The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums by Will Friedwald

Author:Will Friedwald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

26

Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, and Annie Ross

Sing a Song of Basie (1957)

Annie Ross

Sings a Song with Mulligan! (1957)

Credit 26, Credit 27

Sometimes you start off by trying to do one thing and end up achieving something beyond anything you could ever have imagined. When Jon Hendricks and Dave Lambert first started working together, their idea was to see what would happen if they could somehow attach words to famous jazz passages. It wasn’t improvisation, nor was it really interpretation in the traditional sense. Hendricks and Lambert, who were soon joined by Annie Ross, were surprised to learn, in hindsight, that they had created something entirely new: a complete musical genre unto itself.

When Sing a Song of Basie was released by ABC-Paramount in 1957, listeners had no idea what to expect. Did the cover offer any clues? The original LP cover credited the artists as “Dave Lambert and his singers, Jon Hendricks and his lyrics, featuring Annie Ross and the Basic Rhythm Section.” (The designer was obviously hoping that potential buyers would mistake the word “basic” for “Basie.”) Since the two men’s names were new to most record buyers at that time, the main focus was, indisputably, the sleek, well-proportioned form of Annie Ross perched on a piano in dancer’s tights and a form-fitting leotard, snapping her fingers, eyes closed, with an expression on her face that was not only sensual and hip, but somehow exquisitely musical. To her left was Dave Lambert, who had just turned forty and already looked like a college professor, even before he grew that distinguished goatee that made him look like the world’s coolest garden gnome. To her right was Jon Hendricks—and this in itself was startling. As late as 1958, African Americans were not frequently shown mixing freely with Caucasians, in any medium; even the jazz world was not routinely integrated. It’s hard to think of any other album cover of the period that shows black and white people intermingling so casually, including those from the hard-core jazz labels like Blue Note or Prestige. (Perhaps it’s significant that while Lambert is shown gazing appreciatively at Ross, Hendricks is staring into space, as if he were well aware that he wasn’t supposed to be looking at a white woman. Not long after, he thoroughly shattered that unwritten commandment by marrying one, and staying married to her for fifty-six years.) If you looked harder, or could tear your eyes away from Annie’s legs, you might notice that Jon was holding an 8 x 10 glossy of Count Basie.

When you dropped the needle on the 12-inch LP, you heard the piano intro from the classic Basie version of “Every Day I Have the Blues.” This was a widely heard single in the mid-1950s, if not quite an epic chart hit on a Nat King Cole/Johnny Mathis scale. And while it was a relatively new slice of Basieana (the most recent piece on the album), chances are that if you were interested enough to buy what was presented as a Basie tribute album, you would know the tune and recognize the intro.

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