![]() ![]() She was regularly supported by a trio of guitar, bass (usually Ray Brown) and drums. She performed at jazz clubs in Manhattan - sometimes working with Miles Davis - and Los Angeles and her television work included NBC's Today show with David Garroway, who was a big fan, and the Tonight Show with Jack Paar. She began her solo career with Blossom Dearie (1957) and made a half-dozen Verve albums concluding with My Gentleman Friend (1961). When the impresario Norman Granz, who had met her in France, started Verve Records in 1956, Dearie returned to New York, and settled in Greenwich Village. The Blue Stars later turned into the Swingle Sisters.ĭearie remained in Paris for five years. She worked with Ross, both as a singer and pianist, and met the Belgian tenor saxophonist and flute-player Bobby Jaspar, whom she subsequently married. There she shared an apartment with the Scots jazz singer Annie Ross, and formed her eight-piece vocal group the Blue Stars, for whom Michel Legrand arranged George Shearing's Lullaby of Birdland in 1954, sung in French. She played cocktail piano and contributed an eight-bar vocal to a record by the jazz singer King Pleasure.Įarly in the 1950s, at the invitation of the French label Barclay Records, she moved from New York to Paris. She was one of the Blue Flames with Woody Herman's band, and then the Blue Reys with Alvino Rey. In the mid-1940s, with school over, she moved to New York city. Dearie once said: "I'm definitely a jazz musician, learning to be a jazz singer." Yet she worked in vocal groups from the start of her career. ![]() It was the big band era, and she was drawn to the likes of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Instead she went back to East Durham and turned to jazz. There her teacher suggested that she should enrol at Baltimore's Peabody Institute. At 10, while living in Washington DC, she was embarking on Chopin and Bach. ![]() Explaining why she took the Rodgers and Hammerstein song The Surrey with the Fringe on Top at a more relaxed tempo, Dearie pointed out that she was brought up in the country and remembered seeing horses and buggies: "I slowed the song down and made it real."ĭearie started to learn the piano at five. She was born in East Durham, New York state, roughly 150 miles from New York city, in the foothills of the Catskill mountains. Dearie, in various spellings, can be traced back in Britain to the 13th century and Dearie's father was of Irish and Scottish descent. Teddy Wilson, one of the great style-setters of jazz piano, singled her out as one of his favourites. Dearie's piano-playing was as unique as her singing. Many people who had only a passing acquaintance with her songs did not realise that the exquisitely shaded piano "accompaniment" was hers. She was a cult, a musicians' musician, but her fame spread wider through television and radio, and, moving up generations, Kylie Minogue was citing Dearie as a primary influence in 2007. Blossom Dearie, who has died aged 82, was one of the unique jazz voices of the second half of the 20th century. ![]()
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