3/1/2023 0 Comments Flame of fire blossom diarieJust out of high school, Dearie picked up gigs in tiny clubs as a pianist and in the vocal groups that provided lush harmonies for swinging bandleaders like Woody Herman and Alvino Rey.īut the most important thing about her move was the education she found on the city’s music scene, both from the lounge singers she went to see on the East Side and the beboppers she hung out with in Gil Evans’ basement apartment on the West Side - a musical habitat that ran roughly from one end of 52nd Street to the other. Singing only became part of her repertoire after moving to the city in the mid-1940s, where she roomed with British singer Annie Ross and - by Ross’s recollection - a stripper named Rusty Lane. Born in 1924, she played piano from a young age growing up in East Durham, a hamlet near Albany classical lessons were her starting point, but by high school she was playing jazz with a dance band. “I feel like a true New Yorker in the sense that I was born in New York state and live in New York City,” as Dearie put it. In other words, she’s the sound of New York at its location-shot, cosmopolitan, dry-martini best, thanks to her unique ability to soak up life and art uptown, downtown and everywhere in between. On Blossom Dearie, she’s sophisticated but earthy she’s straightforward and precise but still witty and light. Apocryphally, Miles Davis called her “the only white woman who ever had soul.” But what soul she had, the genuine feeling she was able to impart via mostly faithful renditions of the American songbook, came from her resistance to imitation (of artists black and white alike) in favor of a sound that tied her neither to jazz precedent nor cabaret clichés. ![]() Ray Brown’s reported quip aside, Dearie’s success - niche though it might have ultimately been - came from her singular ability to accompany her elegant, straightforward-sung melodies with dynamic and propulsive piano playing. The jokes stopped, though, when it came to assessing her musical ability. Then came her voice itself, which The New Yorker referred to as a “childish treble” and a “baby voice” singing “postgraduate lyrics.” ![]() “But with a name like that, how could there be?” Almost every interview she did included a query as to whether it was her real name (it was) or one of the “lame attempts at humor to which Miss Dearie is now fairly well resigned, if not numb,” as the original liner notes to this album put it. “There’s nothing pretentious, or deadly earnest about Blossom Dearie,” wrote Disc of the debut in 1958. When it came to how she was received, Dearie was always in on the jokes - which often started with her name. ![]() ![]() It was a classic example of doing the bit before you become someone else’s punchline: Dearie sings the lyric - a wink at her accompanying bassist Ray Brown, whose endorsement was sure to make listeners wind the record back - in the highest, most girlish range of her naturally high and girlish voice, playing into the perceived dissonance between having real jazz bona fides and that kind of voice. “But Ray Brown told me I was built for speed,” sings Blossom Dearie on “Blossom’s Blues,” one outtake from her self-titled American debut album.
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