Word: cleo
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England has given Noel Coward to the musical stage, the Beatles to rock and Mantovani to schmalz. But try as it might, it has not been able to make a major contribution to that indigenous American art form, jazz. Except, that is, for gin and Cleo Laine...
With the proper schooling early on, Cleo's superb natural voice could have carried her into an operatic or lieder career. Smoky and sinuous in its middle range, it leaps effortlessly between octaves (sometimes going as high as an Yma Sumac "super F" above high C). Sometimes it skitters exhilaratingly around its bright upper reaches, then makes darting swallow-like swoops into the dark, resonant chest-tone regions of a Marilyn Home...
...Cleo showed recently at a standing-room-only concert in London's Intimate Theater, there is more to her singing than mere vocal acrobatics. There is, for one thing, the sultry, mischievous beauty that belies her 45 years-often enhanced by her penchant for wearing flowing gowns unbuttoned to the waist. There is the emotional intensity that glints inside every wave of her finely controlled vibrato on a ballad like Night and Day. Then there is the quicksilver sensitivity to shifting harmonies on a snaky blues like Gimme a Pigfoot...
Wordless. Unlike the many jazz singers who grimace, snap their ringers or just plain wonder what to do with themselves during long instrumental introductions and interludes, Cleo knows precisely what is called for: she sings along with all the wordless instrumental agility of a clarinet cozying up to a sax. The man who plays sax to Cleo's clarinet is her arranger, conductor and husband, Johnny Dankworth, himself a leading British jazzman and composer...
...Cleo and Johnny have been a musical team since the day in 1952 when he offered her six quid a week to sing with his band, and she said, "Make it seven." He did. She came from Middlesex, just outside London, where life as a child was, in her words, "clean but scruffy." Her father, a West Indian immigrant, earned part of his living as a busker outside London's music halls and pubs. Her mother, disowned by her parents for marrying a West Indian, saw to it that Cleo and her two brothers "were swamped in lessons"-dancing...