Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...eyes may close, the slender hands seem to carve the phrases out of the choky nightclub air. And the voice, sweet and strong above the rhythm section, curls around the lyrics like a husky caress. The voice belongs to Negro Singer Ernestine Anderson, at 29 perhaps the best-kept jazz secret in the land...
...tour with Bumps Blackwell's band, then with Johnny Otis, finally with Lionel Hampton, who took her to Manhattan. For a while she had a "steady gig" at a Greenwich Village spot, but she never attracted real attention until she went to Sweden in 1956 with an "allstar" jazz group headed by Trumpeter Rolf Ericsen. The Swedes loved her and mobbed her concerts. When she got back to the U.S., choice dates were still hard to come by, but West Coast jazz critics, notably the San Francisco Chronicle's Ralph Gleason, started to take note of the best...
Partly because the market for good jazz singers-i.e., singers who phrase and improvise in the manner of instruments in a jazz band-is remarkably small, Ernestine has remained a critical success and a popular failure. She is inevitably compared to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday. Ernestine invariably rejects the comparisons. "I wish," she says, "they would let me be just me." She is, and "just me" is plenty good enough...
...Jazz," Composer Milton Babbitt once said, "isn't necessarily just what is improvised after 4 a.m. on 52nd Street." To prove it, he accepted an invitation from Brandeis University last summer to write one of six jazz compositions for the annual Brandeis arts festival. Also represented: Composers Harold Shapero and Gunther Schuller, Jazzmen Charlie Mingus, Jimmy Giuffre and George Russell. Their efforts are now presented by Columbia on an album entitled Modern Jazz Concert. The selections range from Russell's blues-favored All About Rosie, "on a motif taken from an Alabama Negro children's song game...
Composer Shapero contributes a jazz arrangement of a Monteverdi chaconne. Entitled No Green Mountains (a play on Monteverdi's name), it holds its baroque flavor and allows for some intriguing solo-trumpet embroidery on the main theme. Most successful work is Transformation, by Composer Schuller, who is both the first horn player of the Metropolitan Opera and a sometime player in jazz combos. His tautly constructed piece opens with a wistful theme, gradually begins to swing, gives way to free improvisation and a swelling riff in the wind instruments. All the pieces have their fascinating moments, but they seem...