Sarah Vaughan, circa 1945. Credit Metronome/Getty Images
By JAMES GAVINJULY
july 20, 2017
QUEEN OF BEBOP
The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan
By Elaine M. Hayes
Illustrated. 419 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
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.
read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/books/review/queen-of-bebop-sarah-vaughan-biography-elaine-m-hayes-.html
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