Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 6, 1990 TAG: 9004060309
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOSEPH McLELLAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Actually, Vaughan, who died Wednesday one week after her 66th birthday, did go that far - but she went in her own direction.
In a career that spanned more than 40 years, Vaughan walked a thin and not particularly straight line between jazz and popular music, moving easily in either direction and blurring the distinction between the two modes. Her admirers and collaborators ranged from jazz composer-performers Quincy Jones and Erroll Garner to opera director Sarah Caldwell, who accompanied her in a 1981 Wolf Trap concert. "She has one of the unique voices of our time," Caldwell said, "and she is one of the world's great exponents of the art of phrasing."
Vaughan was a major link in the great chain of women jazz singers that stretches from Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday through Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington to Nina Simone and Roberta Flack.
The thing that made her singing unique (as Fitzgerald's was made unique by imagination and amazing technique, or Simone's by expressive intensity) was the quality of her voice. Her range was sometimes described as four octaves, and it was tonally beautiful and perfectly controlled through three, give or take a few notes.
Whether or not she would have recognized the Italian names for such classic techniques as vibrato and glissando she knew exactly how to use them for expressive purposes - as well as sudden changes of dynamics and "bending" a note, like a blues guitarist who changes pitch by stretching a string across a fret.
"She was like an organ; Ella was more like a violin," said one admirer of both on hearing of Vaughan's death.
Vaughan came close to Fitzgerald and Simone in their areas of particular strength, but the organ tones - lower tones, which seemed to improve as she grew older - are, in fact, what remain longest in the memory. And voice, rather than jazz style, was what kept her on the top-40 charts throughout the 1950s with such songs as "Make Yourself Comfortable," "Whatever Lola Wants" and "Broken-Hearted Melody."
It was also the quality of the voice, and particularly her appealing treatment of ballads (most recently "Send in the Clowns"), that made her a perennial mass-audience favorite on television.
On the other hand, her jazz expertise, appealing to a smaller audience but one with more stable tastes, has kept nearly a full column of her recordings listed in quarterly issues of the Schwann catalogue. Vaughan has done well in the latest rite of passage that tests music's ability to survive: the transition from LP to compact disc. Her work is already available on some 20 CDs (one recorded as recently as last year), with more certainly to be expected.
Although suffering from lung cancer (which was not mentioned in public, while the press was told of a "not serious" carcinoma on her hand) Vaughan was planning more recording projects this year.
Jazz purists have been heard to complain about her choice of repertoire, her indulgence in vocal gymnastics sometimes at the expense of expressive singing and her relative insouciance about words.
She did sometimes handle lyrics with less care than Fitzgerald, Washington or Simone at their best - but still with more depth and expression than any rock or pop singer this side of Barbra Streisand.
But such comments were heard usually from critics, not from fellow jazz musicians, among whom she was widely respected. Ella Fitzgerald, for example, once called her "the greatest singing talent in the world today." Gunther Schuller, whose career has spanned classics and jazz as Vaughan's spanned pop and jazz, called her "the most creative vocal artist of our time."
It was television personality Dave Garroway who first applied to her the nickname "the divine Sarah," purloined from an earlier superstar, Sarah Bernhardt. But the less pretentious, more affectionate and descriptively apt "Sassy" originated and stuck among her colleagues. The first to use it, Vaughan recalled in a 1983 Washington Post interview, was Washington pianist John Malachi, back when she was "a fresh kid."
In some ways, the singer Vaughan most resembled was Billy Eckstine, another vocalist noted for velvet tones, who helped her to get her start and (with Earl Hines, Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie) exercised a strong influence on her early years. Vaughan began her career in 1942, like so many great black performers, in one of the toughest but most accessible venues in music: an amateur evening at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where she sang "Body and Soul."
Her prize was $10 for a week's engagement at that theater, which five years later would be paying her 250 times as much. But the real prize came during that week, when she was heard by Eckstine, who was then singing with Hines's band and asked Hines to hire her as a second pianist and singer. She began her career at the top, still in her teens, appearing with the Hines band at the Apollo six months after she had gone there for an amateur competition.
She went with Eckstine when he formed his own big band a year later, and made her first recording ("I'll Wait and Pray") with him at the end of 1944. "Mean to Me," recorded with Eckstine in 1945, is now a jazz classic as is "Lover Man," recorded with Gillespie the same year.
Her musical gifts were first brought to the public in the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Newark, her birthplace. Significantly, her pre-teen career as a church musician was instrumental as well as vocal; she never took a vocal lesson in her life, though she studied piano and organ for eight years.
In later years, critics would single out for special praise her ability (like Fitzgerald) to use her voice like an instrument in scat-singing. She used to say that her style was more influenced by horn players than by other singers. She also said, in her 1983 interview, that she didn't really know how she produced her unique musical effects: "I just . . . get out there and sing. I don't think about it, I just do it."
by CNB