Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Queen of Bebop
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://elainemhayes.com/
CITY: Seattle
STATE: WA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-125597/elaine-m-hayes * http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=624#m10932 * http://elainemhayes.com/about-elaine/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: son.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, doctorate in musicology.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Jazz historian; freelance writer and editor.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Grove Dictionary of American Music. Former editor, Earshot Jazz; contributor, Seattle magazine. Maintains a blog, Lady Be Bop.
SIDELIGHTS
Elaine M. Hayes is a musicologist who specializes in the history and performance of jazz music. “I have had a passion for music since my first piano lesson at age seven,” Hayes explained in an autobiographical blurb appearing on her website, “and have spent a dozen years studying big band ‘girl singers’ and women in jazz.” She is the author of the biography Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan. “I was trained as a classical musician and didn’t discover Sarah until college,” Hayes told Marilyn Dahl, at Shelf Awareness. “I immediately fell in love with her voice—the way she used her vibrato, the way she’d swoop from the bottom of a range up to the top; it was very exciting. In graduate school, when I took a seminar on women and jazz, I decided to write a paper on her and it grew from there.”
Hayes’s Queen of Bebop, said Dahl in her introduction to a Shelf Awareness interview, “focuses on the voice of one of the most amazing vocalists of the 20th century. Hayes weaves in the story of Vaughan’s life, along with racial, social, and gender history and issues.” “Sarah Vaughan had many musical lives. She really could do it all,” Hayes explained in her interview with Deborah Kalb, appearing in Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb. “As a child, she sang spirituals in her church choir and played classical piano. In her teens, as a girl singer in the big bands, she was at the forefront of bebop, the new avant-garde style that defined the direction of modern jazz. She also sang exquisite romantic ballads and delightful showtunes.” “Hayes,” wrote Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman, “chronicles with passionate precision Vaughan’s galvanizing performances around the world, her recording successes and debacles, and her musical innovations.”
In fact, Vaughan was a pioneer in pushing for equal rights for African Americans—and for women in an industry dominated by men. “In addition to its insightful discussions of Vaughan’s technical genius, ‘Queen of Bebop’ also examines the times in which she worked,” declared Farah Jasmine Griffin in a Washington Post review. “Born in 1924 in Newark, Vaughan was a child of the Great Migration and lived under the painful reality of Jim Crow America. Her parents went North from Virginia in search of greater economic opportunity and political freedom. However, the Newark to which they moved had an established history of racial segregation and oppression, which shaped Vaughan’s experiences as a young artist. On tour she and her bandmates encountered one indignity after another.”
“There is little doubt Vaughan and her contemporaries—including Nat ‘King’ Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Lena Horne—were trailblazers for racial equality by way of enduring, surviving, and ultimately triumphing over the struggles and indignities of Jim Crow while touring with big bands in the 1940s and 1950s,” said Bruce Klauber in the Broad Street Review. “Vaughan also came up in a music business notorious for bad record deals, crooked promoters, [and] unscrupulous managers.” “I was fascinated with how she, often the only woman in the band, immersed herself in the very masculine world of jazz. How she always stood up for herself and her musical choices. She insisted on singing the way she wanted, regardless of what others expected,” Hayes told Kalb. “And I admired her lifelong mission to defy categorization, even when the world around her wanted to label and pigeonhole her. I found this all incredibly powerful and moving.”
Despite her undeniable strengths, Vaughan’s long career suffered from financial reversals. “Hayes does a capable job of outlining Vaughan’s career,” opined a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “hampered both artistically and financially by her unfortunate predilection for letting the men in her life manage her.” “Hayes paints a picture of a self-possessed woman,” said Gwen Thompkins in a review for NPR, “who, contrary to her nature, caved to the dictates of bad contracts and tiny-hearted industry executives. Not until the final stages of her career did Vaughan take control of her legacy. But, for many, the damage already had been done.” Nonetheless “Queen of Bebop is a welcome and well-researched accounting of Vaughan’s life story. It’s also a testament to the singularity of her talent,” declared Thompkins. “But perhaps the book’s greatest accomplishment will be more ears on Vaughan’s music—her nickname wasn’t The Divine One for nothing. As her centennial approaches, now is an excellent time to listen anew.”
Vaughan was also challenged by the decline of the big band era in the 1950s and the rise of rock and roll. Hayes’s “biography,” stated Jessie Hunnicutt in the New Yorker, “shows how the change [from swing to rock and roll] both fuelled and limited her career.” Queen of Bebop, concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, is “a detailed look at a fearless singer who constantly moved into new musical territories and left a legacy for younger musicians.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Donna Seaman, review of Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan, p. 8.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of Queen of Bebop.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of Queen of Bebop, p. 59.
Washington Post, July 24, 2017, Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Sarah Vaughan Finally Gets the Biography She Deserves.”
ONLINE
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (August 16, 2017), Deborah Kalb, “Q&A with Elaine M. Hayes.”
Broad Street Review, http://www.broadstreetreview.com/ (July 10, 2017), Bruce Klauber, review of Queen of Bebop.
Elaine M. Hayes Website, http://elainemhayes.com/ (February 14, 2018), author profile.
NPR Website, https://www.npr.org/ (July 8, 2017), Gwen Thompkins, “‘Queen of Bebop’ Is a Welcome Look at Sarah Vaughan’s Legendary Career.”
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (February 14, 2018), Marilyn Dahl, “Elaine M. Hayes: Discovering Sarah Vaughan.”
About Elaine
Elaine publicity photo.jpg
I have had a passion for music since my first piano lesson at age seven and have spent a dozen years studying big band “girl singers” and women in jazz. Not only do I find these incredible women inspirational, I love delving into the past (yay for microfilm!) and finding those intriguing details that make the lives of these artists more real and vibrant. Along the way, I have sifted through the collections of archives and libraries; received a doctorate in musicology from the University of Pennsylvania; taught multi-media courses in jazz, classical, and world music; spoken at national and international conferences; and discussed Sarah Vaughan on local and national radio, including NPR. All of this has come in handy in my most recent project: a biography of the vocalist Sarah Vaughan, titled Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan, published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2017.
I enjoy making music accessible and fun for non-musicians, and in my post-academic life, I have focused on telling engaging stories about the jazz artists, both past and present, that I admire. I was the editor of the monthly magazine Earshot Jazz. I have co-produced radio segments on Billie Holiday and Seattle’s nationally recognized high school jazz programs for community radio. I’ve also written entries on Sarah Vaughan, Maxine Sullivan, and Nancy Wilson for the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. My musings on Sarah Vaughan, women in the entertainment industry, and music – jazz or otherwise, can by found at my blog Lady Be Bop.
When I’m not nose deep in the world of music, I am a freelance writer and editor. I have written on topics ranging from competitive yoga to celebrity chefs and accounting. My work appears in magazines, business communications, and on the Web. For more on my editing services, please visit here.
Elaine M. Hayes: Discovering Sarah Vaughan
photo: Nick Kramer
Elaine M. Hayes, jazz historian, writer and editor, is recognized within the music history community as the expert on Sarah Vaughan. She earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Seattle with her husband and son.
Hayes's meticulously researched biography, Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan (Ecco, $27.99), focuses on the voice of one of the most amazing vocalists of the 20th century. Hayes weaves in the story of Vaughan's life, along with racial, social, and gender history and issues.
You've said that Sarah Vaughan was your crossover moment.
I was trained as a classical musician and didn't discover Sarah until college. I immediately fell in love with her voice--the way she used her vibrato, the way she'd swoop from the bottom of a range up to the top; it was very exciting. In graduate school, when I took a seminar on women and jazz, I decided to write a paper on her and it grew from there.
There are many ways race impacted Sarah's life and career. Most of them need no explanation--after all, she toured in the South in the '40s, '50s and '60s. But one aspect is not so obvious: the way white critics discussed vocalists. Vaughan's tone was "full and rich like velvet or oozing honey, yet agile and supple, almost light as air." Yet, white female voices were considered beautiful, feminine, while black voices were not.
Since the music was heard on the radio, listeners had to be told what kind of person was singing. White critics were invested in reinforcing racial barriers, so they employed code words to maintain those boundaries, like "earthy," and used a very limited vocabulary for black voices. Black critics, black writers didn't have the same agenda. To them, black singers like Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington and other traditional blues shouters had very beautiful voices.
It was a way to keep white listeners from getting too emotionally invested in black performers. The one thing I love about Sarah is that her music is very emotionally intimate--she's talking about my life. Creating that kind of human connection between white listeners and a black person was frowned upon. So the way that the voices were talked about perpetuated beliefs.
Vaughan was typecast as a blues or jazz singer, while white vocalists had "the freedom of flexibility and the privilege of choice." However, Dave Garroway, in his radio broadcasts in the late '40s, did not "reduce Vaughan to her body." Can you describe what that meant?
When I listened to Garroway's radio broadcasts, he would talk about her voice using a lot of the vocabulary that had been used to describe white vocalists. This is not to say in any way that Vaughan was not an African-American vocalist, but he seemed less interested in maintaining the barriers we were talking about. He would tell people to close their eyes and relax their minds and just enjoy the sound. His approach to Vaughan blurred racial boundaries.
There is so much in your book about racial, social, gender issues as seen through the prism of Sarah Vaughan, but... her voice! "Vaughan... together with her fellow musicians, created a seamless progression of tone colors and timbres as each pairing came in and out of focus. Together, they crafted a distinct sonic world."
When I would interview the musicians she worked with, they would describe her as an instrumentalist. In the context of how jazz singers worked, that's the highest praise they could give. Actively responding to the musicians... that was just one of the things that made her artistry exceptional.
Her singing changed the outlooks of musicians and critics. She left them, especially vocalists, "gasping in amazement at her daring innovations and vocal dexterity."
What she did with her voice was technically very difficult, and her harmonic choices--she'd choose these notes that weren't obvious in the harmonic framework. A really great album that shows this is Sarah Vaughan Live at Town Hall (1947) with Lester Young. One of the things that makes this so great is you can hear how the audience responded to her singing. Listen to "I Cover the Waterfront," or "I Cried for You."
"Mean to Me" from the album is not available, but her recording from 1945, backed by Dizzy Gillespie's Septet (with Charlie Parker on alto sax and Max Roach on drums) is. I wish we had a live performance of this band!
When we listen to "Ave Maria" (1951), we can hear how Vaughan, with her four-octave contralto, could easily have become an opera singer.
It's my sense that that was one of her dreams. Marian Anderson was one of her idols. She had the voice, but she was black and came from a working-class home, and classical music required access to certain kinds of teachers, conservatories, learning foreign languages--there was a financial and class barrier.
In the '50s, some of her greatest supporters/critics accused her of selling out, of being too commercial. "Critics believed that musicians, especially black musicians, had a moral obligation to perform (and record) jazz, and that they should remain untarnished by crass commercialism." But as Nat King Cole said, why starve?
Billy Eckstine, another black crooner, said, "Would you feel better if I died from a drug overdose and couldn't feed my family?" The critics created an idea of how black artistry should work.
Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie--all jazz musicians who definitely had jazz cred--they wanted to be successful as possible, and they understood that was related to financial and commercial success.
That would also give them power, more control over their art.
Exactly. Sarah became a pretty popular singer in the '50s, and as she made the transition from jazz and bepop to pop, critics got really angry with her. But she wanted the freedom to sing what she wanted. In the '50s, she was fine-tuning her style, so she could kind of sneak in a lot of jazz elements into pop songs. She became quite good at singing for a pop audience while remaining interesting to a jazz fan.
Then she widened her audience and moved into what you call her third stage, when she emerged as a "symphonic diva."
In the 1960s, jazz (and pop) had a really hard time as rock became huge, so musicians had to figure out how to make a living. Sarah had a number of very difficult years, but in the process, she found a new opportunity--she started singing with symphony orchestras. It allowed her to first of all find beautiful venues where she was treated with respect and appreciated, but also allowed her to explore her operatic side.
Vaughan insisted on being considered a "singer," rather than being pigeonholed. When she made music, she "became a human being instead of an African-American. It released her from social and cultural limitations." But she wasn't free from the limitations of being a woman at her particular time in the world. She was only free on the stage.
I think so. Near the end of her life, she wrote an op-ed for USA Today. She talked about the special meaning music had for her. Going into the recording studio, differences in age, in musical style, in race, gender--they all disappeared in the moment of making music. Singing, communicating who she was through her voice, expressing herself... but once she stepped off the stage, there was still the real world. --Marilyn Dahl
Biography
Elaine M. Hayes holds a doctorate in music history and is a recognized expert on Sarah Vaughan and women in jazz. She served as the editor of Earshot Jazz and is a contributing writer to Seattle magazine. She lives in Seattle with her husband and son.
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Q&A with Elaine M. Hayes
Elaine M. Hayes is the author of the new biography Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan. She was editor of the magazine Earshot Jazz and has contributed to Seattle magazine, and has taught classes on jazz, classical, and world music. She lives in Seattle.
Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of Sarah Vaughan, and how many "musical lives" did she have?
A: I didn’t discover Sarah Vaughan until college, and I was immediately drawn to her singing. I loved the way her voice sounded, the musical choices she made, and the sheer presence she exuded when she sang.
A couple of years later, I had an opportunity to study her in graduate school. This is when I learned more about the woman behind the music.
I was fascinated with how she, often the only woman in the band, immersed herself in the very masculine world of jazz. How she always stood up for herself and her musical choices. She insisted on singing the way she wanted, regardless of what others expected.
And I admired her lifelong mission to defy categorization, even when the world around her wanted to label and pigeonhole her. I found this all incredibly powerful and moving.
But after finishing my degree, I left Sarah behind. I went off and lived my life and pursed other projects. I always assumed that someone else would write the biography Sarah Vaughan deserved. (There were already two attempts, but both seemed incomplete.) This never happened, so a few years ago, I decided to do it myself.
Sarah Vaughan had many musical lives. She really could do it all. As a child, she sang spirituals in her church choir and played classical piano. In her teens, as a girl singer in the big bands, she was as at the forefront of bebop, the new avant-garde style that defined the direction of modern jazz.
She also sang exquisite romantic ballads and delightful showtunes. She recorded cheesy pop hits in the 1950s and later made forays into R&B, rockabilly, rock n’ roll, and disco, though she hated these. In the 1970s and 1980s, she became a master of Brazilian music and an operatic diva performing with the word’s finest symphony orchestras. She even did an album where she sang the poetry of a young Pope John Paul II.
She was always exploring, stretching, and trying new things. At her core, she was a singer and creative being.
Queen of Bebop is organized around three phases, or crossover moments, in Sarah’s career: her journey from church girl in Newark to big band girl singer; her transition from bebop innovator to pop star; and finally her transition from jazz icon to symphonic diva.
Q: How did you research the book, and was there anything that especially surprised you in the course of your research?
A: I love immersing myself in the past and sifting through old newspapers, magazines, and recordings. It’s like a treasure hunt and you never know what gems you are going to find.
So I visited a lot of archives and took full advantage of all of the new databases of digitized periodicals that have popped up in the past 10 years. I looked at publications by both the black and white press—be it newspapers from the big cities and tiny towns where Vaughan toured; trade journals like Variety, Billboard, Metronome, and Down Beat; or lifestyle magazines like Life and Ebony.
I then supplemented this wtih my own interviews of her friends and co-workers, oral histories, tapes of old radio shows, press releases, re-discovered videos of her live performances, private tapes of her rehearsals and chats with friends, and, of course, the writings of other historians. In the end, a rich, very dynamic and vibrant portrait of Sarah Vaughan emerged.
There were many surprises. Some came in the form of wonderful anecdotes about Sarah rubbing shoulders with her fellow giants of the day. (I’m not going to spill the beans on these here!)
Others were disheartening. I uncovered new stories about the racism she faced and the true extent of the domestic abuse she experienced. The abuse, in particular, was very difficult for me to write about.
For me, however, the most pleasant surprise was re-discovering Sarah’s own voice. When I first began studying her almost 20 years ago, I couldn’t find that many interviews with her and biographies really didn’t include many of her own words. There seemed to be a void.
Sarah was a quiet, introverted woman, and the interviews that she did give were often curt, abrupt, and adversarial. So I assumed that she simply didn’t give that many interviews.
This was not the case. Thanks to these new, remarkable databases of digital newspapers, I discovered that Sarah, in fact, did many interviews. (She still didn’t enjoy them, but she gave them.)
And here I found more examples of her humor and wit, musings on society and the music industry, and her place in it. She was remarkably consistent in her worldviews. Whenever possible, I’ve re-inserted Sarah’s voice into her life story.
Q: What are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about Vaughan?
A: One of the most enduring myths about Sarah is that she was the creation of her first husband-manager. He’s often described as a Pygmalion or Svengali-like figure who masterminded a dramatic, glamorizing makeover that jumpstarted her career.
Well, it’s more complicated than this. This myth was, in fact, the product of an elaborate publicity campaign devised by her husband to assert more control in their crumbling personal and professional partnership. Queen of Bebop delves deeper, separating fact from fiction while considering why this myth has endured.
Another aspect of Sarah’s legacy that has been overlooked is her involvement with the development of bebop, alongside luminaries like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, in the early 1940s. She was in the thick of it, keeping up with all of the boys, and she played an important role in popularizing the music of her fellow bebop instrumentalists.
Today Sarah is best known for her slow, romantic ballads, which don’t fit our preconceptions of bebop singing. But much of her musical style—her harmonic language and how she used her voice—and, most importantly, her worldviews were established during her early bebop days.
Q: What is her legacy today?
A: There is no doubt that Sarah Vaughan has influenced the generations of vocalists who followed in her wake. When I’m listening to jazz singers, I often hear a vocal inflection or turn of phrase that reminds me of Sarah.
But I think a more lasting part of her legacy is that she really changed the way that vocalists, especially women, thought about their voices, their approach to making music, and their role in an ensemble.
When I interviewed singers, they told me how much they learned from watching and listening to Sarah. They saw the unwavering respect that the guys in the band had for her, the intimate musical conversations that she had with musicians, how she owned her musical choices, and it reminded them that they were more than just a “chick singer.” They were serious musicians too.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m still in the land of Sarah Vaughan, which is fine by me. I love her! And now that the book is out, people are sharing their Sarah Vaughan stories with me. This has been wonderful. It gives me new ways to think about Sarah, her legacy, and how she moved her listeners. So don’t hesitate to reach out if you have a favorite Sassy memory!
I’ve also been spending more time with my son. He heads off to kindergarten [soon], and I want to treasure these last moments while he’s still my little boy.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Well, I’d like to encourage people to listen to more Sarah Vaughan! If you are already a fan, keep on listening. And if you are new to Sarah, here are a few of my favorites to get you started:
“Over the Rainbow” (television broadcast, Holland, 1958) Check out what she does at the 2:54 mark. Amazing!
“Don’t Blame Me” (from One Night Stand: The Town Hall Concert, live 1947)
“Shulie a Bop” (from Images, 1954, EmArcy)
“Whatever Lola Wants” (1955, Mercury)
“Send in the Clowns” (live, Playboy Jazz Festival, early 1980s)
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Briefly Noted
Jessie Hunnicutt
The New Yorker. 93.24 (Aug. 21, 2017): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
Queen of Bebop, by Elaine M. Hayes (Ecco). The early years of Sarah Vaughan's career coincided with the waning of the swing era, and this biography shows how the change both fuelled and limited her career. In 1946, the producer John Hammond offered to turn Vaughan into the next Bessie Smith, but she rebuffed him. Having already forged creative partnerships with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who admired her impeccable pitch, her four-octave range, and her vocal improvisations, Vaughan had no interest in singing any way but her own. Later, she struggled under label pressure to re-create hits like "Whatever Lola Wants," and was also hindered by a habit of installing her husband or current romantic partner as her manager, with unfortunate professional and personal results.
Sarah Vaughan finally gets the biography she deserves
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Washingtonpost.com. (July 24, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Listen
Full Text:
Byline: Farah Jasmine Griffin
Along with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan is part of the triumvirate of classic jazz vocalists. Together they laid the foundation of contemporary jazz singing and as such, helped to shape all of popular music.
Holiday has been the subject of several significant biographies, and there is at least one authoritative tome devoted to Fitzgerald, with another long-awaited one soon to follow. But Vaughan has not inspired the same attention, which makes "Queen of Bebop," by Elaine M. Hayes, all the more necessary and exciting. This comprehensive examination of Vaughan's life and work benefits from Hayes's technical knowledge of music and her thorough research on the historical context.
In a sense, though, "Queen of Bebop" is a misleading title. It limits the scope of Vaughan's music and the book's actual exploration of her career. Although Vaughan established herself as an innovative bebop vocalist, she spent much of her life trying to break free of the limitations of category. Hayes documents this journey with painstaking detail. Having collected a rich trove of material, she organizes her presentation around the concept of crossover, as a way to honor Vaughan's "flexibility as a performer and the breadth of her career." Following that crossover journey yields a solid narrative that documents Vaughan's struggles, triumphs and unprecedented success as a "symphonic diva, singing jazz in venues previously reserved for classical music and opera."
As a Newark choirgirl, Vaughan won the Apollo's famed Amateur Night and toured with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Billy Eckstine. After her appearance at New York's Town Hall in 1947, critics took notice and identified her as the bearer of something new. Here was a vocalist who, like her instrument-playing compatriots, transformed jazz from the dominance of swing to the realm of a complex, abstract, high art through bebop. For Hayes, this marked the first phase of Vaughan's journey from "obscurity" to "crossover."
While useful for organizing a linear narrative of Vaughan's career, one of the unfortunate limitations of this approach is a devaluation of the so-called obscure period. Just because Vaughan was unknown to white fans of popular music does not mean that Vaughan languished in "obscurity." Her musicianship was widely recognized and appreciated in the communities that most valued the art form. Furthermore, as Hayes herself notes, when Vaughan crossed over, she broadened the sonic palate of American audiences, introducing them to "everything new and modern" through her sophisticated, avant-garde singing.
Vaughan, who started out as a pianist, brought a knowledge of music's underlying harmonic structure to her singing. "I'm really a singer," she once said. "I wish I could play piano like I think, but I can't. My fingers. My mind. I sing faster. I can think what I'm thinking and sing it, but I can't play it." Despite its vast possibilities, the piano was too limiting for Vaughan's quick thinking creativity. Her voice was the only instrument that allowed her to express the full range, tone and depth of what she heard in her head.
In addition to its insightful discussions of Vaughan's technical genius, "Queen of Bebop" also examines the times in which she worked. Born in 1924 in Newark, Vaughan was a child of the Great Migration and lived under the painful reality of Jim Crow America. Her parents went North from Virginia in search of greater economic opportunity and political freedom. However, the Newark to which they moved had an established history of racial segregation and oppression, which shaped Vaughan's experiences as a young artist. On tour she and her bandmates encountered one indignity after another.
While all the musicians with whom she traveled faced racial violence, Vaughan also faced gender-based violence. Her colleagues beat her. It was a high price to pay for admission into the boys club of jazz instrumentalists. But these conditions both in Newark and within the Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine bands provided Vaughan opportunities to hone her natural abilities and to experiment within a community that appreciated invention. Black audiences and white jazz fans and DJs were central in making sure broader audiences heard her.
But if the communities that produced Vaughan nurtured innovation, the world she sought to enter did anything but. Hayes does an especially good job of explaining the musical landscape of postwar white America. In the second phase of her crossover, Columbia Records signed Vaughan and assigned Mitch Miller to produce her records. Hayes correctly identifies Miller as committed to commercialism. He produced hits for other artists with novelty songs and stereotypic ethnic tunes, a strategy that limited artists both black and white but satisfied the tastes of pop music audiences. "Mitch Miller didn't know . . . how not to use race (or ethnicity) as a novelty device," Hayes writes. "He was in tune with white, mainstream America, but he struggled to present the creations of black artists in a way that wasn't stereotypical or reductive."
Vaughan resisted both "the blatant commercialism of Miller" and the "anti-commercialism of jazz purists" by carving her own path. She took her music to places unimagined by previous jazz vocalists. By the end of her career, especially with the success of her interpretation of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," Vaughan emerged as a singular artist who merged her jazz foundation, her popular music aspirations and her desire for the respect offered to the grand opera divas.
Although Hayes rightly focuses on Vaughan's music, she does not gloss over Vaughan's long-standing tastes for cocaine and marijuana, or her unfortunate pattern of making her often-abusive husbands her managers despite their lack of business acumen and experience. But while drug use and bad relationships are a reality, they do not dominate Hayes's presentation of Vaughan's life; they do not take away from the centrality and enormity of her talent and musical contribution. This is as it should be. "Queen of Bebop" models a way of understanding the lives and artistry of jazz musicians -- one that establishes their importance and centrality in creating the best that America has offered the world.
Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English, comparative literature and African American studies at Columbia University in New York.
Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of
Sarah Vaughan
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p8.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan.
By Elaine M. Hayes.
July 2017.416p. illus. Ecco, $27.99 (9780062364685). 782.42165.
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.--Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 8.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862640/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=11c37223. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517173710968 2/5
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862640
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517173710968 3/5
Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of
Sarah Vaughan
Publishers Weekly.
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p59+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan
Elaine M. Hayes. Ecco, $27.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-06-236468-5
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)
Caption: In the Queen of Bebop. Elaine M. Hayes explores the life of jazz singer Sarah Vaughan (reviewed
on p. 59).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 59+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500758/ITOF?
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517173710968 4/5
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8c5268ae. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500758
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517173710968 5/5
Hayes, Elaine M.: QUEEN OF BEBOP
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hayes, Elaine M. QUEEN OF BEBOP Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 7, 4 ISBN: 978-0-06-
236468-5
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 wellchosen
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Hayes, Elaine M.: QUEEN OF BEBOP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7693c5f4.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934172
'Queen Of Bebop' Is A Welcome Look At Sarah Vaughan's Legendary Career
July 8, 201710:00 AM ET
GWEN THOMPKINS
Queen of Bebop
Queen of Bebop
The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan
by Elaine M. Hayes
Hardcover, 432 pages |
purchase
It's somehow fitting that a biography of Sarah Vaughan would emerge during the centennial of Ella Fitzgerald. That's been Vaughan's story from the get go. The brilliance of her instrument was, is and ever shall be compared to Fitzgerald's — the First Lady of Song, the darling of rhythm, the swinging-est singer on record.
Vaughan was born in Newark, N.J. in 1924, seven years after Fitzgerald. But in jazz, seven years — and particularly those seven — were a lifetime. That's how fast the music was changing. Or, more accurately, that's how fortunate music lovers were. The Queen of Swing and the Queen of Bebop sat concurrently on their thrones in the same lifetime. Each dipped her royal feet in the perpetual spring of pop music, and each paid a price with the critics for doing so. There were others, of course, but Fitzgerald and Vaughan were among the few who belonged on top.
Queen of Bebop, by Elaine M. Hayes, begins with a now familiar story in American music: The girl singer awaiting her history-making debut at an elite performance space in New York City. Vaughan first sang at Town Hall in 1947, following the sublime tenor saxophonist Lester Young on the program. Young, who'd played with Count Basie, and most memorably Billie Holiday, was an intimidating act to follow, but Vaughan managed nicely. In five songs or less, she introduced the well-heeled music lovers of Town Hall to a concept that had boggled the minds of her fellow musicians and touring audiences for some time. "It had not occurred to them that the human voice could be used this way" Hayes writes.
Hayes is at her best when describing Vaughan's talent this simply. Her understatement, like a time-release capsule, packs a — wait for it, wait for it — KABOOM. That's the kind of discipline needed to describe the aural calligraphy Vaughan brought to jazz, and why instrumentalists — who famously disliked girl singers — made an exception for her. It was that voice. That voice! Four octaves as supple as warm taffy pouring out of a saucepan.
'Queen of Bebop' adds detail to aspects of Vaughan's life that confounded even her most besotted fans.
Queen of Bebop depicts Vaughan as a musician's musician, tougher than the rest. As a singer and piano player, she took to the challenging structures of bebop as if she'd made up the modes herself. Her ballad singing, especially, could tempt any swing dancer to sit down and listen to the arrangement.
But it was Vaughan's hardiness off stage that made her one of the guys. Hayes quotes any number of sidemen who said so — in the Earl Hines band, Billy Eckstine's and in Vaughan's own ensembles. She swore and carried her own travel bags — like the guys. She smoked — like the guys. And she drank and stayed high on a variety of drugs — just like they did. But then she would pack herself into a form-fitting gown and present to an audience like a perfect parfait. As Hayes writes, Vaughan kept it up until 1990, when lung cancer killed her.
That's the plot and there are no spoilers here. But Queen of Bebop adds detail to aspects of Vaughan's life that confounded even her most besotted fans. The music critics, disc jockeys and promoters who championed her work early on became frustrated with Vaughan the jazz singer vs. Vaughan the pop singer.
Vaughan's novelty recordings, which even she reportedly despised, widened her audience and her commercial appeal. But songs like Broken-Hearted Melody and De Gas Pipe She's Leakin' Joe put her more in league with the novelties of Doris Day than with singers mentioned in the best jazz circles.
Songs We Love: Sarah Vaughan, 'Fascinating Rhythm'
SONGS WE LOVE
Songs We Love: Sarah Vaughan, 'Fascinating Rhythm'
Hayes paints a picture of a self-possessed woman who, contrary to her nature, caved to the dictates of bad contracts and tiny-hearted industry executives. Not until the final stages of her career did Vaughan take control of her legacy. But, for many, the damage already had been done.
Queen of Bebop explores the hard choices of many a jazz singer when rock 'n roll began stealing audience focus, relying on a variety of performers to shed light on Vaughan's mindset.
Vocalist Billy Eckstine, for instance, unleashing on jazz purists who sneer at commercial pop music. "So I saw one of those creeps, a jazz critic, and I said, 'What are you, mad at me because I want to take care of my family? Is that what pisses you off?'" Eckstine says in the book. "You want me to wind up in a goddamn hotel room with a bottle of gin in my pocket and a needle in my arm, and let them discover me laying there? Then I'll be immortal, I guess, to you.'"
Sarah Vaughan On Piano Jazz
MARIAN MCPARTLAND'S PIANO JAZZ
Sarah Vaughan On Piano Jazz
But Hayes offers little fresh insight into controversial decisions over which Vaughan had complete control — particularly in the hiring of inexperienced husbands and lovers to represent her in business. Vaughan rarely, if ever, spoke publicly on the matter and, as a storyteller, Hayes struggles with her subject's apparent silence. Like many performers, Vaughan was reluctant to be interviewed in-depth or at length. As a result, she's remote on the page — just out of reach. But her shyness and impatience with the press may have given critics undue influence in shaping her reputation in perpetuity.
"In their fervor to condemn her pop records ... jazz critics neglected her live performances," Hayes writes. "They overlooked what she did night after night, for hundreds and often thousands of listeners."
The breadth of Vaughan's career supports that statement. But Hayes — a devotee — cannot fully address the most damning criticism: That for all the technical merit Vaughan displayed — perhaps the greatest vocal range of this or the last century — she could not always connect with her listeners emotionally.
'Queen of Bebop' is a welcome and well-researched accounting of Vaughan's life story. It's also a testament to the singularity of her talent.
"I admire her, but she doesn't move me," Hayes quotes the much-celebrated poet and New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett. "I have to be moved." While Balliett was underwhelmed by virtually all female jazz singers, he was not alone in his assessment. Hayes also describes producer John Hammond — an early Vaughan fan, who also helped introduce the world to Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, among others — pointedly reading the newspaper while ringside at Vaughan concerts in New York.
It's not easy to counter that kind of emotional argument. Either a listener feels that a singer has communicated what a lyric has to say, or doesn't. In music, the transporting factor is, by nature, mysterious — difficult to define, or predict. Queen of Bebop suggests that these criticisms may have added to Vaughan's feeling under-appreciated near the end of her astounding career.
In June of 1989, when Vaughan saw festival producer George Wein in her dressing room at Carnegie Hall — she wanted to know only one thing: "Why do you pay Ella more than you pay me?"
Queen of Bebop is a welcome and well-researched accounting of Vaughan's life story. It's also a testament to the singularity of her talent. But perhaps the book's greatest accomplishment will be more ears on Vaughan's music – her nickname wasn't The Divine One for nothing. As her centennial approaches, now is an excellent time to listen anew.
Gwen Thompkins is a writer in New Orleans and host of public radio's Music Inside Out.
‘Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan,’ by Elaine M. Hayes
The "Divine One" deserves more
Bruce Klauber
July 10, 2017in BooksShare:faxEmailTwitterFacebookPinterestGoogle+
For five decades, legendary jazz singer Sarah Vaughan was one of the few artists who managed to appeal both to jazz aficionados and to those who might not have liked jazz before or since. This mercurial innovator and influence deserves a major biography. Unfortunately, Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan, by freelance writer and University of Pennsylvania alumna Elaine M. Hayes, a first-time author, is not definitive.
A 1955 publicity still of Sarah Vaughan. (Photo via Creative Commons/Wikimedia.)
The blame game
That’s a shame, as the Vaughan story, musical and otherwise, is ultimately a tale of art over commerce, innovation in the face of struggle, and a singular jazz life. This life, taken on its own and at face value, should have been more than sufficient for compelling and essential reading.
Indeed, there is little doubt Vaughan and her contemporaries — including Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Lena Horne — were trailblazers for racial equality by way of enduring, surviving, and ultimately triumphing over the struggles and indignities of Jim Crow while touring with big bands in the 1940s and 1950s. Vaughan also came up in a music business notorious for bad record deals, crooked promoters, unscrupulous managers, and rotten club owners.
But one of the book’s major failings is that the author seems to have a bone to pick with almost every white person who worked in the business though the years, including writers and critics such as John Hammond and Leonard Feather, promoters, disc jockeys (save Dave Garroway, who helped put Vaughan on the map), record-company executives, and fellow singers, particularly blonde and blue-eyed vocalists (the author takes pains to identify their hair and eye color) such as Doris Day and Peggy Lee. Hayes, perhaps conveniently, does not point out that much of Vaughan’s latter-day (and deserved) success was due in part to the efforts of white management.
"Vaughan was victorious"
Even the book title, Queen of Bebop, which the author tries to explain away in the first few pages, is a misnomer. Vaughan worked side by side with bop groundbreakers such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the early days, with the bands of Earl “Fatha” Hines and Billy Eckstine. But stylistically, Vaughan was not a true bopper like her main “competitor,” Ella Fitzgerald, who could scat like a horn player. Vaughan’s considerable talents were different, in that her incredible range, beautiful tone, and advanced harmonic sense, as applied to jazz, set her apart from those who skedaddled through choruses of “How High the Moon.”
Then there are the book’s errors: Vaughan did not play the Fairmont Hotel in Philadelphia in the early 1950s, as there was no Fairmont here until 1979, when the Bellevue-Stratford briefly became a part of the Fairmont chain. Another claim, that Vaughan was told to sleep in the Fairmont basement’s kitchen quarters in lieu of a hotel room during her 1980 appearance, was, I stongly suspect, fabricated. Then, as now, I was an entertainment journalist and working musician who was very close to those who booked entertainment and set policy at the Fairmont in 1980. And one of the biggest musical errors is the author’s view that be-boppers rejected playing the blues, which is just plain wrong.
The book does offer several positives, mainly in the form of interviews conducted with the singer’s various accompanists through the decades. It also presents a comprehensive but disturbing overview of her turbulent personal and business life (though her drug use is only suggested), and some insights as to just why Vaughan may have been as difficult as she often was.
Thankfully, in the end, Vaughan was victorious. Her worldwide collaborations with symphony orchestras, recordings, and her cutting-edge embrace of Brazilian music all received much acclaim and, at long last, she finally got more than decent money.
Sarah Vaughan was a powerful black woman who won her tireless struggle in a business fraught with dishonesty and prejudice — some, but not all, of it racially motivated. It’s great that she won. It’s just that this book doesn’t really tell us how.