman’s entire band, was listening to Art
Tatum.” As he told Vitro, Louis Armstrong was another important and very
direct influence. “Louis Armstrong heard me and said, ‘Boy, you can
sing!’ I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ He said, ‘What are you doing
tomorrow about 12 o’clock?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘Come to the
place I’m staying. … ‘Come by and wake me up and I’ll take you for a
walk.’ So I got up and I went down to the boarding house where he was
staying and he was dressed and ready—you know most people would make you
wait, but he was dressed and ready. We walked down Indiana Avenue to
the downtown area and across the street and all the way back down into
the ghetto. He talked all the way down and all the way back. He said,
‘You know something? You remind me of me when I was the little cat. I
knew all I wanted was to learn to play the trumpet.’” After serving in the Army during World War II, Hendricks returned to
go to college at the University of Toledo, where he was a pre-law
student. When his G.I. Bill funds ran out, he took Charlie Parker’s
advice to move to New York City, and he soon fell in with another singer
named Dave Lambert. In 1955, the two did a vocal recording of “Four Brothers,” and started work on an album they planned to call Sing a Song of Basie.
Their plan was to use a group of studio singers, but it was the
producer Bob Bach who connected them with fellow vocalist Annie Ross. Ross told JT’s Gene Lees that she was basically brought in
to coach the group. “Frankly,” she said, “I was a little miffed that
they didn’t ask me to do it.” Eventually, with the group struggling, the
two turned to the coach—and one of the music’s most important and
influential vocal groups was born. “Dave said, ‘Let’s keep Annie, and
we’ll overdub the parts,’” Ross said. “We did it, and it was
incredible.” The trio became a sensation thanks to the Basie album and a
subsequent string of live performances at concerts and festivals all
over the world. They released a series of albums, including The Swingers! (1959), The Hottest New Group in Jazz (1959), Lambert, Hendricks & Ross Sing Ellington (1960) and High Flying (1962).
Cover of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross album
Nothing quite like it had been seen or heard before. Hendricks
quickly developed a gift for writing lyrics to song melodies as well as
instrumental solos. The term vocalese seemed to be created just to
describe his style—one that would influence generations of jazz singers,
from Al Jarreau to Bobby McFerrin to the Manhattan Transfer to Elling. For his part, Hendricks admitted that he stumbled into lyric writing.
“I would forget lyrics,” he told Vitro. “I’d think, ‘What is that next
line?’ Then I’d make up my own, and nobody noticed. That’s exactly how
it happened. I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote them. I thought
I was doing it for LH&R. It just flowed right out.” But the group’s career was cut short by tragedy in the mid-’60s, when
Lambert died in a roadside car accident. “He was always a good
Samaritan,” Hendricks told Lees about Lambert. “If anyone was in trouble
on the road, he’d always stop and help.” On Oct. 3, 1966, Lambert was
driving on the Connecticut Turnpike on his way back to New York from
Cape Cod, where he had played a gig without Hendricks and Ross. He saw a
motorist on the side of the road dealing with a flat tire and stopped
to help. “It was the damnedest thing,” Hendricks told Lees. “He was kneeling
down, working on the lugs of the wheel. A big semi went by and sucked
him in.” Lambert died instantly. Despite their grief and loss of a musical soulmate, both Hendricks
and Ross continued their careers as solo artists. Hendricks spent some
time in England in the late-’60s and early ’70s, while raising his four
children and also touring in Europe and Africa. He eventually settled in
Northern California, where he added professional writer to his résumé. Although his recording career would be somewhat sporadic over the
next few decades, he continued to be a vibrant presence on the jazz
scene through performances and collaborations with such kindred spirits
as the Manhattan Transfer. In 2003, Hendricks toured with a
multigenerational male vocal group that was built around him; also
featuring Elling, Mark Murphy and Kevin Mahogany, it was billed as “The
Four Brothers.” He also loved performing with his wife, Judith, and
daughters, Michele and Aria, as the Hendricks Family. In his later years, he returned to his hometown to teach at the
University of Toledo, where he continued to influence and mentor
countless singers, songwriters and instrumentalists. His influence on subsequent jazz singers was profound—and it didn’t
stop with jazz stylists. Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell were both
directly affected by Hendricks. “I had jazz records in high school,”
Mitchell told JT’s Geoffrey Himes in 2007. “Lambert, Hendricks
& Ross, Oscar Brown Jr. and Billie Holiday.” Indeed, Mitchell would
later record her version of LH&R’s “Twisted,” with Ross’ lyrics. Hendricks is survived by his daughters, Michele and Aria, and son,
Jon Jr., as well as three grandchildren, Colleen, Azaria and Daniel.
Hendricks’ wife and partner of 57 years, Judith, died two years ago. Listen to this Spotify playlist of songs from Jon Hendricks – Read Gene Lees’ profile of Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross. Read Roseanna Vitro’s interview with Jon Hendricks from her Voices in Jazz series at jazztimes.com.
Jon Hendricks, Genre-Pushing Jazz Vocalist, Dead At 96
by Lara Pellegrinelli
November 22, 2017
National Public Radio (NPR)
Jazz singers, Dave Lambert (left), Annie Ross and Jon
Hendricks with Canon L. John Collins on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral
in London in 1959. Jon Hendricks died on November 22 at the age of 96. Keystone/Getty Images
Jon Hendricks, the singer and songwriter who Time
Magazine called the "James Joyce of jive," died today in New York at
the age of 96. Hendricks was best known for his work in the pioneering
vocal jazz trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. His death was confirmed by
fellow singer and composer Kurt Elling and Hendricks' publicist, Don
Lucoff. First and foremost, he was a storyteller: funny,
dexterous with language and erudite. Jon Hendricks could reference
practically anything in his lyrics – from the controversy over
Shakespeare's identity to the Spanish Civil War – and make them swing. Still, he'll be remembered best for his mini-oral histories of the
jazz world — like his lyrics for Count Basie's 1930's classic "Jumpin'
at the Woodside." "The Woodside is a hotel on 125th [St.] and 8th Avenue," Hendricks told NPR
in 2011. "Everybody stayed there because you didn't have to go to bed
at nine or 10. You could have jam session at 3 a.m. Old vaudevillians
and musicians ran the hotel, the man and his wife. And so I told that
story."
Like his idol, the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Hendricks penned
folk poetry. Only he chose his words to mimic the sounds of instruments,
fitting texts not just to melodies, but the most technically demanding
jazz solos.
"Who would think to do a lyric for the John Coltrane, for
any John Coltrane solo? That's highly complex music," said the late
singer Al Jarreau, talking to NPR in 2011. Jarreau sang with Hendricks on his 1990 album Freddie Freeloader.
"Similarly,
there's very highly complex music in the Basie book, very highly
complex music in the Miles [Davis] book," Jarreau continued. "And to
have the idea that yes, I can write a lyric for this stuff that makes
sense and I'll even sing the solos, the great classic solos — just
wild." Jon Carl Hendricks was born in Newark, Ohio in 1921, the son of a minister and one of 14 children. "I
was always precocious about English language and the King James Bible
especially," Hendricks told NPR, "because my job in my family was to
assist my father and look up in the King James whatever he wanted to use
as a text for his sermon that Sunday." As a youngster,
Hendricks performed with piano virtuoso Art Tatum. He studied law on the
G.I. Bill after World War II, but abandoned jurisprudence for jazz at
the suggestion of legend Charlie Parker. He moved to New York City and
supported himself ghostwriting lyrics for Tin Pan Alley, until he found a
kindred spirit. "Dave Lambert and I were looking for something
to do before we died. Before we starved death!" Hendricks recalled.
"That's literally true. Dave said, 'We both like Basie. Why don't you
write lyrics to four Basie tunes and we'll take them uptown and sell
them as an album?'"
They did. Sing a Song of Basie became a hit in 1957. And,
with the addition of singer Annie Ross, the trio Lambert, Hendricks,
and Ross was voted the most popular vocal group in the world for the
next five years by readers of Melody Maker Magazine. After they split up in 1962, Hendricks turned up in some unlikely places: as the lyricist for the No. 1 hit "Yeh Yeh"
by British R&B singer Georgie Fame and singing about race riots
with a fledgling rock band called The Warlocks — soon rechristened the
Grateful Dead.
Hendricks worked as a music critic, taught college and wrote for
the theater, singing with family groups that sometimes included young
talents—among them singer Bobby McFerrin. In 1985, Hendricks
collaborated with The Manhattan Transfer on their album Vocalese, for which they won seven Grammy Awards. Jon
Hendricks was a professor of Jazz at the University of Toledo, where he
previously studied law. An NEA Jazz Master, he served on the Kennedy
Center Honors committee under three presidents. A reunion with
Annie Ross in 2000, during the revival of the swing style, introduced
him to a new generation. He continued performing almost to the end of
his life. But one thing Hendricks seldom did was sing other writer's
lyrics. "Jon Hendricks always will be the greatest of jazz
lyricists," says Kurt Elling, in a statement on the news. "I can't
imagine him being surprised that his wife Judith thought of him as a
mystical offspring of William Shakespeare." Asked why he wasn't
content to sing the words of other people, Hendricks would point to the
discrimination against African-Americans in Tin Pan Alley. That, and
one minor flaw he saw in the pop songs of the day: "Well, they weren't
deep enough for me. They didn't go deep enough." Fortunately, Jon Hendricks did.
Jon Hendricks, 96, Who Brought a New Dimension to Jazz Singing, Dies
Jon Hendricks performing at his 75th birthday concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1996.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times
Jon Hendricks, a jazz singer and songwriter who became famous in the 1950s with the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross
by putting lyrics to well-known jazz instrumentals and turning them
into vocal tours de force, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 96.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Aria Hendricks.
Although
he was a gifted vocal improviser in his own right, Mr. Hendricks was
best known for adding words to the improvisations of others.
He
took pieces recorded by jazz ensembles like the Count Basie Orchestra
and the Horace Silver Quintet and, using their titles as points of
departure, created intricate narratives and tongue-in-cheek
philosophical treatises that matched both the melody lines and the
serpentine contours of the instrumental solos, note for note and
inflection for inflection.
Mr.
Hendricks did not invent this practice, known as vocalese — most jazz
historians credit the singer Eddie Jefferson with that achievement — but
he became its best-known and most prolific exponent, and he turned it
into a group art.
Lambert,
Hendricks & Ross, with Mr. Hendricks as principal lyricist and
ebullient onstage between-songs spokesman, introduced the concept of
vocalese to a vast audience. Thanks not just to his clever lyrics but
also to the group’s tight harmonies, skillful scat singing and polished
showmanship, it became one of the biggest jazz success stories of the
late 1950s and early ’60s.
Jon Hendricks - "Gimme That Wine" (featuring Wynton Marsalis) Live 1997Video by devoidzer0
The
trio’s success extended beyond the jazz world. They appeared in upscale
nightclubs and on national television in addition to the traditional
round of jazz clubs and festivals. Their 1961 album “High Flying” won a
Grammy Award for best performance by a vocal group. At a time when rock
’n’ roll was taking over the airwaves, the group’s good-natured humor
and show-business panache helped persuade listeners that jazz could be
an entertaining experience rather than a daunting one.
Not
everyone was impressed. The critic Martin Williams wrote that Mr.
Hendricks’s “trivial” lyrics tended to make jazz seem like “pretty light
stuff.” In contrast, his fellow critic Leonard Feather christened Mr.
Hendricks “the poet laureate of modern jazz” and said his writing showed
“a talent bordering on genius.”
Mr.
Hendricks himself shied away from describing himself as a poet, and not
all his lyrics hold up well on their own, divorced from the music. But
at his best he could put words to improvised solos that captured the
musicality of their source material while adding a verbal vitality of
their own.
For
example, he turned Horace Silver’s piano solo on the medium-tempo blues
“Doodlin’ ” into a meditation on the hidden meaning of doodles, with
lines like these:
Those weird designs They only show what’s going on In weirder minds ’Cause when you doodle, then your noodle’s flyin’ blind. Every single thing that you write Just conceivably might Be a thought that you captured while coppin’ a wink. Doodlin’ Takes you beyond what you see, Makes you write what you think.
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’s debut album, released in 1958, was a hit and made the trio’s partnership permanent.Credit
J.P. Roth Collection
John
Carl Hendricks (he dropped the “h” from his first name when he went
into show business) was born on Sept. 16, 1921, in Newark, Ohio, near
Columbus. His father, Alexander Hendricks, was an A.M.E. Zion minister,
and his mother, the former Willie Mae Carrington, led the choir at the
church where Mr. Hendricks first sang in public, at age 7.
He
began singing professionally seven years later, after moving to Toledo
with his parents and his 14 brothers and sisters. He sang on the radio
and at a local nightclub, where for two years his accompanist was Art
Tatum, then little known outside Ohio but soon to become celebrated as
the foremost piano virtuoso in jazz.
Mr.
Hendricks became a full-time singer in Detroit after high school and
then served overseas in the Army during World War II. He later studied
English literature at the University of Toledo and harbored thoughts of
attending law school. At night he sang and played drums in a jazz band,
and when his G.I. Bill scholarship money ran out, he decided to forget
about the law and make music his career.
Jon Hendricks part 1 Interview by Monk Rowe - 10/18/1995 - NYCVideo by Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College
After
moving to New York City in 1952, Mr. Hendricks worked as a clerk-typist
and achieved a modicum of success on the side as a songwriter, but
found little work as a performer. He was inspired to put lyrics to jazz
recordings after he heard King Pleasure’s record of “Moody’s Mood for Love,” based on a James Moody saxophone solo on “I’m in the Mood for Love,” for which Eddie Jefferson had written new words.
“I
was mesmerized,” Mr. Hendricks told The New York Times in 1982. “I’d
been writing rhythm-and-blues songs, mostly for Louis Jordan. But I
thought ‘Moody’s Mood for Love’ was so hip. You didn’t have to stop at
32 bars. You could keep going.”
He
began collaborating with his fellow jazz singer Dave Lambert in 1953,
and four years later their efforts paid off. “Dave Lambert said, ‘You
know, before we starve, we ought to leave something to let people know
we were here,’ ” he recalled in a 1996 NPR interview. “I said, ‘O.K.,
what do you think?’ He said, ‘Well, write some words to some Basie
things, and I’ll arrange them, and we’ll sing them. And then if we
starve to death, at least they’ll know, “Boy, great artists were here.” ’
”
Mr.
Hendricks proceeded to write words for 10 songs from the Count Basie
band’s repertoire, based on the original recordings. Mr. Lambert wrote
vocal arrangements. ABC-Paramount Records agreed to turn the concept
into an album.
Mr.
Hendricks and Mr. Lambert hired a rhythm section to accompany their
vocals and a 12-piece choir to simulate the sound of the Basie band’s
reed and brass sections. When the choir had trouble mastering the
rhythmic nuances of the Basie style, Annie Ross, a British-born jazz
singer who had made some vocalese recordings of her own, was brought in
to coach it.
Ms.
Ross’s efforts to imbue the studio vocalists with the proper jazz
feeling proved futile, and they were let go. She ended up singing on the
session with Mr. Lambert and Mr. Hendricks; their voices were
multitracked, a rarity in those days.
The
resulting album, “Sing a Song of Basie” (1958), was a hit. In the wake
of its success, the three vocalists decided to make their partnership
permanent.
Mr. Hendricks performing in 2008 with his daughter Aria Hendricks at the Jazz Standard, a club in Manhattan. Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross went on to record several more albums, including one with the Basie band itself
for Roulette and one devoted to the music of Duke Ellington for
Columbia. Although vocalese remained the group’s emphasis, its
repertoire also included a number of songs for which Mr. Hendricks wrote
the music as well as the lyrics, and many of their songs were used as
springboards for their own flights of wordless improvisation.
Annie Ross left the group in 1962 and was replaced briefly by Anne Marie Moss and then by Yolande Bavan, with whom Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Lambert recorded three albums for RCA Victor. The trio disbanded in 1964. Dave Lambert died in a highway accident in Connecticut two years later.
Mr.
Hendricks moved to London with his family in 1968 but returned to the
United States in 1973. For the next two years he wrote jazz reviews for
The San Francisco Chronicle and taught classes in jazz history at the
University of California, Berkeley, and California State University at
Sonoma.
Mr.
Hendricks’s stage show “Evolution of the Blues,” in which he traced the
history of African-American music in song and verse, opened at the
Broadway Theater in San Francisco in 1974 and ran for five years. His
focus later shifted to Jon Hendricks & Company, a vocal quartet that carried on the tradition of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.
His
wife, the former Judith Dickstein, who had first sung with him during
their years in England, was a member of the group from its inception in
the late ’70s and also served as his manager. (His first marriage, to
Colleen Moore, ended in divorce.) Over the years its ranks also included
Mr. Hendricks’s daughters Michele and Aria and his son Eric, as well as
the singer Bobby McFerrin and the actor Avery Brooks.
Mr. Hendricks and Mr. McFerrin shared a Grammy in 1986 for “Another Night in Tunisia,” a track from the Manhattan Transfer album “Vocalese,” for which Mr. Hendricks wrote all the lyrics.
Judith Hendricks died
in 2015. In addition to his daughter Aria, Mr. Hendricks is survived by
his daughter Michele Hendricks; a son, Jon Hendricks Jr.; three
grandchildren; and a niece, Bonnie Hopkins.
Mr.
Hendricks remained active into the 21st century. He taught for many
years at his alma mater, the University of Toledo. He was one of the
three featured vocalists in the touring ensemble that performed Wynton
Marsalis’s jazz oratorio “Blood on the Fields,” which received a
Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
He
continued to perform occasionally with Jon Hendricks & Company and
periodically reunited with Ms. Ross. In 2015 the two of them were among
the veteran jazz singers who recorded alongside a vocal group called the
Royal Bopsters and performed with the group at Birdland in New York.
In
his role as a teacher and a critic, Mr. Hendricks proved that he was
adept at dealing with jazz in an analytical way. But he always
maintained that words could go only so far in explaining the music’s
importance and endurance.
“I
wrote the shortest jazz poem ever heard,” he once wrote by way of
explaining his philosophy. “Nothin’ about huggin’ or kissin’. One word:
‘Listen.’ ”
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on November 23, 2017, on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Jon Hendricks, 96, Who Lent Lyrics To Others’ Jazz Improvisations, Dies. Order Reprints|Today's Paper
Jon Hendricks, Literate and High-Flying Jazz Vocalist, Dies at 96
byDavid R. Adler November 23, 2017
WBGO.org
Jon Hendricks at the 1972 Monterey
Jazz Festival
David Redfern
/ Getty Images
Jon
Hendricks, a revered jazz singer who refined and popularized the art of
vocalese, or putting lyrics to famous improvised solos, died on
Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his daughter Aria Hendricks. Hendricks’
unmistakable gravelly tone and crystal-clear bebop enunciation, even at
the most breakneck tempos, placed him at the highest echelon of vocal
virtuosity. No mere stuntman, however, he endowed every performance with
an irresistible, loose-limbed soul. Assuming a saxophonist-like stance
at the mic, he’d wear a perpetual near-smirk as he worked at a sustained
high level of harmonic sophistication. “The ingenuity and
spirited mother wit that showed up in Jon’s lyric writing, the absolute
mastery of jazz nomenclature in his singing and improvisation, was
unparalleled,” Kurt Elling, one of Hendricks’s most successful stylistic
heirs, said on Wednesday. “He represented an immediate link to the
great 20th-century improvisers — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Horace
Silver, the greatest possible players,” Elling continued. “He could
quote chapter and verse.” Hendricks’ earliest success was with
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, a Grammy-winning vocalese trio with Dave
Lambert and Annie Ross. The trio could execute dense harmonized passages
(arranged by Lambert) and breathtakingly precise scat solos, always
rooted in a natural and infectious swing. Sing a Song of Basie,
their 1957 recording of classic Count Basie repertoire, featured
Hendricks’ inventive lyrics to historic solos by Lester Young, Buck
Clayton and other members of Basie’s “Old Testament” lineup of the
mid-to-late 1930s. Hendricks was, to the end, a jazz modernist deeply
informed by the pre-bebop foundations of the music. Receiving
what is perhaps the ultimate honor for a jazz musician, Hendricks was a
featured vocalist with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1965, at the
composer’s Concert of Sacred Music in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral.
Hendricks could dispatch any vocal task, with a versatility that
had few bounds. He sang original lyrics to Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked
Bud” on the pianist’s 1968 Columbia album Underground. Survey
his catalog and one hears echoes of soul-jazz and gospel, even rock ‘n’
roll. He got his start as an R&B songwriter for the great Louis
Jordan, among others. His 1967 performances with the Warlocks, precursor to the Grateful Dead, were recently discussed by journalist Marc Myers
on his blog JazzWax. (It was Hendricks’s rapid-fire style that gave Bob
Weir confidence to handle the tongue-twisting verses of “Truckin’.”)
More than simply a bebop master, Hendricks was intuitively in step with a
full spectrum of American music. John Carl Hendricks (he took
“Jon” as a stage name) was born in Newark, Ohio (near Columbus) on
September 16, 1921. He was one of 17 children, 14 of them brothers. The
son of a minister father (Alexander Hendricks) and choir-leader mother
(Willie Mae Carrington), he began singing in church at age 7. He later
moved with the family to Toledo, where he began singing professionally —
accompanied for two years by Art Tatum, a giant in the jazz pantheon who was then still relatively unknown. After
high school, Hendricks furthered his singing career in Detroit, served
in the Army during World War II and ultimately settled in New York in
1952. His eureka moment came when he heard King Pleasure’s “Moody’s Mood for Love,”
featuring a memorable James Moody saxophone solo set to Eddie
Jefferson’s lyrics. The course for his development of vocalese was set. Work
with Lambert, Hendricks & Ross lasted until 1964 (with Yolande
Bavan replacing Ross), but Hendricks returned to the group vocalese
format in the late ’70s with Jon Hendricks and Company, featuring his
wife Judith Hendricks (now deceased) and his three children, among
others. Hendricks is survived by his daughters Aria and Michele
Hendricks, his son Jon Hendricks, Jr., three grandchildren, and a niece,
Bonnie Hopkins. Hendricks undertook other varied projects during
the ’70s, including stints as a critic and jazz history professor. His
extended work Evolution of the Blues enjoyed a five-year run in San Francisco, beginning in 1974.
He
won a Grammy in 1986 for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, with Bobby
McFerrin, for “Another Night in Tunisia,” from the Manhattan Transfer
album Vocalese (which won in two other categories as well). A
rendering of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” the track found
Hendricks matching Charlie Parker’s famous alto saxophone solo note for
note, with words. In 1997 Hendricks appeared alongside Cassandra
Wilson and Miles Griffith as a vocalist on Wynton Marsalis’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning jazz oratorio Blood on the Fields. His dry delivery and capricious swing feel on “Soul for Sale” make it one of the work’s standout moments. Among Hendricks’s many other career highlights, these hold a special place: The
1955 Lambert, Hendricks & Ross arrangement of Jimmy Giuffre’s “Four
Brothers,” a cathartic 1947 showpiece by Woody Herman’s “second herd,”
features Hendricks singing the saxophone solos of Stan Getz, Zoot Sims,
Herbie Steward and Serge Chaloff in succession, with original lyrics
depicting a vivid dialogue between each “brother.”
The Real Ambassadors, an early-’60s jazz musical by
Dave and Iola Brubeck, found Lambert, Hendricks & Ross in the
company of Louis Armstrong, participating in a searing satire of U.S.
cultural diplomacy and racial oppression during the Cold War. The trio’s
feats of sheer vocal prowess are pivotal on “Cultural Exchange” and the
title track.
Hendricks’ first solo album, A Good Git-Together,
released in 1959 by Pacific Jazz and reissued by Blue Note in 2006,
finds Hendricks leading a group with Cannonball Adderley and Wes
Montgomery as sidemen. The program is wry and eclectic, and while
Hendricks may not have been a ballad specialist, his renderings of Randy
Weston’s “Pretty Strange” and Benny Golson’s “Out of the Past” are
sensitive and compelling.
Hendricks was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1993. He became a
distinguished professor of jazz studies in 2000 at the University of
Toledo (where he studied English literature after the war). He
remained active on the scene as an elder statesman, touring during the
early 2000s with Four Brothers, an all-star group also featuring Elling,
Kevin Mahogany and Mark Murphy. In one of his final outings, Hendricks
attended a recent performance of Fred Hersch’s Walt Whitman-inspired
oratorio Leaves of Grass. Elling, a featured vocalist on the concert, posted an Instagram photo
of himself with Hendricks and friends backstage. On Wednesday, Elling
paid homage to his hero: “He was part of the greatest, deepest link to
the jazz spirit that any of us have ever had the privilege to
encounter.”
Jon Hendricks, the 'James Joyce of jazz,' dies at 96
Jon Hendricks performs at the Blue Note jazz club in Manhattan in January 1999. (Mitsu Yasukawa)
Jon Hendricks, the pioneering jazz singer and lyricist with the vocal ensemble Lambert, Hendricks & Ross who helped create an inventive jazz vocal technique called "vocalese," has died.
Hendricks died Wednesday in New York City, his daughter, Aria Hendricks, said. He was 96. When Hendricks arrived on the jazz scene in the '50s, his mastery of "vocalese" — an expansion of scat singing — had a powerful influence on the musical tenor of post-World War II bebop. The technique combined existing — usually recorded — instrumental jazz solos and newly written lyrics and often replaced instruments with vocalists. In Hendricks' hands, the result was seen by his fans as rhythmic poetry.
Jazz
singer Jon Hendricks in 1997. Singer and pianist Carmen McRae called
Hendricks “the greatest lyricist in the world. " Al Jarreau said he was
“pound for pound the best jazz singer on the planet.” (Jim Cooper /
Associated Press)
Although vocalese was a relatively new jazz art form, Hendricks quickly defined most of its significant elements in Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' first recording, "Sing A Song of Basie," based on such Count Basie classics like "It's Sand, Man," "Two For the Blues" and "Little Pony." Not only did Hendricks create full band passages for the three singers to overdub, he also turned the solos of instrumentalists into vocal passages.
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The album earned Lambert, Hendricks & Ross a Grammy nomination. Decades later it was honored with a Grammy Hall of Fame award, given to musical recordings considered to have a lasting historical significance.
Singer and pianist Carmen McRae called Hendricks "the greatest lyricist in the world" and Al Jarreau said he was "pound for pound the best jazz singer on the planet." Joni Mitchell, who rarely recorded songs other than her own, featured Hendricks' songs on both "Court and Spark" and "The Hissing of Summer Lawns"
Mitchell said she fell in love with Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' "The Hottest New Sound in Jazz" as a teenager.
"In a way I've always considered that album to be my Beatles, because I learned every song off it," she said. "I don't think there's another album that I know every song on, including my own!"
Time magazine labeled Hendricks "the James Joyce of jazz" and Times jazz critic Leonard Feather called Hendricks "the poet laureate of jazz."
As Hendricks' visibility grew, Duke Ellington chose him as the featured soloist in the premiere performance of Ellington's first Sacred Music Concert, and his music guided groups like The Manhattan Transfer, New York Voices and Take 6.
Born Sept. 16, 1921, in Newark, Ohio, Hendricks and his 14 siblings bounced around before his parents finally settled in Toledo, Ohio.
His musical talents were apparent at an early age, and Hendricks was singing on local radio shows by the time he was 7. As a teenager, he expressed ambitions to become a drummer. But opportunities to sing in the company of such major jazz artists as Fats Waller, Art Tatum and Ted Lewis convinced him that his instrument of choice should be his voice.
After serving in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1946, Hendricks returned to Ohio to study law and literature at the University of Toledo. His college funding fell through, however, and he fell back on his musical skills, playing drums and singing with local groups. When Charlie Parker heard him scat singing in a local club, the great bebop saxophonist praised Hendricks' singing, and advised him to devote himself to music.
Parker also urged Hendricks to move to New York, offering to help him make his first contacts in the New York City jazz community.
The introductions began to pay off in 1952 when Louis Jordan recorded Hendricks' "I Want You to Be My Baby." A year later, Hendricks recorded "Four Brothers" and "Cloudburst" with the Dave Lambert Singers, setting the stage for the foundation of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.
Hendricks formed the group in 1957, and the trio performed together until 1962, when Annie Ross left for a solo career and was replaced by singer Yolande Bavan.
Hendricks and his family lived and performed in Europe between 1968 and 1973. When he returned to the U.S., Hendricks moved to San Francisco, where he wrote about jazz for the Chronicle newspaper and formed a group called the Hendricks Family with his wife, Judith, and children, Michelle and Eric.
In 1985, Hendricks worked with the Manhattan Transfer on the recording of their album "Vocalese," which won seven Grammy awards.
Hendricks began to teach at the University of Toledo in 2000 and was eventually appointed distinguished professor of jazz studies and granted an honorary doctorate in performing arts.
He is survived by a son, Jon; two daughters, Michele and Aria; and three grandchildren.
The singer and lyricist helped popularize vocalese
Photo of Jon Hendricks by Tom Copi
Jazz
vocalist and lyricist Jon Hendricks has died at the age of 96. He
passed away in a Manhattan hospital on Wednesday, November 22, the New York Times
reported. Beginning in the late ’50s, Hendricks rose to fame with the
vocal group Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Together they popularized
vocalese, or the tradition of adding lyrics to jazz instrumentals.
Hendricks also performed scat and bee-bop, integrating both
consonant-inflected patterns to heighten jazz’s appeal at a time when
rock ’n’ roll was starting to overtake the charts. Numerous groups and
artists—from Manhattan Transfer to Al Jarreau to Bobby McFerrin—have
cited his influence on their music. Born John Carl Hendricks in 1921, he began singing at the age of
seven. He later served in the Army during WWII, and upon returning home
began attending the University of Toledo on the G.I. Bill. Hendricks was
intent on pursing a career in law, but changed his plans when his
funding began running out. Instead, he moved to New York to pursue
music. In 1957, he formed Lambert, Hendricks & Ross with Dave
Lambert and Annie Ross. For their first album, 1957’s Sing a Song of Basie, the group overdubbed
their vocals and effectively replaced the Count Basie Orchestra’s horns
section. They stayed together for six years, releasing myriad projects,
including their Grammy-award winning album High Flying in 1961. Hendricks spoke with Jazz Times
in 2014 about his particular approach to vocalese. “I would forget
lyrics,” he explained. “I’d think, what is that next line? Then I’d make
up my own, and nobody noticed. That’s exactly how it happened. I didn’t
know what I was doing when I wrote them. I thought I was doing it for
LH&R. It just flowed right out.” After Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross
disbanded, the prolific recording artist went on to release several solo
albums. His last studio album, Freddie Freeloader, came out in 1990.
The cliche of “chemistry” explains more creative relationships than
the happy ones. Like chemical components, some collaborators mix well,
working sympathetically or symbiotically, and some react poorly, even
combustively, when they’re brought together. Jazz, as a form of
spontaneous, collective collaboration, is heavily dependent on the
chemistry of its creators, and volatile combinations sometimes produce
results more interesting—or at least more exciting to watch, if not to
be part of—than those with benign chemistry. Annie Ross and Jon
Hendricks, the jazz singers, have been performing together, on and off,
since 1957, when they joined the vocal arranger and singer Dave Lambert
to form Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, the group that perfected the
emerging art of jazz vocalese—the setting of complex instrumental parts
and solos to lyrics. It’s an art that calls for equally high levels of
virtuosity, dexterity, presence, and imagination, and no vocal group
before or after has had them in the measures of Lambert, Hendricks and
Ross, as we can see in the ever-mind-blowing films of the group in its
prime in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Here are two clips from the
precious little surviving footage of these singers together: “Doodlin’,”
their adaptation of the Horace Silver song, performed at the Newport
Jazz Festival in 1960, and “Every Day I Have the Blues,” their version of the Joe Williams-Count Basie number, in a performance for TV in the same period.
Ross
had innovated vocalese precociously half a decade before Lambert,
Hendricks, and Ross, writing the standard “Twisted” to a Wardell Gray
improvisation in 1952, when she was 22 years old. (As she says in
concert now, “A lot of people think Joni Mitchell wrote it. But she
didn’t.”) Ross left the trio in 1962, and Lambert and Hendricks tried
carrying on with various replacements, including Yolanda Bavan and a
Canadian singer named Anne Moss. Lambert died in 1966, struck by a truck
on the Connecticut Turnpike while he was fixing a flat tire. In the
years since, Ross and Hendricks have reunited for live performances
every now and then, and they even recorded a new album in the 1990s that
was never released. I don’t know why. Seven or eight years ago,
Hendricks and Ross had the twelfth or thirteenth of their fallings-out,
and Ross issued a press release that began with these sentences: “When
hell freezes over. That’s when I’ll sing with Jon Hendricks again.” Ross
thawed first, warmed by the upcoming occasion of Hendricks’ ninetieth
birthday. This past week, Hendricks and Ross reunited for two sets per
night over three nights at the Blue Note in New York, and the run was a
phenomenon of chemistry in all its possibilities. I saw the first set on
the second evening. There were moments of glorious, swirling musical
and personal harmony, and points when both Hendricks and Ross seemed
about to explode, and all of it was not just historic, but kinetic and
alive in ways that have nothing to do with nostalgia. I would say
something sentimental about having seen something that I’ll probably
never see again, but I’ve said that after at least three previous
Hendricks and Ross shows. I’ve never been more glad to be wrong.
Jazz singer who brought the vocalese technique to global audiences with the trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross
Jon Hendricks performing in 1969. He took chances with vocal gymnastics that few had attempted or imagined before him. Photograph: Alan Messer/Rex/Shutterstock
When the singer Jon Hendricks declared, during a gig at the age of
80, that the next stop was 100, the likelihood of him getting there
seemed almost self-evident. Back in 2002, as he bounded onstage at the
Jazz Cafe, London, in a glittering gold suit, hat cocked over one eye,
his yodelling, scatting, tone-bending reinvention of jazz classics by Miles Davis,
Thelonious Monk or Count Basie sounded like the work of an
indestructible musical force. Hendricks, who has died aged 96, was a
funny, articulate and creatively intelligent master of a hard art, who
took chances with vocal gymnastics and unpremeditated improv flights
that few jazz singers had attempted or imagined before him, and he could
mimic the sounds of instruments with uncanny fidelity.
He was a model for some of the best male singers in jazz history, including Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, Mark Murphy and Kurt Elling,
but Hendricks’ most lasting legacy was his expansion of the art of
vocalese, the technique of fitting wittily hip lyrics to the melody
lines of instrumental jazz themes and improvisations, as pioneered by
the singers Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure in the early 1950s. Some
of the jazz cognoscenti disliked the style’s occasional invitation to
technical tightrope-walking and showbiz bravura, but Hendricks was to
give vocalese a global platform through his collaborations with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross in the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
Hendricks was born in Newark, Ohio, one of 15 children born to
Alexander Hendricks, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal
church, and his wife, Willie Mae (nee Carrington), a choir leader. The
boy first sang in public with the choir at his parents’ church, and on
the family’s move to Toledo in 1935 he began singing on local radio, and
working in the city’s Waiters and Bellmen’s Club with a sensational
young pianist, Art Tatum,
that the wider world was on the verge of discovering. After school,
Tatum would give the boy informal music lessons – often playing him a
dizzying improvised run and not letting him off the hook until he could
flawlessly sing it back.
Hendricks worked as a singer in Detroit in the 40s, and served in the
US army following the Normandy landings – a traumatising experience for
reasons other than combat, since the military police took to firing on
him and other black servicemen for the suspicion they had consorted with
French women. They went AWOL to avoid their tormenters and were
imprisoned for desertion.
On his release at the war’s end, Hendricks continued to sing and play
drums around Toledo, took an English literature course at the city’s
university, and considered studying law. But in 1950, he met Charlie Parker
at the Civic Auditorium in Toledo. His wife, Connie, asked the
saxophone star if her shy young husband could sit in with him, and after
their performance Parker reportedly told Hendricks to forget the law
and come to New York.
In 1952, Hendricks wrote some songs in New York for the “jump-music” star Louis Jordan (Jordan’s hit I Want You to Be My Baby
was a Hendricks song), but struggled to make an impact as a singer.
However, when he encountered Jefferson’s lyrics for the James Moody
saxophone solo on Moody’s Mood For Love,
Hendricks became fascinated by the possibilities that vocalese opened
up, and the following year he began exploring them with Lambert. When
Lambert suggested they should apply the technique to the much-loved
riff-packed hits of Count Basie, Hendricks obliged with enough new
lyrics for an album, originally built around the two singers, a rhythm
section, and a vocal choir mimicking the big-band horns. But the chorus could not catch the supple magic of the Count Basie
band sound, so Ross was brought in to coach it, on the strength of her
own successful vocalese composition, Twisted
– a witty 1952 take on psychoanalysis based on a Wardell Gray saxophone
solo. But the music still did not work, until the impromptu trio of
Lambert, Hendricks and Ross dispensed with the choir and performed all
the vocals, with the big-ensemble feel captured by the experimental
studio technique of overdubbing. “It was one of the greatest moments of
my life when I heard those tapes back,” Ross told me in 1997. “I knew we
had something incredible.”
Jon Hendricks, right, performing with the trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross at the Newport jazz festival, 1959. Photograph: Ted Williams/ Iconic Images
The results formed the hit album Sing a Song of Basie (1958), and the
trio’s catchy collective-vocalese sound and canny jazz timing made them
a popular draw. The group worked with Count Basie’s own band, lent
their unique sound to Duke Ellington’s repertoire, and won a Grammy for
their last album, High Flying (1962). Ross left in 1962 to be replaced
by Yolande Bavan, and the new lineup continued until 1964. The prospect
of further re-formations ended with Lambert’s death in a road accident
in 1966. Hendricks had made his first album, A Good Git-Together, as a
leader in 1959, and in 1963 he paid his respects to the bossa nova
fashion of the time by writing classy lyrics to João Gilberto songs,
most notably Chega de Saudade (No More Blues).
He
lived in London for five years from 1968, performing throughout Europe,
appearing on TV, and in the British director John Jeremy’s film Jazz
Is Our Religion (1972). On his homecoming – now to the west coast – he
began a new career as a jazz journalist, and as a teacher of jazz
history at the University of California and California State University.
He wrote a stage show, Evolution of the Blues, which ran for five years
in San Francisco, and revisited the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross agenda
with Jon Hendricks & Company – his second wife, Judith (nee
Dickstein), was both performer and manager, and his daughters, Michelle
and Aria, son Eric, and his gifted disciple McFerrin were members at
various times. In 1986, Hendricks and McFerrin shared a Grammy for their contribution to an album, Vocalese, by their most successful vocal heirs The Manhattan Transfer,
which received an almost unprecedented 12 Grammy nominations and won
three. In 1988, Hendricks was a contributing lyricist to Carmen Sings
Monk, Carmen McRae’s covers album. He was named an American Jazz Master
by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992, performed a series of
reunion gigs with Ross, and in that decade also toured with Kurt Elling,
Mark Murphy and Kevin Mahogany as the Four Brothers. In 1997 he joined the vocalists Cassandra Wilson and Miles Griffith in performances of Wynton Marsalis’
moving Pulitzer-prizewinning slave-story Blood on the Fields (in which
he shrewdly and wittily played the griot-like sage Juba). He taught jazz
singing at the University of Toledo from 2000 to 2015, and toured
internationally with his own ensemble of Toledo students and local
singers. In 2015 he reunited with Ross to record and perform at Birdland
in New York. Hendricks’s final performance came at his 95th birthday
celebration the following year at the Iridium jazz club in New York.
This year, his lyrics to the score of the classic 1957 Miles Davis/Gil
Evans album Miles Ahead were completed, and a recording of that project
is currently in the pipeline. Judith died in 2015. Hendricks was predeceased by his son Eric and a
daughter, Colleen, from his first marriage, to Connie (nee Moore), which
ended in divorce. He is survived by the daughter, Aria, of his second
marriage, a son, Jon, and daughter, Michelle, of his first marriage, and
three grandchildren.
• Jon Hendricks (John Carl Hendricks), jazz singer, born 16 September 1921; died 22 November 2017
Steve Mack via Getty Images. Jon Hendricks performing at the 2011 Jazz At Lincoln Center Opening Night in New York City on Sept. 24, 2011.
Jon Hendricks, one of the most influential voices and creative improvisers in jazz, died in a Manhattan hospital in New York on Wednesday.
His daughter Aria Hendricks confirmed with The New York Times. He was 96 years old.
David Redfern via Getty Images. Jon Hendricks performs on stage in an undated photo taken around 1970.
Hendricks, a native of Newark, Ohio, shot to fame in the 1950s jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. The group, featuring Dave Lambert, Annie Ross and Hendricks as the vocalist, became legendary in jazz, performing around the world in the style of vocalese ― a type of jazz which involves a singer stringing words along to the melody of a song, typically an existing instrumental song, note for note.
The trio was nominated for a Grammy in 1958 and 1960 for their albums “Sing A Song of Basie” and “The Hottest New Group in Jazz” respectively. In 1961, they took home a Grammy for their album “High Flying.”
National Public Radio, which interviewed Hendricks around his 90th birthday in 2011, described the groundbreaking singer as “The Father of Vocalese,” but, as the Times points out, Hendricks did not invent the style. He did, however, become known as the singer who mastered it.
Hendricks described vocalese as “the putting of words to parts of songs not usually approached by lyricists” during a 2011 master class on jazz lyric writing.
“Being brave, I would do the whole song, solos and all, and write words for the solos that gave them their place in the song. And always tell the story,” he added. “I wrote a story out of whatever it is the song is titled and whatever the subject matter is. It’s something like writing a novel.”
Throughout his career, Hendricks was a music critic, wrote for the theater, was a professor of jazz at the University of Toledo and continued singing, according to NPR. He was also awarded with the federal National Endowment of Art’s Jazz Master fellowship in 1993.
Hendricks’ wife, Judith Hendricks, died in 2015. He is survived by daughters Aria Hendricks and Michele Hendricks; son Jon Hendricks Jr.; niece Bonnie Hopkins; and three grandchildren, according to The New York Times.
Two interviews with American jazz singer and lyricist Jon
Hendricks who talks to Les Tomkins in 1968 and 1973. They discuss his
group 'Lambert, Hendricks and Ross' and the British jazz scene.
So the Story Goes: Jon Hendricks on how hamburgers birthed vocalese
News
September 21, 2016
JazzBlog
If you get a group of jazz musicians in a
room together, it’s only a matter of time until they start sharing
stories from the road. In this original series, “So the Story Goes,” we
will highlight some of those great stories. See other entries in this series. Born
in Toledo, Ohio, just over 95 years ago, Jon Hendricks has long been a
legend among jazz vocalists. He is widely referred to as the father of
vocalese, a style of jazz singing in which lyrics are added to the
melody of a preexisting instrumental composition. Needless to say, he's
both a talented lyricist and skilled wordsmith. Jazz journalist Leonard
Feather called Hendricks the “Poet Laureate of Jazz” and Timereferred to him as the “James Joyce of Jive.” In
a recent interview with Jazz at Lincoln Center, Hendricks discusses
what it was like to grow up during the Great Depression and how the time
he spent at the local burger joint kick-started his career as a
vocalist and would play a key role in the development of vocalese:
My
father, with 12 children—that’s a lot of mouths to feed, this being in
the Depression. So Stanley Cowell, Sr. had a hamburger joint right on
the corner of Collingwood and Indiana, good hamburgers. They cost a lot
of money; they cost a quarter—a quarter is a quarter of a dollar! It was
a good piece of change.
So
I wanted to hang out in there but he [Cowell, Sr.] would say, “Jon,
you’re going to have to buy a Coke or something.” So I stood in front of
the jukebox and I learned two or three tunes every day until I had
learned the whole program of the jukebox. Then, in the evening, when
people were off work and they would come in to get a hamburger, I’d be
standing in front of the jukebox and they'd come and I'd say, “What tune
are you going to play?” “What’s it to you?” “Well, give me a dime and I’ll sing it.” “What?” “Yeah, give me the money and I’ll sing the tune.” And
they thought I was crazy! So this guy said to his girlfriend, “This is
just nuts enough to be interesting. I got to find out about this.” So
he gave me the dime and I put the record on and I stood in front. It
was a Jimmie Lunceford record with a Willie Smith alto solo, and then a
trumpet solo—I forget who—but I would sing it, all of it, note for note.
That’s how I was able to write vocalese—to become “Jon Hendricks:
Father of Vocalese.” Click here to read more entries of So the Story Goes.
*****
Image credits: Jon Hendricks, photo by Frank Stewart for Jazz at Lincoln Center; Jon Hendricks, photo by R. Andrew Lepley.
Jon Hendricks: Poet Laureate, Godfather of Jazz Vocalese
Roseanna Vitro’s interview with the influential singer and lyricist
Richard Conde
Jon Hendricks
If there was ever a more swinging bebop singer than Jon
Hendricks, I don’t know who it was. He was clearly born to scat sing,
easily maneuvering through difficult twists and turns in Charlie Parker
solos, swinging through Count Basie’s book and singing Duke Ellington’s
music with integrity and spirit. At 93, he’s still ready to meet life’s
struggles as an artist, with a twinkle in his eye. He was raised in a
family with fourteen siblings and developed strong survival skills from
his father, a preacher at the Warren, OH A.M.E church. With Art Tatum
living down the street, Jon’s ears were fed the right notes and feel
from his youth forward.
In 1957, Jon teamed up with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross to form the most
influential vocal jazz group the world has known. Jon discovered his
talent for writing lyrics to jazz solos, as did the great Annie Ross.
Hair-raising scat solos flowed with the speed of light from Dave Lambert
and Jon. Lambert, Hendricks and Ross unquestionably remain an
inspiration to all jazz singers around the world today.
I met Jon Hendricks when I first moved to New York City in 1980. My
friend and great jazz singer, Marion Cowings, introduced us and we sang
together one night at the Soho Club known as Greene Street. I’d studied
Jon’s music and I was beyond thrilled to utter even one –ooh bop sha bam
with Jon and Marion. It was a thrill to do this interview with Jon in
his New York apartment. No one has better bebop stories than Jon as he
sings solos while he’s talking! I also had the opportunity to catch up
with his wife, vocalist, Judith Hendricks.
Roseanna Vitro: Jon, how would you describe your concept in jazz singing?
Jon Hendricks: I play the song, and then I put words to it, adding to
something that already exists. But to take a type of music, and replay
that type of music verbatim and think it’s a contribution-that’s wrong.
The song that you play is a composition already. So leave the other guy
alone, and do something on your own. I tend to speak in rhymes
[laughing].
RV: I appreciate your concept. It’s one of the reasons I’m here. I
recall our mutual friend, vocalist, Marion Cowings introducing us years
ago. I could hear his improvisation was informed by yours. Marion’s a
wonderful singer.
JH: Yes he is, and you are, too!
RV: Jon, you know you have a very special place in jazz history.
JH: I don’t want a place in history. I want a place in the House of
Lords. They made me an honorary member of the House of Lords, and an
honorary member of the House of Congress, and in France, they made me a
member of the Legion D’Honneur, comprised of musketeers-the regiment who
protects the King-Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the famous Three
Musketeers, belonged to the Legion D’Honneur. That means I can go to the
Mayors mansion in Paris and show them my pin, and go right into the
Mayor’s office. They’ve given me much more than my own country.
RV: Yes, most jazz musicians and jazz lovers in the U.S. have very
strong feelings regarding how jazz music is perceived and pigeonholed by
the media in this country.
JH: We are the cultural arbiters of the nation. It’s disgraceful. You
have to fight, because America is an ignorant country. My magazines are
best sellers around the world. I just finished a magazine on the Miles Ahead album. I put words to that for jazz choirs to sing.
RV: Jazz choirs are very popular right now in high schools and colleges
around the globe. Almost all vocal jazz directors know your book of
vocaleses from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross recordings and your solo albums, such as Freddie the Freeloader.
JH: I have one in London waiting for me now. They’ve got the words and they’ve got the choir.
RV: I can’t wait to hear it! Freddie the Freeloader and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, The Hottest New Group in Jazz are required listening.
JH: You have that Miles Ahead album, right? It’s got all those
great tunes, plus that great JJ Johnson ballad-“Lament.” And I love to
sing Miles. Miles is a singing teacher.
RV: Absolutely. You’re learning hip altered scales, note choices and
phrasing when you sing with Miles. The space is as important as the note
choices.
JH: I want to have everybody on it, all my friends, Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau. [Singing:]
“Every soul I encounter, I regard is just another me. It’s part of my
heart constantly. Always, Always. Living like that rule can be a lonely
life. If you taste the sweetness of life, while you’re avoiding the
trials. The minute that I’m weeping, each tear that trickles down over
my face, I see it for the whole human race. Another soul’s in trouble…so
am I. That’s why I cry. Through each song I see a large desire, just
the way it should be, If nobody ever sees me. I wanna be kissed…”
RV: Oh, that’s amazing. I could listen to you sing solos all day and I’m
spellbound with inspiration. I’d like to ask some questions about your
boyhood. What were you dreaming of when you were young?
JH: When I was young I was hoping for a time that I could learn to sing
opera. I lived in a neighborhood in Toledo and learned to speak some
Italian, because there were a lot of Italians there, and some of them
were the Mafia. They came into the neighborhood without any problem.
They wanted to have a place where they could have a good time, so they
set up a club called the “Waiters and Bellman’s Club.” Those jobs-waiter
and bellman-were two of the only jobs a Negro man could get in those
days that had respect and could earn a living. Five houses from me was
the home of Arthur Tatum. I was about 12 years old and I used to come
out of junior high school past his house. One day I was walking by and
he came out of his house and invited me in. He asked me what I was
doing, and I told him I was coming from school. He said, “Oh, you go to
Robinson? My brother goes there.” So I would stop and see him after
school sometimes. After a time, I asked him what he was up to and he
said he was playing all night in a little joint downtown where artists
would stop and jam when they were crossing the country. So I was talking
to him and I said, “You wanna work in your home town? You want to be
close to your family? ” I told him he should get a gig at this
after-hours joint over on Indiana Avenue that I was working in. “You
get the house bass and drummer and you have two sets, and you play my
two numbers that I sing.” I was 12 or 13 years old at the time. I asked
Art if I could mention his name to them. He said, “Sure! Mention my name
to them.” I did, and they asked him to come in and play. They hired him
immediately! At that time he couldn’t find singers that would stay,
because they would come and stay two weeks and end up going and covering
Cleveland, Columbus, Louisville, then back to New York. They never
stuck around.
RV: When did you actually start singing?
JH: I started singing when I was 6. My father was the pastor at Warren
A.M.E. Church, A.M.E is for African, Methodist, Episcopal Church. The
Episcopal Church was the one that the English ship captain belonged to
who transported and dumped over 180 slaves. When they came ashore, they
had to provide the information about where they came from, and John
Nelson, the ship’s captain, was found out. He was so sorry for what he
did, and he started going to church and wrote the classic hymn, “Amazing
Grace.”
RV: Many a good singer began their musical journey in a church choir.
Tell me more about your working relationship with Art Tatum.
JH: My mother would save my supper for me, because she knew I was up at
Art’s getting my nightly lessons. I’d leave about 9 p.m. and I wouldn’t
come back until 2 or 3 a.m. the next morning. Everybody of any
consequence who played an instrument, that means all the great bands,
Benny Goodman’s entire band, was listening to Art Tatum.
Louis Armstrong heard me, and said, “Boy, you can sing!” I said, “Thank you very much.”
He said, “What are you doing tomorrow about 12 O’clock?” I said,
“Nothing.” He said, “Come to the place I’m staying. (You know they
couldn’t check into the White hotels, and there weren’t any hotels in
the ghetto, so he had to get a room in a boarding house. So he said,
“Come by and wake me up and I’ll take you for a walk.” So I got up and I
went down to the boarding house where he was staying and he was dressed
and ready-you know most people would make you wait, but he was dressed
and ready. We walked down Indiana Avenue to the downtown area and across
the street and all the way back down into the ghetto. He talked all the
way down and all the way back. He said, “You know something? You remind
me of me when I was the little cat. I knew all I wanted was to learn to
play the trumpet.”
RV: How incredible that you met Art Tatum and Louis Armstrong. Louis,
like you, was so entertaining and joyous. I recall reading some
musicians didn’t dig his persona because he was entertaining.
JH: They called him an Uncle Tom because they thought that he was trying to make the white men happy. Well, of course he was!
RV: Well, everybody’s trying to make a living, right?
JH: That’s what entertainers do. I’m not going to come out on stage and
say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to entertain only the black
people.” No. I wasn’t going to do that. No, you can’t think like that.
And that’s what those people were doing. Artists like Louis, Duke and
Count Basie, talked them out of that. Everything they did involved white
people.
RV: Fortunately, Benny Goodman broke a color barrier when he hired Teddy
Wilson. Musicians began building the bridges even amidst the terrible
racial climate.
What was the catalyst and inspiration that put your talent on the path
of a bebop lyricist to jazz solos? I’ve taught your lyrics to countless
students and audiences on the road. “Everybody’s Boppin'” is fun for
rhythm changes and “Centerpiece” for a twelve bar blues form.
JH: I would forget lyrics. I’d think, what is that next line? Then I’d
make up my own, and nobody noticed. That’s exactly how it happened. I
didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote them. I thought I was doing it
for LH&R. It just flowed right out.
RV: So forming Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross was your inspiration. I’ll
post a list of your vocalese catalog at the end of our interview. The
scat solos you and Dave Lambert traded inspired generations of vocal
improvisers. Annie Ross wrote some unforgettable lyrics, too: “Twisted,”
“Jackie,” and “Farmers Market.” I look forward to chatting with Annie
very soon.
JH: Yes, I needed to give Dave and Annie something to sing. It just
flowed right out. I was an English major in school, all the way through
college.
RV: So in school, you were reading a lot of good prose. Were you a big dreamer?
JH: Poverty can be valuable, because if you suffer like that, it
strengthens you for all of the things you need to get through. That
strength you get from hard times can be put into your work, and it helps
you get through the work you need to do.
RV: I understand. I too, grew up with very little money, but big dreams.
I advise my students to ignore the negative people. You must have a
dream, a vision and work hard, focus and stay on your path.
JH: No. Never listen to them! My brother says, “Shurrup!” I also never
say you can’t. Don’t tell me what I can’t do, because that’s what I will
do. That’s the way I am about “Can’t.” “John, you can’t do this.” Then
BOOM! “John, you did that?” Well, don’t tell me what I can’t do!
RV: A strong mindset is very important.
JH: You’ve got to have a positive mindset, especially if you want to be
an artist, because you have to be in a position to be helped by ghosts.
You know there are spirits who are all around us all of the time. The
human family is surrounded by spirits at all times. And they actually
are taking care of us. If we were paying attention to what they tell us,
we wouldn’t have these tragedies that we go through.
RV: You’ve truly lived a magical life. Your ghosts have done a fine job watching over. What are a few of your favorite memories?
JH: Art Tatum’s mother scrubbed floors in a bank building downtown. One
day she came home and said, “Arthur, I saw a piano roll and this fellow
said he’d sell it to me cheap because nobody was buying them, so I
bought it and brought it home.” I don’t know if you remember piano
rolls, but there were player pianos set up to automatically play these
pieces that were recorded on the paper rolls, while you pumped the
pedals. When she heard this roll being played she said, “That’s pretty. I
wonder if Arthur can play it.” She didn’t understand it was two guys
playing the music on the piano roll. She took it home and said, “Arthur,
I’d like to hear you play this when I come home from work tomorrow.”
Art said, “Momma, I’ll be ready for you to hear it tomorrow. I’ll spend
today learning it.” He didn’t know it was two guys. She came home the
next day and she asked him, “How are you coming along with that?” He
said, “I’m ready!” And he played it! I said, “Whoooo, look at that!”
Then I whispered in her ear, and told her it was two guys playing. She
said, “It is?” I said “Yeah!” She was so surprised. He not only played
it, he learned it by ear and played it in a day. To this day, I’ll never
forget that.
Do you know who Martha Raye is? I’m reminded of a story. Martha Raye
came into this joint where we were jamming. She starts scatting, and
she’s trying to cut me. That’s her job. I knew it; she knew it. I was
laughing. She was scatting like, “Spack! Shog-in-dit Dit!
Shadle-do-bom-bop dee-ter! Shpee-keee do-ah-da-wop! Then she put the
huge old microphone completely in her mouth. Man-I got off the
bandstand.
RV: What amazing stories. I never knew Martha Raye could scat sing!
Sounds like a very funny moment. Art Tatum must have been blessed with a
very focused mind. Meditation is a popular discipline for the mind. Do
you meditate?
JH: Oh, yes.
RV: I noticed Judith making a healthy green drink for you guys when I
walked in today. It’s obvious you guys are into a holistic life style.
You look great!
JH: Oh, yeah. I’m 93. I’m not finished. I’m just on the third rail.
RV: I know you still teach in your hometown at the University of Toledo.
What’s the first thing you tell a student who wants to learn to sing
jazz?
JH: The first thing you need to know is… I wrote a jazz poem:Nothing about hugging or kissing.
One word- Listen!
You’ve got to listen. If you can hear it, you can sing it. If you can hear it and sing it, you can play it.
RV: Who were your biggest influences for developing your scatting?
JH: Louis Armstrong, Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, and Dizzy. I always held my
hands like I was playing a saxophone. If you move your hands like an
alto or tenor player, that’s how you’re gonna sound. There are other
cats who do that, too, like Al Jarreau. You’d be surprised how many
notes come out.
RV: Did you ever study singing?
JH: No.
RV: Did you ever study the piano?
JH: No, but I know enough to play a few chords.
RV: So, the majority of your work is by ear. “Listen” is your first step.
JH: Yes, like my poem says:Nothing about hugging or kissing.
One word- Listen!
RV: Do you have any other pearls of wisdom you’d care to mention for the
benefit of student singers? You’ve seen the jazz business go through
many changes.
JH: I would say this: what you want to know, some person possesses. So
you get as close to that person as you can. The way to do that, the way I
did it, the way everybody I know does it, is: “Hey, I’m gonna hang out
with you so that I can learn what you know and how you came to know it.
In turn, I’m going to serve you in some way. If you need a person to run
errands, or to be of help to you, I’m here for that, in order to learn
what I need to know.” And nobody will turn you down, because you are
offering to be a personal assistant. People are flattered by that. If
you do that, you can get all the knowledge you want. Many band singers
that I worked with helped me. I later asked them why they had taken the
time to share with me. They told me that it was because they knew I was
sincere, that I wanted to better myself, and I wasn’t trying to
“out-star” them. So they gave me all the knowledge they could.
RV: That’s such good wisdom to pass along to younger musicians.
JH: It’s also a good way to hold your ego down. Some people have an
attitude, “I don’t serve nobody!” I say, that’s okay. You don’t have to
serve me. Then I’m gone. I wouldn’t say that’s a good friend to have.
RV: It pays to be humble and listen.
JH: Why, sure.
RV: Were you always disciplined? A lack of discipline has stopped many a good musician from completing their goals.
JH: I was always disciplined, thanks to my father. My father looked
after me and looked out for me. He wouldn’t want me to work under the
wrong circumstances. Now, in the club where Art played, there were
guests all the time. They had one room downstairs for the dancing
ladies. Nowadays, dancing ladies are very skinny, no meat on the bones.
That’s not good, really. The best of the dancers had some meat on their
bones. At the club, they put me in the room with the ladies. I was just
12 years old. They all knew me and my father, mother, all my brothers
and sisters. I was one of 15 siblings, 9th child, 7th son, of 12 boys
and 3 girls, born September 16, 1921. They were right givers, a lot of
marijuana in the men’s room at the club, and I knew that was bad. But
there were a lot of ladies in the ladies’ room. They would come in
between acts to change costumes and rip off their blouses and their
brassieres, and bare breasts would be flopping everywhere. They would
say, “Oh, Jonny, come here! Come here, Jonny!” They would take my head
and bring it to their bosoms and press. [He motions with hands squeezing
face on both sides.] I’d be like, “Hey, bus driver! Open the door!”
[laughter] Yes, these ladies would get me in trouble.
RV: Yes, I can see your introduction to women at such an early age was a young boys dream.
Let’s talk about your favorite piano players. In today’s college jazz
programs, instrumentalists are taught very hip technique and
improvisation theory. But seldom are they taught the value of lyrics and
how to play with different styles of singers. What advice would you
give to pianists?
JH: It’s called “accompaniment.”
RV: Some pianists bristle at that label, feeling it’s pejorative, and they are insulted if you call them an accompanist.
JH: Then take that cat’s name off the roles, and get yourself another cat that’s got more sense! “What do you mean, it’s what you want? You know, you’re not here to get what you want and just be here for that only. You get what you want, when you give something back.”
RV: Yes, a relationship with respect should be about give and take musically.
JH: That’s the only way to be in show business.
RV: When you’re performing on the road and sing one of your beautiful
ballads, instead of a bebop song, what do you tell the pianist?
JH: I would explain to them what the word accompanist means. When
you are accompanying a singer, you are playing the chords of the song
in such a way that you never get in the way of the melody the singer is
singing. You always lay it down, and then, 3 bars later, the next
phrase, and then it becomes a marriage. It’s a work in which everybody
takes part as an accompanist somehow, and it’s healthy. If it’s done
right, it’s artistic as hell.
RV: Who’s one of your favorite pianists to sing with?
JH: Art Tatum. It was like I had the whole Philadelphia Symphony back there when I was singing with him.
RV: What do you look for in a bassist?
JH: In a bassist you look for thumpin’! BOOM! Ding! Ba-doom, dup, dup, [sings killin’ bass line]. You’re looking for that!
RV: How about the drummer? A drummer can make or break the band. Do you say anything to the drummer before you start?
JH: You’ve got a vocalist here. No instrument is weaker than the human
voice. So to accompany something as weak as the human voice, you’ve got
to stay under it. And you have to have the willingness to do that.
Everybody knows you want to be heard, so you should have a solo to show
the audience that you are an artist, and be heard. But all of that
“being heard” should not be going on over the singer. If you feature the
band and let them blow on something so they can shine, it’s good for
them and for the audience.
RV: What is your favorite jazz club?
JH: I like the Blue Note. Arturo’s is fun here in NYC. But my favorite
is Ronnie Scott’s club in London. The best way to teach singers is to
sing. People ask me if I teach and I say, “No,” but I’m lying. Because
I’m going to Ronnie Scott’s that night to perform and the students are
all there studying what I do. They can learn from what they hear. We
performers are teachers. That’s what we do.
RV: Many thanks to Jon and Judith Hendricks for opening up their home
and taking the time to chat with me. This interview is a small peep into
the life and history of a jazz icon. I believe all jazz students should
hear Jon’s lyrics and solo’s on ballads and bebop. “Just Listen. “ Required listening: 1. The Hottest New Group in Jazz – Lambert, Hendricks and Ross 2. Sing a Song of Basie – Lambert, Hendricks and Ross 3. Freddie the Freeloader – Jon Hendricks featuring Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, George Benson More information about Jon Hendricks here.
THE MUSIC OF JON HENDRICKS: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH JON HENDRICKS:
John Carl Hendricks (September 16, 1921 – November 22, 2017), known professionally as Jon Hendricks, was an American jazzlyricist and singer. He is one of the originators of vocalese,
which adds lyrics to existing instrumental songs and replaces many
instruments with vocalists, such as the big-band arrangements of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He is considered one of the best practitioners of scat singing, which involves vocal jazz soloing. Jazz critic and historian Leonard Feather called him the "Poet Laureate of Jazz", while Time dubbed him the "James Joyce of Jive". Al Jarreau called him "pound-for-pound the best jazz singer on the planet—maybe that's ever been".[1]
Early years
Born in 1921 in Newark, Ohio, Hendricks and his 14 siblings moved many times, following their father's assignments as an A.M.E. pastor, before settling permanently in Toledo.
There,
Hendricks began his singing career at the age of seven. He has said:
"By the time I was 10, I was a local celebrity in Toledo. I had offers
to go with Fats Waller when I was 12, and offers to go with Ted Lewis and be his shadow when I was 13. He had that song 'Me and My Shadow'. And he had this little Negro boy who was his shadow, that did everything he did. That was his act."[2]
As
a teenager, Jon's first interest was in the drums, but before long he
was singing on the radio regularly with another Toledo native, pianist Art Tatum. Jon met his first wife Colleen Moore in Toledo, Ohio. They were married and had 4 children.[citation needed]
World War II
After serving in the Army during World War II, Hendricks went home to attend University of Toledo on the G.I. Bill as a pre-law major. Just when he was about to enter the graduate law program, the G.I. benefits ran out. Charlie Parker had,
at a stop in Toledo two years prior, encouraged him to come to New York
and look him up. Hendricks moved there and began his singing career.
In 1957, he teamed with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross to form the legendary vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross (LH&R). With Jon as lyricist, the trio perfected the art of vocalese and
took it around the world, earning them the designation of the "Number
One Vocal Group in the World" for five years in a row from Melody Maker magazine. Their multi-tracked album Sing a Song of Basie was one of the earliest examples of overdubbing.[3]
Hendricks typically wrote lyrics not just to melodies but to entire instrumental solos, a notable example being his take on Ben Webster's tenor saxophone solo on Ellington's original recording of "Cotton Tail", as featured on the album Lambert, Hendricks and Ross! (1960). His lyrics to Benny Golson's "I Remember Clifford" have been recorded by several other vocalists, including Dinah Washington, Carmen McRae, Nancy Wilson, Ray Charles, The Manhattan Transfer and Helen Merrill.[citation needed] After
six years the trio disbanded for solo careers but not before leaving
behind a catalog of legendary recordings, most of which have never gone
out of print.[citation needed]
Countless singers cite the work of LH&R as an influence, including Van Morrison, Al Jarreau and Bobby McFerrin. The song "Yeh Yeh", for which Hendricks composed the lyrics, became a 1965 hit for British R&B-jazz singer Georgie Fame,
who continues to record and perform Lambert, Hendricks & Ross
compositions to this day. In 1966 Hendricks recorded "Fire in the City"
with the Warlocks, who shortly after changed their name to the Grateful Dead.[4] Hendricks wrote lyrics for several Thelonious Monk songs, including "In Walked Bud", which he performed on Monk's 1968 album Underground.
For a performance at the 1960 Monterey Jazz Festival, he created and starred in a musical he called Evolution of the Blues Song, which featured such acclaimed singers as Jimmy Witherspoon, Hannah Dean, and "Big" Miller, as well as saxophonists Ben Webster and Pony Poindexter.
The ensemble played not only Hendricks' words and music but also Percy Mayfield's classic "Please Send Me Someone to Love," the driving D. Love gospel song "That's Enough", and the blues evergreen, "C.C. Rider".
In 1961, Columbia Records released an LP of the production and
Hendricks later presented the show in San Francisco; at the Westwood
Playhouse in Los Angeles, where it was produced by attorneys Burton
Marks and Mark Green; and in New York City.[citation needed]
Solo
Jon Hendricks at Birdland
Pursuing a solo career, and after divorcing his first wife, Colleen (Connie), Hendricks moved his children to London, England, in 1968, partly so that his four children could receive a better education. While based there he toured Europe and Africa, performed frequently on British television and appeared in the 1971 British film Jazz Is Our Religion (which focuses on the photographs of Val Wilmer) as well as the French film Hommage à Cole Porter. His sold-out club dates drew fans such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Five years later the Hendricks family settled in Mill Valley, California, where Hendricks worked as the jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and taught classes at California State University at Sonoma and the University of California at Berkeley. The piece he wrote for the stage about the history of jazz, Evolution of the Blues, ran for five years at the Off-Broadway Theatre in San Francisco and two years in Los Angeles. His television documentary Somewhere to Lay My Weary Head received Emmy, Iris and Peabody awards.
Hendricks
recorded several critically acclaimed albums on his own, some with his
wife Judith and daughters Michele and Aria contributing. He collaborated
with old friends The Manhattan Transfer for their seminal 1985 album, Vocalese, which won seven Grammy Awards. He served on the Kennedy Center Honors committee under Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton.
In 2000 Hendricks returned to his home town to teach at the University of Toledo,
where he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Jazz Studies and
received an honorary Doctorate of the Performing Arts. He was selected
to be the first American jazz artist to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris.
His 15-voice group, the Jon Hendricks Vocalstra at the University of
Toledo, performed at the Sorbonne in 2002. Hendricks also wrote lyrics
to some classical pieces including "On the Trail" from Ferde Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite. The Vocalstra premiered a vocalese version of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" with the Toledo Symphony.
In 2012, Hendricks appeared in the documentary film No One But Me, discussing his former bandmate and friend, Annie Ross.[6] In 2015, Hendricks lost his second wife Judith to a brain tumor.
Hendricks also appeared on three tracks from the 2016 release of the JC Hopkins Biggish
Band titled "Meet Me At Minton's". He performs vocalese on "Suddenly
(In Walked Bud)", is included in the ensemble on the album's title track
"Meet Me At Minton's", and croons a duet of the Monk tune "How I Wish
(Ask Me Now)" with singer and 2016 Thelonius Monk Competition winner Jazzmeia Horn. At the time of the recording he was 93 and Horn was 23.[7]
In 2017, Hendricks' full lyricization of the album Miles Ahead, including Miles Davis' solos and Gil Evans'
orchestrations, was completed. It was premiered in New York by UK-based
choir the London Vocal Project, with Hendricks in attendance, with a
studio recording to follow.[8][9]
Hendricks died on November 22, 2017 in Manhattan, New York City, aged 96.[10]
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
.
Truth be told, Jon' s splendid contribution to jazz has never been
fully acknowledged or appreciated. Jon not only has written the words to
dozens of songs based on famous jazz solos, he also has perfectly
captured their infectious intent by singing every nuance of the original
instrumentals. Which requires enormous skill, sensitivity and depth. If
you wave off Jon's gifts as nothing more than a vocal magic trick, try
this exercise: Grab the lyrics to Cloudburst or Everyday
and sing along with the record. Not so simple, right? Jon can swing,
he's bop hip, and since the early 1950s has been jazz's
impersonator-in-chief, getting saxophone, trombone and trumpet solos up
on their hind legs and walking.
session that featured vocalese singer Eddie Jefferson and the Three
Riffs. In 1955, Jon and the Dave Lambert Singers recorded three tracks.
But his big break came in 1957, when a failed recording session led to
the formation of 
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. The group's first album, Sing a Song of Basie, won a Grammy Award and ignited a fresh vocal concept that was both fun and sophisticated.
road running through it. My father was pastor of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church, which served the area. No one was famous there. If you
were alive back then in the Depression, you were a celebrity [laughs].
There were 17 of us—14 boys and 3 girls. There was no TV then, so
getting along with each other was necessary and easy. You had no choice.
church moved my father to many different parishes to energize
congregations. I went to 13 different schools. The church paid for our
relocation, and there was always a parsonage that went with the church,
so we always had a house. We had to sleep three to a bed, of course, but
we were used to that. That’s good for a family. It forces closeness.
[Bishop Richard Allen, founder of the A.M.E. Church]
was from Toledo, too. When I started to sing as a kid, he accompanied
me on the radio. Soon he began calling me for gigs. Can you imagine? Art
Tatum calling me to sing with him? When I was 9 years old, I was known
as Little Johnny Hendricks and sang at the Rivoli Theater in Toledo. Art
was 21 years old.
bunk reading when I heard someone playing Charlie Parker’s records. His
music made complete sense to me because I was already familiar with Art
Tatum. When Dizzy [Gillespie] and Bird [Charlie Parker] came on the
scene, they were just following Art Tatum. Most people don't realize
that Tatum was the father of bebop.
and was studying pre-law. I got all A's in English—including the only A
awarded in creative writing in seven years. My English professor was
Milton Marks, who had written a book on creative writing used in all the
universities.
Miles had just left the quintet and Kenny Dorham [pictured] replaced
him on trumpet. Al Haig took Duke Jordan’s place. I had Bird’s records
and had researched everybody in the group. So when I went up to sing
with him, I took about eight choruses. Then I started to exit the stage.
But I felt this hand on my coattail. Kenny was up taking his solo so
his chair was empty. I looked back and saw my coattail was in Bird’s
hand. Bird motioned for me to sit in Kenny’s chair.
broke down. We went to the bus station and, remembering what Bird had
said, bought tickets and took the bus to New York City. When I arrived, I
had only my wife and son, and a set of drums.
to see Bird. When I arrived at the bar, I put my hand on the doorknob
but pulled it back. I started to feel silly. I thought, “This cat was
doing one-nighters all over the Midwest. He’s not going to remember me."
So I started to walk away from the bar, toward my hotel. But soon I
stopped. I said to myself, “The only guy who knows what I do is in that
place. I have to go in there.”
thought it would be a desecration of the copyright. So Parker played
the same chord changes but made up a different melody. Parker told Teddy
Reig, the [Savoy Records] producer of the session to call it Ko-Ko. Years later, Teddy asked Bird what Ko-Ko meant. Bird said it was the name of the Lord High Executioner in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado [laughs].
Charlie Parker not only knew the work but the irony of the name and its
use for the song. He was an intellectual. Later Bird kept a tape in his
luggage of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. He liked the part where the woman screams [laughs].
“Roy, cool it and sit down and play the drums.” I got up with them and
sang three numbers, and the house went wild. I’ve always thought of
myself as a horn, so that’s what I did. I scatted as though I were
another horn in the group. They loved it.
gave me a sheet of paper with his words to Stan Getz’s solo on Don't Get Scared,
which Stan had recorded in '51 with his Swedish All-Stars. I said, “I
see your words, but where are my words?” King Pleasure said, “You’re a
writer. Write your own words.” So I did. That’s why when you listen to
the recording, his words sound like a father talking to his son and I'm
responding. I came up with that concept after leaving the bar. Quincy
[Jones] arranged that session.
language. My father always chose me to help him with the text for his
Sunday sermons. He’d ask me to copy out text from the bible each week.
This made me curious about everything and eager to research whatever I
didn’t know. If I’m onto something, I don’t stop until I get to the
truth. I do the same thing with my lyrics. I’ve always had a love of
words and word combinations. After spending time on the streets and in
the clubs of New York in the early 1950s, it all came together.
He'd just take off the different parts he needed right from the
recording. Instead of the whole band, you'd hear just one saxophone—the
first alto and the second alto, the first tenor and the baritone, one
after the next. Annie had the same thing but with the trumpets, and Dave
had the trombones.
Twisted was out already. She was singing vocalese before Dave and I did.
imitates the sound of the distorted voices on the tape].
When assembling all the parts onto one master tape, we had put the
least-heard voices—the alto, the second trombone and the baritone
parts—on top. And the others next. So it was inaudible. There was no
blended order to the parts. We should have recorded each section
separately and then brought them together by modulating the sections by
the dials.
such a sweet cat. We all loved him. So Dave said, “Give us another
month and a half. What time do you close?" Creed said, "At 8 [p.m.].
Dave said, "We’ll be in here at 8:15 p.m. What time do you open?" Creed
said, "At 7 [a.m.]." Dave says, "We'll leave at 6:45. Just give us the
time." Creed said, "I won't be able to come up with any more money."
Dave waved him off, saying, "We don't need the money. Just give us the
time and we'll come in and do this right.”
rest of our lives. Dave, too, bless his heart.
Jon Hendricks 
Jon Hendricks at the 1972 MontereyJazz FestivalDavid Redfern / Getty Images
He
won a Grammy in 1986 for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, with Bobby
McFerrin, for “Another Night in Tunisia,” from the Manhattan Transfer
album Vocalese (which won in two other categories as well). A
rendering of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” the track found
Hendricks matching Charlie Parker’s famous alto saxophone solo note for
note, with words.
Jazz
singer Jon Hendricks in 1997. Singer and pianist Carmen McRae called
Hendricks “the greatest lyricist in the world. " Al Jarreau said he was
“pound for pound the best jazz singer on the planet.” (Jim Cooper /
Associated Press)
