When store shelves fill with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and valentines are getting delivered to sweethearts, school teachers, and our veterans, I always start putting together an audio playlist for my partner. It’s a musical card; he is also making one for me.
Love and romance, of course, are key themes in music from all genres, but because I have a weakness for the saxophone and jazz vocalists, I thought I’d share some of my favorites with you. On this Black Music Sunday and Valentine’s Day eve, join me in an exploration of lyrical tunes of love and romance that might enhance your day of love—or any day of the year.
In 2021, this series featured love and Valentine’s Day offerings from Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Arthur Prysock, Nat and Natalie Cole, Miles Davis, and Ben Webster. Truthfully, I could probably write a story every day and never scratch the surface of the plethora of songs about love (and heartbreak).
From my perspective, nothing is sexier than a saxophone, so rather than opening today’s offerings with singers, let’s sit back and bask in the sheer heart and power of Houston Person’s entire 1998 album, My Romance.
Person’s website offers this bio:
Houston Person, born in Newberry, South Carolina in 1934, is the natural heir to the Boss Tenor crown worn so long and so well by Gene Ammons. In the more than twenty-five years that he has been a working bandleader, Person has taken his music to most points on the globe. A traveling Jazzman in an era that has found that particular species a veritable rara avis, Person does it all himself. He books his own tours, hunts up the new clubs, has the phone number of every major concert promoter on each continent and produces his own albums: truly the vertically integrated Jazzman.[...]
He grew up in Florence, S.C., studied at the state college there, was later named to the school’s Hall of Fame in 1999, and continued his studies at Hartt College of Music in Hartford, CT. Earlier, in the U.S. Air Force, he played with Don Ellis, Eddie Harris, Cedar Walton, and Leo Wright. Contrary to popular belief, he was never married to the late singer Etta Jones, but did spend many years as her musical partner, recording, performing and touring.
Press play on this 55-minute lovefest.
Not convinced? All Music has an eloquent review.
Everything on the album is understated, with most of the tunes delivered in a slow, deliberate tempo. There's an occasional nod to medium tempo, as on "Love Is Here to Stay." Given the very intimate nature of the session, this recording could easily have been of a live performance from a small, smoky lounge. All that's missing are the tinkling glasses in the background and the light, knowledgeable applause of jazz fans who've dropped by to enjoy an evening of good music played by top jazz musicians.
As mentioned above, Person toured for decades with Etta Jones. Let me emphasize that I do not mean Etta James, who was a decade younger and not known as jazz singer, per se. Musician Guide’s biography of James by Wendy Kagan offers more.
Jones was born on November 5, 1928, in Aiken, South Carolina, and raised in New York City. As a three year old she dreamed of becoming a singer and would pose in front of a mirror to mimic songs from the radio. Billie Holiday, whom she saw in concert, and Thelma Carpenter, were some of her earliest influences. When Jones was 15 years old, she attended Amateur Night at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem. Like jazz greats Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, her career began at the Apollo, though at first glance her debut did not seem promising. On that evening in 1943 she was so nervous that she started singing off key and lost the talent competition. Yet the pianist-bandleader Buddy Johnson recognized her ability. Johnson immediately hired her to fill in for his vocalist sister, Ella Johnson, who was leaving the band to have a baby.
In 1968 Jones formed a musical partnership that would change her career. She met Houston Person, a highly regarded tenor saxophonist, when the two performed on the same bill at a Washington, D.C., nightclub. Jones and Person immediately hit it off, and they decided to tour together as a duo with equal billing, a partnership that would last for more than three decades. "They say ... a lot of times singers and musicians don't get along too well," Jones told Billy Taylor of Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center on National Public Radio in 1998, "but we got along famously."
Person became not only Jones' collaborator but also--after 1975--her manager and record producer. Their connection was so close that some jazz aficionados have mistakenly assumed they were married, though they were not. Yet their rapport as musicians was unique, and they developed a conversational style with vocals and saxophone riffs. "[Person] knows exactly what I'm going to do," the New York Times recalls Jones saying. "He knows if I'm in trouble; he'll give me a note. He leaves me room."
Jones was nominated for three Grammy Awards during her career, and her album Don’t Go To Strangers was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008. Additionally, Jones’ Save your Love for Me album garnered another nomination in 1982.
Here’s Jones’ single by the same name.
Jones died of cancer in October 2001; her obituary in The New York Times honored her voice and vocal stylings.
She used silence, the sound of the breath, a quick yodel here and there, lyric readings that drew out or shut down syllables idiosyncratically, and a sliding pitch that made her an extraordinary blues singer. Billie Holiday was the most obvious and famous precedent for her style, and she was capable of astonishingly close Holiday impersonations, though she rarely let her audiences hear them.
But her hard-edged blues sensibility owed something to Dinah Washington, while her highly improvised phrasing came from horn players like Sonny Stitt. Ms. Jones always cited as an influence Thelma Carpenter, a onetime Count Basie vocalist who became a heavy-vibrato torch singer. Neither a shouter, a whisperer nor a bebopper, Ms. Jones clung fast to a set of jazz standards from the 1940's and 50's, and tunes by composers like Sammy Cahn, her favorite, whose songs are the subject of her 1999 album, ''All the Way.''
From one Etta to another, this seems like a perfect segue to Etta James’ classic love song, “At Last,” from the album by the same name.
Cary O’Dell shared James’ own path to the song for the Library of Congress in 2008, when “At Last” was added to the National Registry.
Etta James’s legendary 1961 recording of “At Last” was one of her first releases for the Chess/Argo recording label after beginning her career with the Modern label. The change in companies also marked a change in James’s career. She recounted in her 1995 autobiography,“Rage to Survive”:
I was no longer a teenager. I was twenty-two and sophisticated. Or at least I wanted to be sophisticated. So when Harvey [Fuqua, formerly of the Moonglows, and then James’s boyfriend] got out his “Book of One Hundred Standards” and began playing through old songs, I got excited. I saw in that music the mysterious life that my mother had led when I was a little girl, the life I secretly dreamed of living myself. I wanted to escape into a world of glamour and grace and easy sin. “At Last” was the first one to hit big.... Because of the way I phrased it, some people started calling me a jazz singer.
Interestingly, “At Last” was already a hit nearly two decades before James took it on, according to Song Facts:
The songwriting team of Mack Gordon and Harry Warren wrote this in 1941 for the film musical Sun Valley Serenade. The following year it was rearranged and re-recorded and used in the film Orchestra Wives. It was performed in both movies by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra with vocals by Ray Eberle, and the song became a major big band hit in October 1942.
Give it a listen.
You can better understand James’ comment about her mother when you read about her early beginnings.
Born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, James's start in life was not ideal. Her mother, Dorothy, gave birth at 14; her father was unknown. James has remained convinced that it was Minnesota Fats, the noted pool hustler. "My heart told me that Minnesota Fats was my father. There was also evidence to back me up. But [in the 1970s]... I didn't have the courage or means to confront him," James wrote in her autobiography.
Baby Jamesetta was placed in the care of Lulu Rogers, her landlady, when her mother proved to be an unwilling parent. James was raised in the church and sang gospel hymns in the St. Paul Baptist Church choir. She was a child prodigy, performing on Los Angeles gospel radio broadcasts by the age of five. "I'm not a braggart, but when I was a little girl people used to come from all over Hollywood to hear me sing," said James in a 2004 interview with Essence. "Here was this 5-year-old sounding like a grown woman. People were shouting all over the place."
After the death of Rogers in 1950, James went to live with relatives in San Francisco, when she was 12. According to Essence, James was "a restless womanchild, in and out of girl gangs and singing groups." When James was still a teenager, she formed a singing group called The Creolettes with two other girls. West Coast rhythm and blues titan Johnny Otis discovered James in 1954. "We were up in San Francisco," Otis recalled in Rolling Stone, "for a date at the Fillmore. That was when it was black. ... I was asleep in my hotel room when ... my manager phoned. He was in a restaurant and a little girl was bugging him: she wanted to sing for me. I told him to have her come around to the Fillmore that night. But she grabbed the phone from him and shouted that she wanted to sing for me NOW. I told her that I was in bed---and she said she was coming over anyway. Well, she showed up with two other little girls. And when I heard her, I jumped out of bed and began getting dressed. We went looking for her mother since she was a minor. I brought her to L.A., where she lived in my home like a daughter." Despite her determination to audition for Otis in his hotel room, James remarked later in Rolling Stone, "I was so bashful, I wouldn't come out of the bathroom."
Writer, educator, and activist Kenyon Farrow wrote a powerful and very provocative “political obituary” for James when she passed in January 2012.
At Last has become arguably the most popular song in the U.S. for weddings, Valentine’s Day, or other kinds of bourgeois events calling for cheap sentimentality—despite the fact that James’s powerhouse vocals and phrasing actively work against the sentimentality of the song’s arrangement, as it does in most of her work covering jazz standards during that period.
But her vocals weren’t the only place James was working decidedly against a safe “jazz singer” image. She worked in her personal life and her styling to embody the kind of black urban street culture in which she was immersing herself: “I [was] serious about turning little churchgoing Jamesetta into a tough bitch called Etta James…. I wanted to look like a great big high-yellow ho’. I wanted to be nasty.”
James ascribes the blonde-yellow hair and black eyebrows that she adopted early in her career to being closely associated with street-based sex workers and drag queens at the time. That’s who she was emulating.
It was a look James cultivated till the end.
Returning to the saxophone, in the pantheon of great tenor saxophonists Ben Webster does not always get his due, probably because he left the United States for Europe in 1964 and never returned. Whitney Balliett—jazz critic and book reviewer for The New Yorker—wrote this profile of “Big Ben” and his sound in 2001.
Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Ben Webster were the founding emperors of the jazz tenor saxophone. Hawkins more or less invented the instrument, Young reinvented it tonally and melodically (Hawkins sped through the chords, while Young floated above), and Webster developed an enormous lyrical sound and swinging directness—an easy, embracing quality—that touched you in a way that Hawkins and Young, for all their genius, rarely did. Webster had rummaged around in Hawkins's style for most of the thirties. Then, in 1940, he joined Duke Ellington and fell under the sway of the magical Johnny Hodges, who by example taught him about tone and emotion, about how to trap his listeners. When he left Ellington, in 1943, and joined Sid Catlett on Fifty-second Street, he had perfected his huge style.
It came in three speeds. He seemed to breathe rather than play his slow ballads; he'd start phrases with a whispering breath that would grow majestically into a full tone, then gradually melt back into breath—a kind of aural appearing-and-disappearing act. Webster's ballads were intimate and cajoling, but never sentimental. Everything tightened when he played the blues. The breathiness vanished, and his phrases became short and hard; he preached and badgered. His ballads insinuated, but his slow blues were in your face. Webster swung irresistibly in medium tempos. His blues moved at a run, and if he played a thirty-two-bar song he would alter the melody discreetly in the first chorus, then elbow the melody aside, replacing it with pure blocks of sound. Fast tempos sometimes got away from him. He'd coast through his first chorus and, either angry or perhaps hungover, start growling, an abrasive sound that would finally end a chorus or two later with a shuddering, out-of-my-way tremolo. But sometimes this abrasiveness worked, as in Webster's celebrated roaring solo on Ellington's "Cotton Tail." In the late forties, with Webster sailing along, jazz was struck by a cataclysm it still suffers from. Art Tatum and Charlie Parker began flooding the music with sixteenth notes and cascading, glissandolike runs and arpeggios, and they turned jazz into a baroque music. Webster became one of the last non-rococo players, a champion of quarter notes and whole notes. But the thousand-notes-a-chorus musicians who eventually surrounded him made his rich, wasteless lyricism sound monumental.
I guarantee you will fall in love with Webster’s “When I Fall in Love.” Recorded in 1958 for the album The Soul of Ben Webster, the song features Art Farmer on trumpet, Mundell Lowe on guitar, Jimmy Jones on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Dave Bailey on the drums.
To close, what could be more perfect than this melodic jazz duet between Johnny Hartman’s voice and John Coltrane’s saxophone?
Rusty Aceves wrote about the legendary pairing for SF Jazz in 2016.
Few vocal jazz albums are as beloved and revisited, or as steeped in jazz folklore, as the classic 1963 collaboration between saxophonist John Coltrane and the rich-voiced balladeer Johnny Hartman. Coming a few months after Coltrane’s lauded collaboration with Duke Ellington and before the creative zenith he would achieve the following year, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman was the only album Coltrane would make with a vocalist, and despite what on paper might seem to be a incongruous pairing of artists, stands as a uniquely harmonious and compelling partnership. Hartman himself was dubious when producer Bob Thiele approached him about working with Coltrane, but the singer attended a performance by the John Coltrane Quartet at Birdland, and was inspired to meet with the saxophonist after the last set and work out a list of songs. In his effusive liner notes, poet and author A.B. Spellman considered the album this way:
This record serves a double purpose: it brings back into the public ear one of the most neglected singers of the middle bop era and it proves in a novel-for them-way that John C. and his Thrilling Three are eloquent balladiers and very, very sensitive accompanists. I say novel for them because, to my knowledge, no singer has ever performed or recorded with the John Coltrane quartet. The quartet has been, till now, concerned with other things, with the development of a kinetic vernacular which facilitated the release of a kind of group energy that was deeper in content and fuller in emotional color than any music I have ever experienced, anywhere.
That energy even comes through in this still image of Hartman and Coltrane.
Jazz Standards provides some background detail about Johnny Hartman.
John Maurice Hartman was a critically acclaimed, though never widely known, baritone jazz singer who specialized in ballads. Born in Louisiana, but raised in Chicago, he began singing and playing the piano by age eight. Hartman attended DuSable High School studying music under Walter Dyett before receiving a scholarship to Chicago Musical College. He sang as an Army private during WWII but his first professional work came in September 1946 when he won a singing contest awarding him a one-week engagement with Earl Hines. Seeing potential in the singer, Hines hired him for the next year. Although Hartman’s first recordings were with Marl Young in February 1947, it was the collaboration with Hines that provided notable exposure. After the Hines orchestra broke up, Dizzy Gillespie invited Hartman to join his big band in 1948 during an eight-week tour in California. Dropped from the band about one year later, Hartman worked for a short time with pianist Erroll Garner before going solo by early 1950.
Hartman has always been an enigma; very little was written about him until the 2012 publication of The Last Balladeer: The Johnny Hartman Story, by Gregg Akkerman. David Kastin reviewed the biography for the Jazz Journalists Association.
Gregg Akkerman’s new biography of Johnny Hartman bears the suitably elegiac title, The Last Balladeer. But after reading the author’s litany of missed opportunities, shoddy management, poorly produced (and marketed) recordings, racial roadblocks and sheer bad timing that characterized the singer’s career, a more appropriate subtitle might have been, “The Unfulfilled Promise of Johnny Hartman.” Ultimately, however, the power of one transcendent album – his 1963 collaboration with John Coltrane – bolstered by a lifetime of brilliant singing, personal and professional integrity and the respect of his peers, not only leaves the reader with admiration for the vocalist, but eager to seek out additional recordings from his sizeable (if underappreciated) discography.
During the course of his absorbing and briskly paced narrative, Akkerman chronicles the story of Hartman’s life, while correcting a number of factual inaccuracies (many generated by the singer himself) that have crept into previous accounts of the elegant crooner. Born in 1923 in Houma, Louisiana, Johnny Hartman joined his parents and five older siblings as an infant on the Great Migration to Chicago, where his close-knit, aspirational family established itself within the city’s African-American working class community. Like so many of his peers, Hartman first exposure to singing was in the Baptist church (a congregation that included another great jazz vocalist, Dinah Washington). But unlike most singers who “crossed over” from the spiritual to secular realm, Hartman eschewed the fervent, emotionalism of gospel. “I was a cool singer even when I sang in church,” Hartman once declared. “That was just me, my style of singing.” And so it would remain.
As a Hartman fan, I highly recommend both the book and his music. But listening to Hartman, I’m compelled to add just one more tune, dear readers.
“Dedicated to You,” written by Sammy Cahn, Saul Chaplin, and Hy Zaret in 1936, has been recorded by a host of vocalists and instrumentalists over the years.
If I should write a book for you
That brought me fame and fortune too
That book would be like my heart and me
Dedicated to you
And if I should paint a picture too
That showed the loveliness of you
My art would be like my heart and me
Dedicated to you
To you
Because your love is the beacon that lights up my way
To you
Because with you I know a lifetime could be just one heavenly day
If I should find a twinkling star
One half as wondrous as you are
That star would be like my heart and me
Dedicated to you
To you
Because your love is the beacon that lights up my way
To you
Because with you I know a lifetime could be just one heavenly day
If I should find a twinkling star
One half as wondrous as you are
That star would be like my heart and me
Dedicated to you
Here’s Coltrane and Hartman’s version.
With that, I’ll wish a happy Valentine’s to you all. Join me in the comments for more “lover-ly” music from multiple genres. As always, be sure to post your favorites!