Publisher's Weekly Review
Drawing on exclusive interviews with Sarah Vaughan's friends and former colleagues, jazz-historian Hayes (a former editor of Earshot Jazz magazine) has written a lively and moving portrait of the passionate and tenacious jazz singer. Hayes gracefully narrates Vaughan's life, from her childhood-church-choir days in 1930s Newark, N.J., and her first major performance at age 18 at Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem to her career of singing bebop with Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker. Hayes traces Vaughan's growth as a successful pop artist-which she dictated on her own terms-as well as her failed marriages and her canny ability to make a range of musical styles her own. Vaughan dealt with shady business managers and unscrupulous producers who wanted to shape her in their image, but she held strong and continued to focus on her singing, which, as Hayes astutely explains, represented for her "autonomy, independence, and an opportunity for self-realization... it was her salvation." Hayes's blending of the cultural history of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s with his lucid critical insights into Vaughan's recordings and her life makes this book a detailed look at a fearless singer who constantly moved into new musical territories and left a legacy for younger musicians. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Music historian Hayes elucidates with expertise and finesse the precise nature of Sarah Vaughan's artistic genius. No mere girl singer, Newark-born Vaughan was a serious, hard-working, gutsy musician with a dazzling four-octave range, perfect pitch, and technical prowess matched by an unfettered musical imagination. Vaughan dropped out of high school to school herself in jazz, graduating with a triumphant performance on amateur night at the Apollo Theater, which delivered her to Earl Hines' band in 1943, a group that included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Billy Eckstine. At 18, Vaughan was on the road at the dawn of bebop, holding her own on and off the stage as the only woman with 16 men as they faced brutal racial discrimination. Cussing and battling, Vaughan earned the nicknames Sailor and Sassy. Two years later she launched her roller-coaster solo career. Tireless researcher Hayes chronicles with passionate precision Vaughan's galvanizing performances around the world, her recording successes and debacles, and her musical innovations, from her forays into pop to her singing with symphonies. Hayes' interviews with musicians, meticulous jazz history, incisive coverage of the ridiculous publicity campaigns the performer endured, and frank coverage of Vaughan's emotionally and financially disastrous marriages and her repeated rising from the ashes cohere in a deeply illuminating and unforgettable biography of a true American master.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOR ELLA FITZGERALD, jazz singing Was a way to wallow in joy; Billie Holiday used it to confront her grief. And to Sarah Vaughan, it was a nirvana where everything was possible and nothing went wrong. The legendary vocalist, who died in 1990, had a chocolate-mousse contralto that dipped into bass territory and soared to birdlike highs. Vaughan improvised extravagantly melodic lines; she heard all the harmonic choices in a chord and breezed through them at will. Her voice had the textures and colors of an orchestra. And she swung. With so much splendor at her disposal, she was like a child in a candy store; less was seldom more. Her nicknames, "Sassy" and "the Divine One," suggest the vast range of her musical personality, from playful coyness to diva hauteur. She sang about love, but it had not been good to her, and she avoided revelation; Vaughan took an instrumental approach with even the most candid lyrics. Occasionally a song pierced her reserve. In "Send In the Clowns," from Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," an actress views her failed love life in terms of a play that ends tragically. This originally calm confession so moved Vaughan that she gave it the sweep of grand opera. The opening of her version is as hymnlike as a funeral dirge. Later, her voice trembles as she sings, "no one is there." Reaching the climactic phrase, "maybe next year," she intones it over and over with a gospel fervor, climbing ever higher in an agonized grasp for the unattainable. There's more than enough back story here for a compelling biography. Fans were hoping for a better one than Leslie Gourse's sloppily written, musically flimsy effort from 1993, "Sassy: The Life of Sarah Vaughan." Now comes the far more scholarly "Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan," by Elaine M. Hayes, a Seattle-based jazz historian. It reads like a graceful doctoral dissertation, sensitive to Vaughan's technical gifts and the development of her art. But it goes awry in its attempt to politicize her as a civil rights and feminist groundbreaker - as though her artistic stature alone would not have justified this book. The title itself is questionable. Although Vaughan had flowered through the language of bebop, it was just one feather in her plumage. Hayes calls Vaughan "the first vocalist to introduce bebop singing to the world"; but that crown is better worn by Fitzgerald, who released her first bop single through a major company, Decca, in 1945, when Vaughan was recording for tiny New York jazz labels. Vaughan herself said she hated being categorized. What she wanted most, it seems, was to sing with musicians she liked and feel the love of a good man. Born in Newark in 1924, she focused at first on piano. But she wasn't satisfied, for reasons explained astutely by Hayes: "The piano, with its fixed pitch and strict adherence to half and whole steps, simply cannot produce the microtones, nuanced slides and dramatic swoops that soon became a trademark of her vocal style." Vaughan's singing went on fabled display in 1942, when she won the Apollo Theater's renowned amateur contest in Harlem. The pianist Earl Hines hired her to join his band, which included Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, two of the budding masterminds of bop. Vaughan absorbed their innovations, adding to them her uncommonly beautiful sound. What she lacked was spelled out in a review: "She is not exactly handsome to look at." Enter the trumpeter George Treadwell, Vaughan's Svengali and first husband. Seeing her potential, he invested in a complete makeover - coiffure, teeth straightening, gowns - and ingeniously guided her into the spotlight. Over many labored pages, Hayes analyzes the marriage in terms of the Pygmalion story and of fairy tales: expressions of "patriarchal values" used to "control women and undermine their individuality and accomplishments." Treadwell, she adds, had a "savvy understanding" of the fact that audiences of the day, especially white ones, "needed Vaughan to seem silent, submissive, powerless and not disruptive so that, ironically enough, they could hear her voice, with its vitality, humanity, beauty and ability to challenge racial boundaries." Might the story simply be that of an obscure sideman who wed a rising star and, knowing the realities of showbiz, exploited them to both his and her advantage? Overtheorizing also strains her study of the featherweight hits Vaughan recorded in the '50 s for her new label, Mercury. The flirty "Make Yourself Comfortable," the author writes, "reflected postwar views on domesticity and the acceptable role of women." To Hayes, "How Important Can It Be" ("That I tasted other lips? / That was long before you came to me / With the wonder of your kiss") was "a story line in harmony with contemporary gender roles and sexual mores." Skillfully as Vaughan rendered them, those tunes were picked with just one motive - to make a buck - and cannot withstand the weight Hayes heaps upon them. Along the way, she sails past many of the outstanding albums Vaughan's hits helped pay for, including "Sarah Vaughan in the Land of Hi-Fi," "Great Songs From Hit Shows" and "Sassy Swings the Tivoli." Hayes goes on to write of how Vaughan's singles "helped set the stage for the advances of the civil rights movement" by proving "that black women were not flat or one-dimensional and that a single black voice could sound multifaceted and complex." For Vaughan to have sung for the love and the art of it apparently isn't enough; music, Hayes insists, was how her subject "expressed herself in the face of intolerance and the way she brought about social change." Vaughan would probably have rolled her eyes at these claims. Hurtful as her early brushes with racism were - Hayes recounts several - they neither defined her nor held her back. Despite what the author states, Vaughan was no "race woman"; she was not inclined to march, campaign or crusade. Her racial significance is more that of a highachieving, abundantly talented black woman who inspired by example. The singer's main battles were romantic, and Hayes details the postTreadwell ones movingly. Vaughan kept inviting the men she fell for to manage her, which caused problems. In 1958, she married Clyde B. Atkins, an abusive charlatan who gambled away her money. She lived in the '70s with the solid Marshall Fisher, who got her faltering career back on track. But in 1978, Vaughan switched to a giddy romance, then a brief marriage, with a much younger man, the trumpeter Waymon Reed, whom friends described as controlling and violent. Her instrument, at least, had never let her down, and Vaughan took it for granted, smoking and snorting coke. In 1989, she learned she had lung cancer. At the Blue Note in New York, where she sang for the last time, her voice sounded magically untouched. She died six months later at the age of 66. To imitate Vaughan, as many have, seems nothing but phony; her sound and style were her thumbprint, nontransferable. Her true legacy was summed up to me by the jazz singer Dianne Reeves, who recalled her first response to Vaughan: "You mean, there are those kinds of possibilities?" On that score, "Queen of Bebop" leaves no doubt. With such splendid gifts at her disposed, she was like a child in a candy store; less wets seldom more. JAMES GAVIN has written biographies of Chet Baker, Lena Horne and Peggy Lee. He is working on a biography of George Michael
Kirkus Review
A biography of the great jazz singer whose commercial success seldom equaled her enormous gifts.Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990) was generally acknowledged to possess the most magnificent voice in jazz, and her instrument-playing colleagues paid her the ultimate tribute of considering her a fellow musician, not just another "girl singer." Her one-of-the-boys attitude earned her the nickname Sassy, and she was a lone female in the macho world of bebop, present at the creation as a teenager with Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker in Earl Hines' band in 1943. Going solo in 1945, Vaughan made more mainstream records with Musicraft and by 1947 had broken through to an audience beyond the jazz cognoscenti in Chicago, thanks partly to the enthusiastic championing of local DJ Dave Garroway, who dubbed her "the Divine One." Hayes' labored explanation of how Garroway "broke the rules" by describing Vaughan's voice in terms usually reserved for white women is regrettably typical of her tendency to shoehorn academic analysis of race and gender issues into a text supposedly aimed at general readers. Her points are perfectly valid, but the way she makes them is dreary. However, Hayes does a capable job of outlining Vaughan's career, hampered both artistically and financially by her unfortunate predilection for letting the men in her life manage her. If Vaughan had received the kind of sustained support that Ella Fitzgerald got from Norman Granz, Hayes convincingly argues, her legacy on disc would not be so spotty. Instead, she did her best work in performance, and the magic of her concerts is nicely captured in well-chosen quotes from her sidemen. They also capture the prickly personality of a musical perfectionist who could be a harsh taskmaster but also a warm mother figure to her band members. Vaughan continued singing after her diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, giving her final performance less than six months before her death. Informative and well-intentioned but sometimes pedestrian and lacking the elegant effervescence of Vaughan's singing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Performer Sarah Vaughan (1924-90), born in Newark, NJ, set the course for modern jazz singing. At 18, she won amateur night at the Apollo singing "Body and Soul," which launched her career. She spent the rest of her life in music, touring early on with musicians such as Earl "Fatha" Hines, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker, who were on the verge of changing jazz and creating bebop. Throughout her career, she maintained her creativity and fearlessness about venturing into new musical conversations, pushing herself and others to be constantly innovative. This title treads some of the same ground as Leslie Gourse's Sassy: The Life of Sarah Vaughan, but music historian and Vaughan expert Hayes focuses more on the music and looks at the role racism and imposing notions of femininity played. The author combines research and interviews, deftly outlining that by becoming a "crossover" artist, Vaughan helped create spaces for others and shifted perceptions of "how white America heard, understood, and interacted with the black female voice." VERDICT This inspiring book about an artist who disliked being labelled traces Vaughan's life and its intersection of music with race and gender. [See Prepub Alert, 1/23/17.]-Lani Smith, Ohone Coll. Lib., Fremont, CA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
