Obscure & Neglected Female Singers Of Jazz & Standards (1930s to 1960s)

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Ridin'High, Sep 4, 2016.

  1. Bob F

    Bob F Senior Member

    Location:
    Massachusetts USA
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  2. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident

    Thanks. What made me think it was about ten years earlier.
     
  3. Bob F

    Bob F Senior Member

    Location:
    Massachusetts USA
    Perhaps you're thinking of the two duets Sinatra sang with Keely Smith for a 1958 Capitol single—“Nothing in Common” and “How Are Ya’ Fixed for Love?”
     
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  4. toilet_doctor

    toilet_doctor "Rockin' chair's got me"

    Location:
    USA
    Next singer you are looking for is also from the National Treasure chest and my top 10 (banned here):



    And the album would be this one:

    [​IMG]

    It is hard to find 2004 JVC audiophile XRCD24 release, but please don't buy 1985 CD - I'll just spoil the fun.

    Look for Japanese release of 2014:
    Sings Ballads [Limited Pressing] Rosemary Clooney CD Album
    (translation)
    "A wonderful ballad album by Rosemary Clooney that can be said to be extreme in maturity. From the expression of Rosie carefully sprinkling moist and moist, great persuasive power is born. Concord 's all - star member also shows good support. ※ Limited Edition (3 months)"

    Or wait for re-release. I'll let you know when it come.

    Rosemary Clooney - The Shadow Of Your Smile (Remastered)
     
    Last edited: Jan 19, 2018
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  5. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident

    That must be it. Weren't there earlier duets on the radio in the late 1940s or early 1950s? or on television?
     
  6. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident


    T_D :
    (I'm old and polite and can't bring myself to call you by your handle here)
    Okay, I found Sings Ballads and bought it. Easy.
    Now I'll look into her Shadow of Your Smile album.
    what is this banned business I keep seeing references to? why would Rosemary be banned, the poor dear?
     
  7. Bob F

    Bob F Senior Member

    Location:
    Massachusetts USA
    Only on TV with Louis Prima in 1958 (“I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me”). I don’t think there were any other appearances with Sinatra before that.
     
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  8. toilet_doctor

    toilet_doctor "Rockin' chair's got me"

    Location:
    USA
    R--W, please check Post#1, Page 1.
     
    Last edited: Jan 19, 2018
  9. Stu02

    Stu02 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Canada
    Yes I am still able to post my own photos though. It’s just when I see an image online and I try to copy it there seems to be problems. I thought the web images were supposed to be easier then your own photos. :shrug:

    Oh well ...I’ve never been good at this stuff. You lot seem to have no problem posting reviews or images from the web. I am mystified...
     
  10. Stu02

    Stu02 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Canada
    [​IMG]
    Well look at that. It worked after all. Here is that article on Bryant. She certainly rubbed shoulders w important players.
     
  11. Ridin'High

    Ridin'High Forum Resident Thread Starter

    This is such a nice-looking collection that I thought I'd share some photos here, even if none of the artists of choice are terribly obscure. (Back when this series came out, I also posted a couple of photos in the Nat King Cole appreciation thread, but the photos below give a better sense of the whole collection.)


    [​IMG][​IMG] [​IMG][​IMG][​IMG]
     
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  12. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    That must be Antonionia Carlosa Jobim, a little known Brazilian woman, and not Mr. Tom Jobim, the composer, singer, pianist.
     
  13. Woonshadow

    Woonshadow Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Rhode Island
    "Here I sit, above the town... in my palpitating gown" (cough)
     
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  14. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member


    Yes, you might catch cold sitting on the hillside in a palpitating gown. That can give you a nasty cough.
     
  15. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    Basically, the reason you are palpitating (shaking or trembling) is that you are outside in hill country in just a gown. You should wear a coat, and good boots.
     
  16. toilet_doctor

    toilet_doctor "Rockin' chair's got me"

    Location:
    USA
    Mildred Bailey - The Most Obscure Jazz Singer in a World


    "...if you had asked me this a week ago I would not have included Mildred
    as I was not familiar with her work so she is a last minute add on to my top ten.
    (Worthy though as I can’t stop listening to her)." (from the Post #1352)



    Who is Mildred Bailey?

    People around me do not know who Mildred Bailey is. Neither my wife nor my daughter. Oh, yes... they know a lot of songs, but do not remember who those singers are. My grandson 15, he knows Lady Gaga.
    My friends knew a lot: from Janis Joplin and Susie Quatro to Beth Hart and Melody Garlot, and everything in between... but Mildred Bailey... Nope...

    Stu02 said that he agrees [with Tribute] 99.9999 percent of people have no clue who Mildred is.... I tried to find at least one person of this .0001% who knows, but I couldn't. I even began to ask my toilet_doctor's patients - it's useless...
    I'm sure that people who know Mildred, do exist, because 5000 Mosaic boxes have been sold 17 years ago. But I had no honor to see any of them.

    So what? The same situation with other singers of the thread.
    This is true. But the historical importance, influence on the next generations of Jazz singers, respect and admiration in the music world is incomparable.
    And these Compete and Chronological sets are nothing, but the result of this respect and admiration.
    And the good sound of these sets also shows how people who know, love Mildred Bailey.
    (Forget about the "Audio DVD," it's not a Hi-Res format DVD Audio and it's not even a DVD Video - it is DVD-R made for amazon from the unknown sound souses).
    And these stamps, articles and entries in jazz books only underline how obscure Mildred Bailey is.

    However, all the people I asked knew Billie Holiday...
     
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  17. toilet_doctor

    toilet_doctor "Rockin' chair's got me"

    Location:
    USA
    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Bailey and Billie


    "Whatever troubles that may have existed in the
    Mildred's life, they never intruded into her music.
    Her sound radiated swing, cheer and optimism."




    "The 30's and 40's were luminous years for the popular music. And among their lasting legacies were two female jazz singers whose music still gives off enormous light. One was Mildred bailey. The other was Billie Holiday. Each had their sad stories, and nothing, it seems, becomes a legend than a sad stories. Mildred wrestled with her weight, Billie with her habit. Each was married twice. And both died impoverished and alone in their 40th living largely on handout of friends.

    Each was also a profound vocal innovator. Between 1935 and 1942 each recorded more than 200 sides for the same company, often guided by the same producer, John Hammond. And both became a singer whom other singer venerated.

    On the spectrum of legend, though, the parallel diverge into sharply different outcomes. Billie's life somehow suited her music, much of which seemed dark and melancholy. Her recording career outlasted her voice by about of decade, which, in a perverse way, only magnified our fascination and encouraged us to imagine her worst records as autobiographical texts of self-annihilation.
    Mildred bailey, on the other hand, didn't look or act at all like she sounded. Technically the better singer by far, she had a slim demitasse of a voice inside a dinosaur of a body. She sang with a bright sunny vocal timbre, a shimmering vibrato, and a jazz musician's ear for a rhythmic variation and amendment. Her sound radiated swing, cheer and optimism. The was nothing in her music that connected audiences to her persona in a way that invoked empathy.

    She was also widely herd on radio, first as a member of the Whitman band, then debuting on CBS under her own name on December 16, 1933. Her weekly 15-min show was herd on Saturday evenings, but lasting until following February. In October 1934 she moved to the Blue network of NBC in program called Plantation Echoes, a format capitalizing on her association with rose colored songs of the Old South and a still lovely public appetite for the minstrel tradition. It lasted into April 1935.
    ...

    Momentum of Bailey's career petered after the war. The radio show never found a sponsor and was cancelled. Her marriage to Red Norvo soon broke up, and the recordings stopped. In the end she died in 1951, too soon for the kind of transforming second act that might have salvaged her fame, as it did for Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.
    So she has languished in jazz's under-known cult-hood of dead, white females. Bailey's influence today is spotty. Her main disciple is a smart New York singer named Daryl Sherman, whose admiration has been a matter of record ("Celebrating Mildred Bailey and Red Norvo" on Audiophile) since 1997. But until Mosaic Records issued Bailey's complete Columbia and Brunswick recordings of the '30th in 2000 the best of the Bailey originals had been unavailable or scarce for nearly 30 years.

    Taken together Bailey and Holiday are case studies in the curious processes of cultural selection by which one reputation fades and another soars. It should surprise no one that the verdict often depends less on music than on, well, other things. Today a full agenda of fashionable social and political concerns seems to intersect in Billie Holiday: the consequences of drug addiction, the oppression of racism, the sensual choices of bi-sexuality, or the forbidden allure of lire too long on the wild side. Every one is a portal into the kinds of exotic vices and victim-hoods we favor in our prematurely martyred legends. Our emotions are stirred as much by her story as her music. How else do we explain that National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has heaped 10 posthumous Grammy Awards on Billie Holiday. As for Mildred Bailey - well, by comparison, her weight, self-esteem and health issues are the daily white bread stuff of Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil. In short, far too prosaic and drab to be enticing, exotic, or Grammy-worthy. Her drug of choice was food, not heroin, and no one ever marched on Washington demanding a war on carbohydrates or the criminalization of the Big Mac. So she is left with no defense against obscurity but her music - and not a single posthumous Grammy.

    For all her lightness and grace, Bailey was a truly hot singer. The heat was in her diminutive but penetrating vibrato. It brought unsentimental warmth to commonplace material and shivered like a coquettish banshee in sudden falsetto-like leaps. The meaning of her words sometimes seemed less important than their bubbly, incandescent shimmer and how they rolled with the accompaniment. Whatever troubles that may have existed in her life, they never intruded into her music.

    Billie holiday never had a radio show, of course, which reminds us that their differences were as substantial as their parallels. But the differences complimented each other in a way. If Bailey's range and virtuosity were beyond Holiday's grasp, Billie's freedom and fluidity clearly helped move Bailey from the band singer to a true jazz singer.

    My only regret is that it's Billie who will probably get another Grammy as Mildred's reputation fades deeper and deeper into memory and history
    ."
    (John McDonough, Down Beat, The Wall Street Journal, October 2003)
     
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  18. toilet_doctor

    toilet_doctor "Rockin' chair's got me"

    Location:
    USA
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  19. Stu02

    Stu02 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Canada
    Tibute has it gotten to the point where you are talking to yourself.:shh:

    I’ll have to post reply’s to myself more often...
     
  20. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    Like Patti Page, I am multi-tracking my posts. Doing duets alone.
     
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  21. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident

  22. jazzyvocalfan

    jazzyvocalfan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Columbus, Ohio
    Has anyone mentioned Kay Thompson? I was looking through the pages and pages of comments and saw a youtube clip of Sylvia Syms singing "You Let Me Down" and immediately thought of Kay Thompson's version which was my introduction to the song. I couldn't find a clip of her recording of that song.

     
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  23. toilet_doctor

    toilet_doctor "Rockin' chair's got me"

    Location:
    USA
    [​IMG]

    Kay Thompson
    (1909-1998)

    "Kay Thompson was an American author, composer, musician, actress and singer. She is best known as the creator of the Eloise children's books. Catherine Louise Fink was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1909, the second of the four children of Leo George Fink, an Austrian-born pawnbroker and jeweler, and his wife, the former Hattie A. Tetrick. Her siblings were Blanche, Marian, and Leo. She married twice, Jack Jenney, trombonist and bandleader, married 1937, divorced 1939 and William Spier, radio producer, married 1942, divorced 1947. Thompson began her career in the 1930s as a singer and choral director for radio. Her first big break was as a regular singer on The Bing Crosby-Woodbury Show (CBS, 1933--34). This led to a regular spot on The Fred Waring-Ford Dealers Show (NBC, 1934--35) and then, with conductor Lennie Hayton, she co-founded The Lucky Strike Hit Parade (CBS, 1935) where she met (and later married) trombonist Jack Jenney. Kay Thompson and Her Rhythm Singers joined André Kostelanetz and His Orchestra for the hit series The Chesterfield Radio Program (CBS, 1936), followed by It's Chesterfield Time (CBS, 1937) for which Kay and her large choir were teamed with Hal Kemp and His Orchestra. For her motion picture debut, Kay and her choir performed two songs in the Republic Pictures musical Manhattan Merry-Go-Round (1937). In 1939, she reunited with André Kostelanetz for Tune-Up Time (CBS), a show that was produced by radio legend William Spier (who later married Kay in 1942). On an installment of Tune-Up Time in April 1939, 16-year-old Judy Garland was a guest. It was at this time that Kay first met and worked with Judy, developing a close personal friendship and professional association that lasted the rest of Garland's life. In 1943, Kay signed an exclusive contract with MGM to become the studio's top vocal arranger, vocal coach, and choral director. She served as main vocal arranger for many of producer Arthur Freed's MGM musicals and as vocal coach to such stars as Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, and June Allyson. A wealth of information examining Thompson's contributions to Freed's musicals is found in Hugh Fordin's "The World of Entertainment!: Hollywood's Greatest Musicals" (1975). Thompson was the vocal arranger for Ziegfeld Follies (1946), The Harvey Girls (1946), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), Good News (1947) and other films. After working on The Pirate (1948) with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, she left MGM to create the night club act: "Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers" (Bob, Don, Dick, and Andy Williams). They toured the country's nightclubs and cabarets with great success, smashing house records with their jazz-based harmonies and comedic gymnastics. Kay wrote their songs and Robert Alton did the original choreography for the act." (comment)

    Besides, multi-talented Ms. Thomson had a nice timber, pretty face and stunning figure:

    All or Nothing at All (1933)
    Kay Thompson - "All Over Nothing at All" (1937)
    (1937)
    1937 Kay Thompson - There's A Lull In My Life

    Does she have enough to fit here? Yes... there are only no samples on youtube:

    [​IMG]

    Queen of Swing Vocals and Her Rhythm Singers 1933-37
    Baldwin 2003 (hard to buy)

    1. Strike Me Pink
    2. I Can't Give You Anything But Love
    3. Take a Number from One to Ten
    4. My Galveston Gal
    5. (Oh Suzanna) Dust off That Old Pianna
    6. It Must Have Been a Devil in the Moon
    7. What's the Reason I'm Not Pleasing You
    8. You Let Me Down
    9. You Hit the Spot
    10. Don't Mention Love to Me
    11. Out of Sight, Out of Mind
    12. After You've Gone
    13. Solitude
    14. If This Is Love, I Don't Want Love
    15. You Hit the Spot
    16. Jericho
    17. Summertime
    18. The Old Man of the Mountain
    19. Carelessly
    20. There's a Lull in My Life
    21. It Had to Be You
    22. Exactly Like You
    23. All or Nothing at All
    24. I Owe You
    25. It Had to Be You
    26. Whoa Babe
    27. Medley: Down With Love/Moanin' in the Mornin'
     
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  24. toilet_doctor

    toilet_doctor "Rockin' chair's got me"

    Location:
    USA
    Sylvia Syms
    Sylvia Syms - You Let Me Down

    Check this out (naked soul)
    Billie Holiday - You Let Me Down
    That's why she is No.1 and may always will be.
     
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  25. jazzyvocalfan

    jazzyvocalfan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Columbus, Ohio
    [​IMG]

    Incidentally (and going back to a topic discussed several pages back, in connection with Marilyn Maye), Teri Thornton was yet another singer that ever-gushing Ella Fitzgerald momentarily called her favorite singer, only to move on to a new "favorite" soon afterwards.


    Finally, here's the self-penned number with which she won the Monk competition (as re-arranged and recorded for Verve): I'll Be Easy to Find »[/QUOTE]


    Actually, Bart Howard wrote "I'll Be Easy to Find" and it was originally recorded by Johnny Mathis. The self-penned songs on the album were "Salty Mama", "Knee Deep in the Blues", "Wishing Well" and "Feels Good". I know it's been over a year since the amazingly knowledgeable and articulate Ridin' High posted this but the error bothered me because I don't expect any from him and it doesn't seem like anyone noticed the error.
     
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