Shirley Horn, a jazz singer and pianist who drew audiences close with a powerfully confidential, vibratoless delivery, died Friday at a nursing home in Cheverly, Maryland. She was 71.
Her death was announced by Regina Joskow, vice president of publicity at the Verve Music Group, Horn's label.
Horn was a unique singer, with one of the slowest deliveries in jazz and a very unusual way of phrasing, putting stress on certain words and letting others slip away. She cherished her repertory, making audiences feel that she was cutting through to the stark truths of songs like Here's to Life and You Won't Forget Me.
PHOTO: EPA
She wanted things just so: She stuck with her drummer, Steve Williams, for 23 years, and her bassist, Charles Ables -- who died in 2002 -- for 33.
She lived all her life in and around Washington, often performing close to home to be near her family. But over the last two decades she enjoyed a quietly expanding revival of the concert and club career she had begun in the 1950s, and she became a star in the jazz world.
When she was four, her mother had her start piano lessons. In her teens she won a scholarship to Juilliard, but it was decided that living in New York would cost the family too much money; she studied
classical music at Howard University in Washington instead.
She recalled that at 17, while she was playing classical music at a restaurant in Washington, a man appeared in front of her with a young-man-sized turquoise teddy bear. "If you sing Melancholy Baby," he said, "I'll give you this bear." She did, and he did.
At the time Horn was shy and largely focused on classical music, but she often cited this as the moment when it dawned on her that if she overcame her reluctance to sing and to play jazz in public, she might be able to make a living at it.
About her transition from classical to jazz, she liked to say: "I loved Rachmaninoff, but then Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninoff. And Ahmad Jamal became my Debussy."
From 1954, she led her own jazz trio in Washington. In 1960 she recorded her first album, Embers and Ashes, for a small label called Stere-o-Craft. It was not widely heard, but Miles Davis heard it, and a year later he tracked down her telephone number in Washington and invited her to open for him at the Village Vanguard in New York. That exposure, plus the help of the jazz agent and manager John Levy, helped get her a contract with Mercury Records.
Mercury signed Horn as a singer, not a singer-pianist. Although some of the great piano-playing accompanists, including Hank Jones and Jimmy Jones, were hired to play on her records, and although Loads of Love, from 1962, showcased her voice well -- she could sound like a quieter, subtler version of Dinah Washington -- the situation made her uncomfortable.
By the mid-1960s she had stopped touring and decided to restrict her
performing to the Washington and Baltimore areas so she could spend more time at home raising her daughter, Rainy. From 1963 to 1978 she made only two records -- Travelin' Light for ABC-Paramount and Where Are You Going? for Perception. From 1978 to 1984, she recorded for the Danish label Steeplechase and slowly came back into the awareness of jazz fans.
In 1982, she played her first New York performance in more than 15 years, at Michael's Pub, and in 1986 she was signed by Verve. The company built up her career all over again over the course of 11 albums, including You Won't Forget Me (1990), which featured guest appearances by Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis, I Remember Miles (1998), which won a Grammy Award, and a few that featured string sections.
Horn's survivors include her husband, Sheppard Deering, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, her daughter, Rainy Smith, of Maryland and several grandchildren.
Horn had been fighting breast cancer for some time when complications of diabetes led to the amputation of her right foot in 2002. For a few years she performed sitting in a chair and facing the audience directly, away from the piano, which was played by George Mesterhazy.
But in her final performances in New York, a two-week stretch at Le Jazz Au Bar that started last Dec. 30, she was back at the piano again, with the help of a prosthetic device that helped her to use the instrument's sustain pedal.
Three of those performances will be released this month on a Verve anthology of her work, But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn.
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