In the Wall Street Journal today, I write on Frank Sinatra's Strangers in the Night—the single and the album (go here). Fifty years ago this week, the single went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the album soon became a chart-topper in July, resulting in four Grammys the following year. For the article, I tracked down Jimmy Bowen, the song's legendary producer, and Artie Kane, the organist who gave the album its contemporary, snarky pop feel.
In the early summer of 1966, I was 9 but I still vividly remember Strangers in the Night. So much so that just hearing the opening sweep of the strings today takes me back to those summer nights and the smell of cotton candy and popcorn. As I recall, there was a heat wave when the single came out with talk of a drought in New York. Air conditioning didn't exist yet for average families. Not in cars or bedrooms. Before turning in, you took a wash cloth, soaked it in cold water, ran it over your body and left yourself wet with a big square metal floor fan thumping away on medium as you fell asleep.
In late June '66, school had just let out for the summer. In my neighborhood in Manhattan's Washington Heights, the end of school meant parents would begin taking turns driving a carload of kids across the George Washington Bridge to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. Camp? Summer homes? Not for families without air conditioning. You spent summer in the city, which was great.
"At dusk that summer, as you neared the amusement park, you'd see the strong neon signs from the rides and attractions bleeding into the gray-blue heat just after the sun went down. Strangers in the Night seemed to be everywhere. It was on the car radio on the way over along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield and all of the other pop-rockers. It was also playing inside the park, on the midway's speaker system. I even heard it at night in my bedroom drifting from parents' living rooms in the apartment building. Everyone loved it. Amid the pre-teen Fab Four fever, parents were having their last laugh and a last hurrah. Their music could still give ours a run for the money.
As I write in my Strangers in the Night essay, the song was a product of a series of accidents. The melody originally was an instrumental called Beddy Bye recorded by easy-listening maestro Bert Kaempfert for a movie called A Man Could Get Killed, which opened in March '66. In fact, three different songwriters would claim partial credit for influencing Kaempfert. Soon after the soundtrack was ready, the publisher of Kaempfert's song played Beddy Bye for producer Jimmy Bowen, who was working with Sinatra at Reprise in Los Angeles. Jimmy told me he loved it immediately and asked Fine for lyrics. Let Jimmy pick up the story:
"In 1966, Hal Fine was the head of Roosevelt Music and had published Bert Kaempfert's music for the movie A Man Could Get Killed. Hal had a good ear. He knew that Beddy Bye had Frank written all over it, so he came to me and played the track. I liked it immediately. The song was perfect for Sinatra, and I told Hal if he got the right lyrics I’d bring it to him. Fine went off to lyricist Eddie Snyder, who worked on the song’s words with co-lyricist Charles Singleton and Kaempfert while sitting around a piano. They renamed the song Strangers in the Night.
"Hal sent me a demo but I didn't like the first set of lyrics. A week went by and he sent me a new demo along with a bundle of other things. It was 2 a.m. and I had just gotten back from the studio. I went right for Strangers, and after listening to it, I flipped. I called Hal and woke him up to tell him how much I loved it. The next day, I called Frank and said we had to meet. Frank told me to come over. After I played him the demo he, too, loved the song. I said, "We should record it soon, I have no idea who else has heard it." Sinatra said, "Great, how about Monday [April 11]." [Photo above of Jimmy Bowen by Beth Gwinn]
I reached out to arranger Ernie Freeman, who had been working with me on sessions, and I booked the studio at United Recording. That Monday, I got there early, around 4 p.m., to make sure the studio was set up. I knew Frank liked to have everything ready when he arrived. With a few hours until his arrival at 8 p.m., I headed out to grab a bite at Martoni's in Hollywood. When I walked in, there was Jack Jones in a booth. I sat down and Jack asked what I was up to. I told him I was recording Sinatra that night. When I asked how he was doing, Jack said he had just recorded a song called Strangers in the Night.
"As soon as I heard that, I froze. I told Jack it was great seeing him, got up and quickly returned to the studio without eating. Hal had shopped the song around. I can't blame him—he didn't know if Frank was actually going to record it. He was hedging his bets.” [Photo of Jack Jones in 1966]
"Back at the studio, I booked two mastering rooms. Then I sent a guy out to get about $300 in $20 bills. I also had someone in the Reprise A&R department round up six guys. As soon as the recording session ended, I planned on making acetate discs of the master. Then I'd have the guys take them to LAX and pay flight attendants to hand them off to Reprise promotion directors when they landed in 12 different markets. The promo guys, in turn, would bring them to the radio stations.
"When Frank arrived at the studio at 8 p.m., I didn't tell him about my earlier conversation with Jack [Jones]. Nothing good would come of it. Frank immediately got with his pianist Bill Miller in another room to warm up. We recorded the song in three takes. On the first two, Frank was having trouble with the key-change modulation, where 'love was just a glance away, a warm embracing dance away' meets 'Ever since that night...'
"As soon as I heard he was having a problem, I stopped the music and came into the studio to talk to Frank privately. Ernie had put that modulation in toward the end to give the arrangement a lift, but Frank had missed it twice. He couldn't find his note in the new key. He was in front of a lot of musicians and I needed to protect his reputation. In the corner of the studio, Frank apologized for screwing up, and I said not to worry about it, that the arrangement shouldn't have made that transition so tough.
"I said, 'Frank, we'll record up to the the modulation. You'll stop. Then you'll hear a bell note on the piano for the new key and you can pick it up. We'll cut the two together." Frank said, "We can do that?" I said, "Sure." He said, "OK, great." And that's what we did.
After the three takes, [engineer] Eddie Brackett (above) took out his razor blade and we cut and spliced the three takes together in the editing room. I told Frank that I wanted to get the song out fast, that Strangers was a song that would likely be covered by other singers. Once Frank approved the master and left, I started making acetates in two mastering rooms, four at a time. As soon as they were cut, they'd go into envelopes addressed to contacts at the 12 stations around the country that controlled all the national ads. Then I sent the team off to the airport.
"First thing the next morning, I called the stations to let them know the record was coming. It was pretty exciting—stations were waiting for a Sinatra acetate cut straight from the mastering room.
"Jack Jones's single had gone out the traditional way—by mail. In some cases, the single didn't arrive until after Frank's was already on the air. Or it was still sitting in the stacks of singles waiting to be auditioned by the stations' program directors. My floppy acetates would last only through a bunch of plays before the sound quality began to wear out. But by then, our vinyl single of Strangers in the Night would have arrived." [Photo above of LAX in 1966]
Tomorrow, my full conversation with Artie Kane, the organist on the Strangers in the Night album.
JazzWax tracks:You'll find Frank Sinatra's Strangers in the Nighthere. The title song of the album was arranged by Ernie Freeman and produced by Jimmy Bowen. The balance of the album was arranged by Nelson Riddle and produced by Sonny Burke.
JazzWax clips: Here's Bert Kaempfert's Beddy Bye, from A Man Could Get Killed, released in March 1966 (move the time bar to 7:26)...
West Coast jazz has no real beginning and no specific founder. It's a sound that evolved from a range of musical influences—including Lester Young's relaxed sound on the tenor saxophone, Count Basie's swing and classical counterpoint. But West Coast jazz is also a product of experiences, including the vastness and tranquilizing effect of the Pacific Ocean, the exhilaration of car culture, and the optimism of suburbia.
When I interviewed Howard Rumsey in 2009, the bassist who managed The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, Calif., home of West Coast jazz jam sessions in the 1950s, told me the chief architects of the music were Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne and Gerry Mulligan. All were East Coast transplants who made expansive use of harmony and round-robin soloing in compact groups. Early on, the sound of West Coast jazz was a more laid-back form of bebop, or, as Howard told me, "It's the music of happy—in a hurry."
We know that the properties that define West Coast jazz—zig-zagging melody lines, dry-roasted solos and tight harmony configurations—were pretty much in place by 1951 on Shorty Rogers' Modern Sounds album for Capitol. But where did the sound on this album come from? What's the genesis? Let me take a stab at it.
If we assume Shorty Rogers (above) had the greatest influence on shaping the early West Coast jazz sound, then we need to track his footprints back from Modern Sounds. During the late 1940s, Rogers was in Woody Hermans' band, specifically the one in 1947 that recorded Jimmy Giuffre's Four Brothers. This reed-centric, highly melodic recording was harmony-rich but it didn't really carry the architecture of West Coast jazz. Instead, it was more of a bebop line fleshed out with saxes.
By January 1950, Rogers joined Stan Kenton, where he found an orchestra with much more power and muscle for his arranging style. In February '50, the band recorded Rogers' arrangement of Jolly Rogers, which had inklings of his ascending and descending progressions that would mark his sound...
But here, the music was more like a snapping electrical cable than the cubist structure that would become Rogers' hallmark sound. Not until September '50, with Kenton's recording of Rogers' Round Robin,do we start to hear the West Coast jazz sound emerge. Where Jolly Rogers is blistering, Round Robin is more focused on its geometry. There are plenty of high-note fireworks thanks to Maynard Ferguson's trumpet, but they are used merely for splash and punctuation. What dominates is the seductive descending progression and stop-time figures that would be used often by Rogers in the years that followed. We also hear more relaxed solos by Rogers on trumpet, Bob Cooper on tenor sax, Art Pepper on alto sax and Don Bagley on bass...
Compare Round Robin with Apropos from Rogers' Modern Sounds album, recorded in October '51. By then, the West Coast sound was formed. Though Mulligan wouldn't be on the West Coast until the following year, when he formed his pianoless quartet, the octet format pioneered by Rogers (and several years earlier by Dave Brubeck in San Francisco) would become the most efficient ensemble size to handle the new West Coast jazz style....
So, West Coast jazz starts with Shorty Rogers' inventive arrangement of Round Robin for Stan Kenton in 1950. While the sound might not have fully congealed at the time, all the ingredients were in place, including sighing relay-race solos. All that remained was for Rogers to downsize the orchestra to eight players and hit the new style's sweet spot.
Back in May, I posted on a Bill Evans Trio rehearsal in Denmark in 1966 that was captured on tape for TV broadcast. In the TV studio that day was Evans on piano; Eddie Gomez on bass; Alex Riel on drums; several cameramen; and a director. There also was a Danish photographer. His name is Jan Persson.
Last week I caught up with Jan to chat about his career, how he happened to be in the studio with Evans that day in '66 and his thoughts on the pianist and photography in general [photo above from the rehearsal tape, with Alex Riel, left, Jan Persson and Bill Evans]...
JazzWax: Where did you grow up? Jan Persson: I grew up in Copenhagen and lived there most of my life until 20 years ago, when I left for the countryside 40 miles south of the city. I first became interested in photography when I was 12.
JW: Which photographers did you admire most and why? JP: There were so many great European and American photographers working in the jazz field. Among the ones I admired most were Herman Leonard, Don Hunstein, William Claxton (above), Dennis Stock and others. There also are younger ones I've long admired, like Jimmy Katz.
JW: How did you first become interested in jazz? JP: In Denmark, at the start of the 1960s, there was a jazz club in virtually every town of a certain size. At one point, there were upward of 80 American jazz musicians living here. [Photo above of Stan Getz performing at Copenhagen's Jazzhus Montmartre]
JW: How did you wind up photographing the Bill Evans rehearsal? JP: I was working as a freelance photographer for daily newspapers and magazines here. I knew the people at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation—a very active part of the Danish jazzlife—so I didn't have a problem being there.
I think Bill Evans did about six sessions for Danish television over the years. The first was in 1964, with bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Larry Bunker.The second was the one you wrote about, with Eddie Gomez, Danish drummer Alex Riel and Swedish singer Monica Zetterlund. On this occasion, Evans had arrived in Europe without a drummer so he used Alex on a number of his gigs. [Photo above of Bill Evans and Monica Zetterlund in 1966 by Jan Persson]
JW: Did you talk to Evans? JP: No. I was 23 and a shy young man. At that age you don't disturb a superstar. But I felt he was a very nice person and very dedicated and concentrated on his work. [Photo above of Bill Evans by Jan Persson]
JW: What were you trying to capture about Evans with your camera? JP: I was trying to capture the atmosphere in the studio.The very concentrated, hard-working and dedicated Bill Evans. [Photo above of Bill Evans by Jan Persson]
JW: Which jazz or rock musicians gave you the most trouble as a subject? JP: As an interviewer, you know that musicians are rarely the problem. It's all the people surrounding the musicians who make a living from stars who can be difficult.
JW: What’s your favorite portrait and why? JP: If we are talking about my favorite by other photographers, I'd have to say Herman Leonard's image of Dexter Gordon with all the smoke. There's a lot of jazz feeling there. I look at the image every day because I have a signed copy of it it on my office wall.
If you are asking me which portraits of my own, I'd have to say my images of Miles Davis. The three images (above, from top) are from Copenhagen in 1964, Berlin in 1971 and Aarhus, Denmark in 1987. These three say everything about the man and his music. Through these images, you can see his development from jazz artist to rock musician. And that was quite a transformation. [Photos above of Miles Davis by Jan Persson]
Stan Cooper, a long-time JazzWax reader who in the 1950s was a music publishing executive who brought Learnin' the Blues to the attention of Frank Sinatra, died in Jupiter, Fla., early yesterday morning. He was 91. [Photo of Stan Cooper last year on his 90th birthday by Bradley Berkwitt]
Over the years, Stan and I spoke at least twice a year—once on his birthday and again on the birthday of his dear friend, songwriter Jack Reardon, who wrote the lyrics to The Good Life. It was a gas speaking with Stan and Jack. I always felt as if I had been transported back to a time in New York when music was everything. Stan had been a JazzWax reader from the blog's start in 2007.
Stan was like a steel file cabinet from New York's Brill Building or the triangular drink cups at Nedick's or the buzz in Colony Music late at night or the cherry color of red neon signs. He was old New York, when song pluggers and record promoters set out to hustle newly published songs to producers, managers and singers with hopes of landing a hit. Stan was New York when Broadway traffic ran uptown and downtown, smoke puffed from the male model on the Camel cigarettes billboard in Times Square, and the sound of distant pianos and dancers could still be heard coming from studio windows one flight up.
Stan's knowledge of the pop music industry, vocalists, arrangers and the best versions of songs was unmatched. He'd often call following a JazzWax post about a singer to share stories about the vocalist and why that person's version was special or why another was slightly better. Stan had a great ear and he was always right.
In exchange, I often knocked him out with posts on little-known albums by jazz artists and singers that had miraculously escaped him. I remember after writing about David Allyn's Sure Thing, my phone rang and it was Stan, with his insistent raspy voice. "My God, I knew David when he was on the scene but I had no idea he had recorded that. That was remarkable."
Back in the 1950s, Stan managed Barton Music Corp., the music publishing company part-owned by Frank Sinatra. Stan's job was to spot potential hits for Barton, acquire the rights, and match the song to a singer who had the best chance of making the song a hit. Back in those days, when a song was a hit, its publisher and writer made money based on units of sheet music and records sold and radio airplay.
Stan had a hand in helping Sinatra record Learnin' the Blues, which would be the singer's only #1 pop hit until Strangers in the Night in 1966. Here's what Stan told me about the song:
"Back in late 1954 or early 1955, two guys came up to my office at Barton Music on the fourth floor of New York’s Brill Building. They had a record they wanted me to hear. After we played it a few times, they asked me what I thought of the singer. I liked the singer fine, but the song was so-so. So I flipped over the demo. It was Learnin’ the Blues. I thought the singer, a guy named Joe Valino, was terrific. But to me, he sounded too much like Sinatra. Dozens of singers were modeling their sound after Frank's then. But the song, wow, that was different story. It was a hit.
"My job at Barton was to listen to songwriters’ songs and demo recordings and identify the ones that had the potential to be a big seller. I had managed a bunch of record stores on Sixth Avenue years earlier and had a knack for picking songs that would become hits. Record executives used to play songs for me to get my reaction before moving forward. So I became a publishing manager. But finding great songs was only half of it.
You had to match a great song to the right singer. When that happened, you had magic. Great songs recorded by the wrong singers usually went no place. A song had to work with the singer's personality and style to connect. When you had that, the song clicked with the public and became a hit.
"For example, when I first heard Cy Coleman's I'm Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life in 1955, I knew it was a hit. When I brought it to the attention of Nat King Cole, he played it on the piano while I sang the lyrics. Then he played and sang it about 20 times. He heard what I had heard and loved it. The next week, he recorded it, and the song hit the charts and the song became a standard.
"The same thing happened with Earl and Alden Shuman's and Marshall Brown’s Seven Lonely Days in 1953. I first heard about the song from Elliott Kastner, a friend in the William Morris Agency mail room. He called me and said his pals had written a lousy song but he was honoring a promise to call me. I said send your pals over.
When the writers arrived, we went into a studio and they played and sang it for a demo. I could hear right away it was great. I also knew the song would be perfect for Georgia Gibbs (above). When I went over to see her, she resisted. She thought it was too hillbilly. But the more she rehearsed it that day, the more she realized she had a hit on her hands. She recorded Seven Lonely Days that night and had a hit with it.
"So back to Learnin' the Blues. I knew it was big. When I asked the two guys in my office who brought in the Joe Valino single for the name of the songwriter, they wouldn’t give it to me. They were there, in my office, for the singer, they said. After a while they told me that the songwriter was a woman named Vicki Silvers. I asked where she lived. They told me in Philadelphia. But they wouldn’t give me her address.
"As soon as they left, I got on the phone and found out she was married to a guy named Arthur Silvers, a wealthy guy who was in the clothing business. When I called him up, sure enough, Vicki Silvers was his wife. So I told him who I was, that I worked for Sinatra's publishing company, and I made an appointment to meet with them the next day. Those two guys were in my office on Friday. I was on a train to Philadelphia the next morning to meet with Silvers.
"When I got to the house, a woman who looked like Ava Gardner opened the door. I said I was there to see Miss Silvers. She told me she was Vicki Silvers (above). I was stunned. She looked like a movie actress. When I went in and spoke with Vicki and her husband, I told them I was crazy about the song and that I wanted to bring it to Sinatra. They were excited. I always carried blank contracts with me. When I took one out, they wanted to add a clause. It said that if within six months Sinatra had no interest in the song, the rights would return to Silvers.
"I was fine with that. I knew that if Sinatra didn’t record it, the song wouldn't likely become big. So Vicki Silvers signed, and the copyright transferred to Barton Publishing, whose job it was to make the song popular. No advance changed hands. In those days, a song's writer made money only after the song hit and revenue came in through the sale of singles and sheet music.
"When I returned to New York later that day, I brought the Joe Valino single and Silvers' contract to Frank Military [Sinatra's longtime aide] (above). He sent the record out with about 20 others to Sinatra. Sinatra received the package that Monday. Sinatra apparently went through all the demos in the package, but the only one he picked was Valino singing Learnin' the Blues. He recorded it soon after, in March '55.
"For bringing the song in, Ben Barton paid me a $100 [laughs] and he took all the credit for finding it. About a month later, I quit and took a job at Fischer Publishing.
"Joe Valino didn't have a hit with Learnin' the Blues, but he benefited greatly from Sinatra’s success with it. Thanks to the Sinatra single, Joe got more exposure for his version and landed a record deal with RCA."
Love you Stan and miss you much. And a special thanks to Bradley Berkwitt, who knew Stan since he was 12 and alerted me earlier today. [Photo above of Bradley Berkwitt and Stanley Cooper last year]
JazzWax clips: Here's Joe Valino's original version...
There are still way too many jazz albums among the missing. During the digital revolution that started in the late 1980s, not every album made the jump to CD, download or streaming services. Some simply went out of print on vinyl and never were reissued. They either fell through the cracks or they were ignored when labels changed hands. In other cases, they were dismissed as inconsequential and not worth the cost or effort to reissue. They're just out there in the universe, floating around like space debris.
If you still love one or more of these lost vinyl albums, chances are still pine for them today, hoping for an eventual reunion in digital form. That's because as CDs became popular, you probably gave away your LPs or put them in storage. Now those albums are tough to reach or too much of a pain to bother. I know the feeling.
Back when I first started listening to jazz in 1968, I was a big Sonny Stitt fan and was intrigued by his What's New!!! (1966) album on Roulette. The copy I came by was a bit scratchy, but fortunately the label re-issued the album in 1976 as Stardust. The album featured Stitt playing the varitone, a quirky device that hooked up to a saxophone (or trumpet) and gave the instrument an electric sound. In the pre-fusion era, horns were desperately trying to keep pace with the electric guitar, bass and keyboards.
At any rate, What's New!!! was one of those LPs that went into boxes that are now someplace in my building's storage cage. Heirs will eventually find those boxes and be overjoyed, since I don't have the time to deal with them. Stardust has been impossible to find digitally. I even tried to find a rip online without any luck. In fact, I think I'm the sole person who knows or cares about it. And so I became resigned to never hearing it again, wistfully thinking about the music that once was.
Then recently, a reader mentioned in an email that he had a few of Sonny Stitt's varitone albums that I may be missing, include Stardust. (I first posted about my Stitt varitone fetish here back in 2011.) The reader offered to ask a mutual friend to make a digital burn of the analog albums. I was in heaven.
Mind you, Stardust isn't the best Stitt album ever recorded, not even close. But it was still seared into my memory as an LP I enjoyed very much. Long story short, the missing Stitt varitone albums arrived a couple of weeks ago on burned CDs, complete with generous printouts of the covers. Among them was Stardust. Reunited after all these years! Pure joy!
Here's the album's collective personnel, since it was recorded over a couple of days in July '66: Joe Wilder and Eddie Preston (tp); J.J. Johnson (tb); Sonny Stitt (el-as,el-ts); Illinois Jacquet (ts,el-ts); George Berg (bar); Billy Taylor (p) / Ellis Larkins (p); Wild Bill Davis (org) / Ernie Hayes (org); Mike Mainieri (vib); Les Spann (g); Jan Arnet (b) / George Duvivier (b) and Walter Perkins (d).
To celebrate, here are three tracks from Stitt's Stardust (a.k.a. What's New!!!):
If you're looking for an introduction to West Coast jazz or simply want the pure stuff, Bud Shank's recordings for the Pacific Jazz label in the 1950s are a great place to start. Bud had a sterling, aggressive sound on the alto saxophone, with the feel of a sports car pulling away from the curb. His albums for Pacific Jazz wisely teamed him with top like-minded Los Angeles talent, including Shorty Rogers, Bill Perkins, Bob Cooper, Claude Williamson and others. Yesterday, I spent the day writing while listening to Bud's entire Pacific Jazz output. Each album remains a masterpiece—from a technician's standpoint and from a soul perspective. Bud was always all in—he loved lowering his foot on the proverbial gas pedal—but he also had enormous sensitivity and depth.
The album that stuck in my ear during yesterday's listen was Bud's first leadership date—simply called the Bud Shank Quintet. It featured flugelhornist Shorty Rogers backed by Jimmy Rowles (p) Harry Babasin (b) and Roy Harte (d)—a superb rhythm section. This album was originally recorded for Nocturne as part of its "Jazz in Hollywood" series and reissued later on Pacific Jazz. The enterprising Harte founded both labels as well as Drum City, a leading drum retailer in West Hollywood.
What's fabulous about this album is that all of the songs were composed by Rogers, who had one of the finest lyrical sensibilities of all the West Coast jazz writers-arrangers. We also get to hear Rowles, one of the most elegant and delicate West Coast pianists of the period, and Harte, whose stick and brushwork were terrific. We even get to hear Bud play flute on Lotus Bud. But the real standout on this album was the superb and still underappreciated bassist Harry Babasin. His lines here were meaty, rock-solid confident and smart. So much so that the sound of his bass rises out of the rhythm section to become the third horn. [Photo above of Bud Shank by Roy Harte Jazz Archives/CTSImages]
It's remarkable that 62 years later, this music sounds just as fresh and joyous as it did in 1954. There's no filler. I only wish Bud were still with us so I could call him up to talk about it. For my interviews with Bud, scroll down the right-hand column under JazzWax Interviews for the "Bud Shank" links. [Photo above of Shorty Rogers by Roy Harte Jazz Archives/CTSImages]
JazzWax tracks: You'll find the Bud Shank Quintet playing the compositions of Shorty Rogers as well as three other Bud Shank albums for Pacific Jazz here. If you're feeling flush, spring for the The Pacific Jazz Bud Shank Studio Sessions, a Mosaic box now out of print but available here.
JazzWax clips:Here's Bud Shank and Shorty Rogers on Rogers' ballad Jasmine, which has a These Foolish Things feel...
And here's Just a Few. Dig Bud and Rogers motoring around on this one...
Yesterday I was listening to Meredith d'Ambrosio accompany herself on piano while singing Love Is a Simple Thing. The song appears on her sterling album Another Time (1981), which is one of my favorites. Meredith and I have emailed for years, since she loves JazzWax and I love her voice and piano. As I listened, I thought I'd give you a treat today by uniting all five parts of my 2009 interview in a single post. As you'll soon read, Meredith's biography is a harrowing story of an artist's struggles to endure tremendous emotional pain and suffering only to survive and thrive.
I hope you enjoy my complete five-part interview from 2009 with Meredith—a jazz composer, pianist, singer and painter...
JazzWax: Where did you grow up? Meredith d’Ambrosio: I grew up in Boston. I have two brothers and a sister. One brother and my sister are quite a bit younger than I am. My mother had them late in life. My mother was a pianist-singer whose voice was similar to Lee Wiley’s. She performed around Boston using the stage name Sherry Linden. Her real name was Sarah Kleiman. She was the last of the red-hot mamas, a performer who sang songs by the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Kern, Berlin, Coward and others. She also performed risqué material.
JW: Sounds like she was quite a character. Md’A: She was. Her romantic style of singing would often bring tears to people's eyes. As for my father, he had been a small-band radio singer. Later, using his own formulas, he created a refinishing and re-upholstery business. I remember my early childhood in the 1940s vividly. I was a terrible tomboy. Those are the years I remember most fondly.
JW: Why? Were your teenage years unhappy? Md’A: Very messy. My mother and father didn’t get along, and neither gave me much encouragement. My father was a womanizer and it broke my mother’s heart. She resented him terribly for it. My father's issues probably stem from his rough start in life.
JW: What happened? Md’A: He was born out of wedlock in Boston to a Russian mother and a merchant seaman from Florence, Italy. His mother gave him up to the care of the state when he was five. After years bouncing around foster homes, orphanages and farms, he was sent at age 14 to live at the home of a family on Cape Cod. But just as the family was ready to adopt him, his mother surfaced and blocked the adoption. Up until then my father thought she was dead.
JW: Did his mother take him away? Md’A: Yes. She took him to live with her in the Beacon Hill section of Boston, where it turned out she was the town madam who ran her business out of a four- story townhouse. Just before she took my father back to Boston, though, she married a man whose last name was d’Ambrosio.
JW: When did you know you could sing? Md’A: When I was six years old, I was harmonizing along with my mother’s large collection of swing records. I then studied classical piano and art from that point forward. My classical training lasted up to age 11. Then I went to Boston’s Schillinger House of Music [pictured], which later changed its name to the Berklee School and then moved its location to become the Berklee College of Music.
JW: Which singers moved you most as a kid? Md’A: Dick Haymes [pictured] and Peggy Lee. My mother had a collection of 12-inch swing records that had to be played on a Victrola. I thought Haymes had the best phrasing of them all and the most romantic voice.
JW: Did you have formal voice training? Md’A: No, my father wouldn’t allow it. He was a bass baritone and had been classically trained at the New England Conservatory of Music. When he heard me singing and harmonizing along with my mother’s records at age 11, he decided voice training would be bad for me. He didn’t want my voice to be spoiled with formal instruction, though he had a hand in coaching me to understand how to breathe and shade.
JW: What did you sound like? Md’D: I had a style back then, a voice that sounded like no one else. I was a mezzo-soprano then—the same range as my mother's. Much later I became a tenor, the same range as a cello or flugelhorn.
JW: Did painting and visual art play a more important role in your youth than singing and playing piano? Md’A: Yes, and it still does. When I was 5 years old, in kindergarten, I drew a picture of a face that was in perfect proportion. I immediately sensed I had an advanced talent. So my mother bought me an easel, and a year later I started taking formal art instruction. After school, I’d take piano and ballet lessons. And each Saturday I’d go for additional art lessons at the Rutledge School of Music and then Hebrew School. I had no time to play on the streets. It was a grueling schedule. [Pictured: Quarter to Three, 1986, watercolor, Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: Was your family well off? Md’A: Actually no. When I was 13 years old, I got my social security card and had to go to work over the summer at a hearing-aid and transistor parts factory. The check was used to help my family make ends meet. By then my mother had two more children in addition to my brother Jerry, who was born three years after I was.
JW: Why did your mother have two more children so many years later? Md'A: She later confessed to me that she had had my brother Stanley and my sister Elaine later in her life to keep my father from straying. So I had to help take care of my new siblings, since my mother was in her forties and had had nervous breakdowns with both births. The newborns were exhausting and stressful for her.
JW: You must have been gratified to get out of the house when it was time for college. Md’A: It was liberating. When I was 17 years old, I won a scholarship to the Boston Museum School, which was at the time considered the second best fine arts college in the country after the Chicago Art Institute. By then, I was living a pretty bohemian life, which angered my mother to no end, since she was rather traditional. [Pictured: Debut of Spring, 1996, watercolor, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: Just before college began in 1958, you and your mother fought regularly. What was her big issue with you? Md'A: Several things. For one, I couldn’t hold a waitress job in Maine over the summer to pay for textbooks, and my mother was furious that I didn’t apply myself and take the job more seriously. Just before my studies began at the Boston Museum School, our disagreements grew so bad and so frequent that I moved out.
JW: Did you enjoy the Boston Museum School? Md’A: I loved it. But even before college started, my life was complicated, which certainly didn't help matters with my mother. When I was 17, I had the misfortune of falling deeply in love with a man who was a jazz pianist and three years older than me. He asked me to marry him, and we became engaged. But soon I learned from his closest friend that within a two-year period, he had been engaged to 22 other women. He disappeared soon after I found out. I think my parents chased him away once they learned about his past. It took me many years to get over the emotional devastation of being deceived by someone who I thought was my soulmate. I had even thought about suicide. By then I had moved back home. [Pictured: First Snow, oil on canvas, 2008, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: You must have fallen pretty hard for the guy. Md’A: [Laughs] That was only the half of it. Two years later, the same guy called and asked if I’d go to Europe with him. I turned him down, having learned my lesson. Or so I thought. Then, 18 years later, he called me again, this time from Colorado. We began to date when he came to Boston. He proposed to me again, I accepted, and I sold everything I owned to move out there with him. He took some of my eggshell mosaics to Denver to see if he could find an exclusive gallery for my works. I had been doing the mosaics since I was 18 years old. [Pictured: After the Blizzard of '78, eggshell mosaic, 1978, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: What are eggshell mosaics? Md’A: It’s a technique I developed. On a thick wooden board, I make a sketch. After tearing the membrane from white eggshells, I paint the shells, crack them into small tessera [tiles], apply medium-rough mosaic cement in small areas to the board, and one by one, place each small painted eggshell onto the cement using a tweezer. Polyurethane is painted on the back to prevent warpage. The result is an image composed of painted eggshells.
JW: So what happened with the guy? Md’A: I didn’t hear from him for two weeks after he left. When I called his brother to see if anything had happened to him, his brother told me he was engaged to another woman and a wedding was planned.
JW: That must have crushed you, to be duped twice like that. Md’A: I was pretty shocked. I never thought I was going to get over him. But I did eventually—12 years later.
JW: Getting back to your college years, did you and your mother patch things up once you moved home? Md’A: After my first year at school, my mom and I resumed fighting bitterly. So I moved out again—into the basement apartment of a girlfriend. But she made my life miserable. She was a terrible bully. I had gone back to work at the hearing-aid factory to make ends meet and had to walk home from work in the bitter cold winter. Eventually I came down with pleurisy and bronchitis, which resulted in walking pneumonia. Eventually I got well. [Pictured: Elm Street Blizzard, watercolor, 2003, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: Were you still listening to jazz during all of this turmoil? Md’A: Oh Yes. Horace Silver’s records in 1952 had first awakened me to jazz. The only way I could play chords was to try to emulate them while I was listening to his records. I was so taken with what he was doing. I also was aware of jazz through radio shows in Boston hosted by Symphony Sid and Father Norman J. O'Connor, the so-called jazz priest. I realized immediately this wasn’t swing like the music on my mother's records. It was straight-ahead jazz. And I loved it.
JW: What were you listening to in Silver's records? Md'A: I heard the chords Horace was playing and was able to figure out his voicings. Art Tatum, too. He had full, full chords. I've always been able to hear the detail in recordings and figure out on the piano what I was hearing. When I went to Schillinger House in 1952 and 1953, I was taught basic chords. But by separating those chords, I could figure out what Silver was doing.
JW: By the late 1950s, were you good enough to get work playing and singing? Md’A: Yes. I eventually found work playing at jazz clubs in Boston in 1959, when I was 18 years old. I also became friendly with the guys in Gunther Schuller’s jazz group at the New England Conservatory of Music. That’s where I met pianist Roger Kellaway. He would perform at clubs and ask me to sing while he played. We’d often go to Storyville, the Stables and the Crystal Club in Milford, Mass., to hear Boots Mussulli [pictured], Conte Candoli and Serge Chaloff, and to the Stables to hear Varty Haroutunian with Ray Santisi, Herb Pomeroy and others.
JW: You sang with Maynard Ferguson’s big band at a club? Md’A: Yes. Maynard [pictured] was at the Crystal Club one night with his big band. Roger [Kellaway] said something to him, and Maynard asked me to sing with the band. We did I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good) and I Cover the Waterfront. Fortunately I was able to sing in the key in which they played. That was the first time I sang with a big band. Maynard loved it, and so did the audience. Roger was very encouraging, and he remains a beautiful pianist. We had a Jackie and Roy thing going. We had many of those kinds of arrangements. He made me work hard, though, and I’m grateful for that.
JW: What did your mother think about your flowering jazz career? Md’A: Not much. There still was no encouragement from her. Around this time she started to suffer terribly from depression and had another nervous breakdown. So I had to return home yet again to care for my youngest brother and sister. I became their surrogate mother. [Pictured: Popponesset Spit, oil on canvas, 2007, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: Did being pulled away from your art, singing and playing upset you or stress you out? Md’A: No. For whatever reason, my mother's issues and my family chores never really pulled me away from my goals. I compartmentalized the two and never felt stress.
JW: Did your heart repair itself after your parents chased off the grifter who proposed to you? Md'A: Yes. Two years later, in 1960, when I was 19, I met a man and agreed to marry him. I didn’t love him at the time but I assumed I would learn to love him. He didn’t want children but I did. Three months after we were married, I was pregnant. Cyd was born in 1961, and about a year and a half later I divorced my husband and moved back in with my parents. At this point they were living in Newton, just outside of Boston. [Pictured: Apiary, watercolor, 1986, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: How did you make money? Md’A: By doing calligraphy for wedding invitations and envelopes and diplomas, citations and illuminating scrolls. I also sang at the Hunt Room at the Beaconsfield Hotel [pictured] in Brookline, MA. Then I landed a better job singing and playing at the Charter House in Newton, which paid me $100 for five nights. Once again, I decided to leave home, at which point my mother generously told me, “You’ll never make it.”
JW: So you’re divorced with a two-year-old baby, and you’re scuffling to make ends meet? Md’A: Yes. Soon I began dating a lawyer, and we lived together for three years in Boston. Then I found out he was cheating on me, so I asked him to leave. Soon after I went to Austin, Texas, for two weeks to sing and play at a jazz room there. I left my daughter Cyd with her father in Boston.
JW: What happened when you returned? Md'A: After I got back to Boston two weeks later, my ex-husband and his new wife wanted to keep Cyd. They wouldn't let me take her back, even after I found steady work in Boston. Then I learned that they were attempting to adopt her. My ex-husband thought Cyd wouldn’t be well cared for by me because there was no backyard for her to play in where I lived. This was a very sad time for me. [Pictured: Glen Lake, oil on canvas, 2006, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: What did you do? Md'A: I stole Cyd back from my ex-husband's house with my dad's help. I pretended that I was going to take her to the movies. A huge custody battle followed. I won, and my former husband in response chose not to see Cyd for years, until she was 11 years old. I continued to make ends meet with calligraphy and by selling my eggshell mosaics.
JW: During this time, what was going on with your parents? Md’A: My father divorced my mother in 1967. A year later she committed suicide by running the motor while sitting in the car in the garage. My sister Elaine, who was 11 at the time, found her.
JW: And your dad? Md'A: My father remarried in 1970, but I never got along with his new wife. He became increasingly cruel to my sister Elaine and brother Stanley. It got so bad that my father asked them to leave his house. [Pictured: Traffic Signal #1, eggshell mosaic, 1972, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: Where were you living? Md’A: In Newton, Mass., with Cyd. To pay the bills, I accepted assistance from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a federal program at the time. But I also had to take in my brother and sister. The AFDC didn't provide me with enough to support everyone.
JW: What did you do? Md'A: I sued my father for support and won. Then he disowned me. Soon I found another job singing and playing and working as a calligrapher.
JW: What eventually happened with your daughter Cyd? Md’A: She became pregnant and married, but she couldn’t cope. In 1981 she had a nervous breakdown and left her two-year-old baby with her husband. Later Cyd moved into my apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Once she got her bearings, she tried to return to her husband and daughter, Davina, in Revere, Mass. But her husband and his family barred her from visitation. They even cut me off from visiting my granddaughter and changed their phone number. [Pictured: White Mountains Birches, watercolor, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: That must have been painful for you. Md'A: It was. In 1991, my granddaughter Davina called me for the first time. She had tracked me down in an effort to learn more about her mother. Today I speak with Cyd and my granddaughter Emmalyne and grandson Emmanuel every day. Davina hasn't been as close to me or her siblings for unknown reasons. That's her choice. I did recently learn, though, that Davina now has three children, which makes me a great-grandmother. [Pictured: October, watercolor, 1999, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: Clearly all of these events have shaped who you are as an artist, especially as a jazz singer. Md’A: It’s all in there someplace, I suppose [laughs].
JW: Returning to the 1960s, you had breakfast with John Coltrane in late 1965? Md’A: Yes. I went to hear him play at Boston's Jazz Workshop with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones over a series of nights. I knew his Boston manager, Robin Hemingway, who took me to see them. After the gig one night, Coltrane, Robin and I went to Ken's, a coffee shop nearby in Copley Square, for breakfast. We sat there till 3 a.m. talking. I was told later that John never laughed or smiled. But during our time at Ken's, he was laughing and enjoying himself the entire time. I was happy to know that I was able to amuse him.
JW: Did he hear you sing? Md’A: Yes, he asked me to sing something for him, and I did. After I finished singing at the table, he was so moved he asked me to come with him to Japan and sing with the group.
JW: Was he serious? Md’A: Very. But Cyd was just four years old, and I was living with my parents after escaping my marriage. I explained why I couldn't go with him. John understood.
JW: Do you regret the decision? Md’A: Oh, goodness, not at all. I never think about what might have been. I was and still am a very shy person. I didn’t want to venture away from Boston at the time.
JW: Shy? Md’A: You have to understand, I didn’t want music in my life, professionally. I thought of myself as a visual artist. I’m a thinker, not a talker. I’m introspective, all day and all night. To this day I hide away in my house painting, composing and writing lyrics to my compositions, or other people's melodies. [Pictured: Top of the Island, watercolor, 2000, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: Your first album, Lost in His Arms, was recorded in 1978, at age 37. That’s pretty late for an artist with your talents. Md'A: I didn’t want to be out there on an album. But I was duped [laughs]. The piano tuner who worked at the Longview Farm Recording Studios near Boston had free rein of the studio one day. Just for fun—or so he said at the time—he wanted me to come out and sing and accompany myself on piano. So I did.
JW: What happened? Md'A: I recorded 35 songs in a seven-hour period—mostly one take for each song. The guitarist, Norman Coles, sat in on two tunes. We chose 15 cuts to put on a tape for a possible album. The tuner would have become my manager, but he passed away soon after that. I think he was there to guide me for a moment.
JW: What happened to the tape? Md’A: Ron Della Chiesa invited me to come on his WGBH-FM radio show, Music America, to play the tape. Johnny Hartman [pictured] was also being interviewed by Ron that day. When the tape played, it sounded like an album. When Johnny heard it, he couldn't believe it wasn't. Johnny insisted on taking the tape to New York to play for a record producer he knew. Johnny thought it should be an album. I was surprised he was so kind to me. I was a fan of his.
JW: How did pianist Ray Santisi wind up on the album? Md'A: Later, Ray, who is a great pianist from Boston, came to the recording studio and we recorded two songs. We added those extra tunes to the tape. It spiced up the album, since I never considered my playing to be anything but sparse. Wil Morton of Shiah Records bought the master. I recorded two albums with Shiah before receiving a call from Herb Wong [pictured] at Palo Alto Records. He asked me to record my third album, Little Jazz Bird, for him, and I did.
JW: Your voice has been compared to Bill Evans’ playing, particularly his sensitive, lyrical feel. Md’A: I know. I guess there's a similarity in the quality of tone and voice. I first met Bill in the mid-1960s when he was in Boston playing at the Jazz Workshop. I was sitting with Fred Taylor, the club’s owner, whom I’ve known since I was a kid. Bill came over and sat with us. He was so shy. He hardly said anything, and I immediately identified with him because I’m the same way. I didn’t want to be out there in the world playing and singing. I don’t think Bill did either, deep down. But he had a natural talent that couldn’t be hidden away.
JW: As a pianist and singer, did his sound affect you? Md'A: I was in awe of his genius. Listening to him play, I hung on every note, every phrase, every chord. I knew instantly that I was in the presence of someone from another planet. Our conversations, as I look back, seemed more telepathic than verbal. Something happened to me after talking with him and hearing him there that first night. I completely understood his concept of chords, and I changed musically in a noticeable way.
JW: What isn’t well known about Evans? Md’A: Probably that one of his sources of early inspiration was British pianist Pat Smythe. When I was living in New York in 1980 at [English composer] Richard Rodney Bennett's home, I became friends with Pat. He allowed me to pick his brain, but all I needed to do was watch his fingers.
JW: What did you learn? Md'A: Pat [pictured] showed me chord voicings on the piano that were even more advanced than those used by Bill Evans. When I told Pat that the voicings sounded like Bill's, he said he used to sit with Bill in his London home and fool around on the piano when Bill first visited England in 1965. Pat said he showed Bill how he voiced chords, and Bill adapted some of that knowledge. He said that Bill learned from him that there was no limit to how many notes in a chord one could play if all 10 fingers were used at once.
JW: What did Smythe teach you? Md’A: That nothing on the keyboard is impossible. The key is to use all of your fingers at once. I soon found myself using one finger on two notes, which helps make a fuller sounding chord. I’m not proficient at the piano, but Pat taught me enough so I could get a certain sound and contrast to my deep voice. A chord using five notes would sound mysterious and full because of the placement of the fingers on an altered tension chord voicing, for example. Pat helped me realize that there are no limits. [Pictured: Daniels Island, Early Autumn, oil on canvas, 2005, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: What goes through your mind when you’re recording? Md'A: Trying to get everything right. I rarely do more than two takes. Sometimes I’ll get stuck on one tune, and it will take a while. But I want the initial innocence or vulnerability or rawness that comes the first time around to be preserved.
JW: Do you think more about the words or the music? Md’A: I’m thinking about what the words mean but I’m more of a music person. I get carried away by the music that I hear while I’m singing. That music is very important. Like when pianist Lee Musiker plays behind me. Or Don Sickler [pictured] and the rest of the group on my latest album. I’m not a traditional singer.
JW: Not a singer? Md’A: I don’t have the pipes. I only think from within. I’m not thinking about what I sound like. I’m already me. All I have to worry about is not breathing in the wrong places. If I breathe in the middle of a phrase, that’s a no-no. So I’m always thinking about phrasing and how to break it up so it will flow.
JW: Which comes first when you write, melody or lyrics? Md'A: When I first started to record, I realized I shouldn’t be breaking up my phrases. So my words are wrapping around the music. When I write a song, the music comes first. Each melody note dictates what the word should be—the whole story of the song, the phrase, the poetry. I get lost in the melody and chord.
JW: You say you're shy but yet you spent years performing in front of audiences. Md’A: There's shy and there's stage fear. I've overcome the latter. I had to. When I was very young, my mother used to make me stand next to her when she performed in Boston at the Hampshire House [pictured] and sing Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart tunes. Little by little she taught me to be brave.
JW: What was the turning point in your career? Md'A: I think Little Jazz Bird in 1982 with Phil Woods, Hank Jones and Manny Albam. It got airplay all over the world. When I toured in Paris, they treated me like a queen. The second time I went over, Miles Davis and I were on the same bill. Can you imagine? This was 1986 at the Paris Jazz Festival. Miles was in his rock-and-roll phase.
JW: Had you met Davis before? Md'A: Yes, years earlier. Miles sat with me when he was working at the Jazz Workshop in Boston and I was playing the Inner Circle upstairs. Miles was very angry at the table when he sat with me on his break. I had come downstairs to hear him. But during the little time we spent together, he softened after learning that I was a jazz singer-pianist. JW: What was your biggest thrill? Md’A: When Horace Silver dropped in to see me in 1967 at the Inner Circle. He saw my picture outside and came in. I had a four-night a week job there. Horace sat right in front of me while I was at the upright piano they had made to look like a grand piano for me [laughs]. I couldn't believe he was there. He asked from the audience if I could play Some Other Spring. It was his favorite song.
JW: Did you? Md’A: Yes, and he loved it. I was so embarrassed because of my lack of chops. After that we became friends. My mom had just committed suicide and he was concerned about me.
JW: But you and your mother didn't get along. Md'A: Yes, but despite all that my mother and I had been through, I sobbed about her for five years after her death. Years after meeting Horace, when I was still in Boston, he asked me to come to New York. So I took a train down, and Horace took me to see Reverend Beulah Brown up in Harlem. Reverend Brown was a minister Horace had known for years, but she was also a medium who claimed to communicate with the dead. I think that’s where Horace got his church sound, through her funky feeling and way of talking.
JW: What did Reverend Brown tell you? Md’A: She said, “You have to let your mother go. She has to get on to another life.” She told me I was keeping my mother earthbound. So I let her go, and I stopped sobbing. It was amazing.
JW: Where did you meet your late husband, pianist Eddie Higgins? Md’A: I met him 22 years ago. He had heard four tunes of mine that deejay Ron Della Chiesa played in a row on WGBH in Boston. They were four tracks from four different albums. After, Ron announced that I was playing at a place called the Asa Bearse House in Hyannis on Cape Cod. Eddie also had played there, so he knew where it was. I was working the room three days a week, and pianist Dave McKenna worked three days. One night Eddie [known to friends as Haydn] walked in and asked me to do a song. [Pictured: Haydn in Paris, watercolor, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JW: What did he want you to sing and play? Md’A: Well, I thought he had asked me to play You Light Up My Life [the Debby Boone pop hit]. I told him I didn’t do those kinds of songs [laughs].
JW: He was putting you on, no? Md’A: No, no [laughs]. I hadn't understood what he had said. He had asked for a Brazilian tune called Someone to Light Up My Life. I didn’t know much about Brazilian music at the time. So he tried another song, by Duke Ellington, called All Too Soon. I sang it, a bit puzzled about his taste after his first request.
JW: What happened next? Md'A: That evening, I ended up standing during my last set singing while he accompanied me on piano. After that we became close friends. Six weeks later we kissed goodnight for the first time. We became engaged two weeks after that and married the following year in the woods on Cape Cod. It was July 28, 1988, the anniversary of our first meeting We were happily married the entire time right up until he died this past August [2009]. [Pictured: After Dawn, oil on canvas, 2007, by Meredith d'Ambrosio]
JazzWax clips:Here's Meredith singing and playing Love Is a Simple Thing...
Here's Meredith singing and playing Love Is Not a Game...
And here's Meredith singing and playing No One Knows...
About
Marc Myers writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal and is author of "Anatomy of 55 More Songs," "Anatomy of a Song," "Rock Concert: An Oral History" and "Why Jazz Happened." Founded in 2007, JazzWax has won three Jazz Journalists Association awards.
