A Style and An Era Recede With Her Passing
Ernestine Anderson died in Seattle on March 10 at 87. The Houston native got an early start singing in church before crossing the chalk line that divides the sacred and secular to enter a talent contest at the El Dorado Ballroom. She was only twelve at the time, but her first-place finish landed her a regular weekly gig at what was billed as the city’s “Finest Dance Palace.”
A couple of years later, when her family relocated to the West Coast, her precociousness was of paramount concern in the matter of where they would reside. As the Seattle Times obituary by Paul DeBarros reports, “Afraid that his daughter’s grades were slipping and that the jazz life was fraught with temptation, he chose Seattle because a family friend told him it was a sleepy town with no nightlife.” But of course every locale’s got its bright lights, and by the time she entered Garfield High School, Ernestine was singing in the city’s Jackson Street nightclubs.
Like Dinah Washington and Etta Jones, and to a lesser degree Ruth Brown and Esther Phillips, Ernestine transcended the stylistic boundaries separating jazz, blues, gospel, and pop. She was exceptionally gifted in her ability to sing sophisticated standards, negotiate bebop changes, and preach the down home blues. On tunes like “One Mint Julip,” “Nightlife,” “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” and “Never Make Your Move Too Soon,” she improvised bold and sassy story lines off the material, and did it all with a vocal timbre that her Seattle friend Quincy Jones called “honey at dusk.” Of her background, she told Leonard Feather, “When I was growing up, I was into Dizzy and Bird, but my parents loved the blues, so I heard Dinah Washington and B.B. King, and before I left Houston, a lot of country too.”
Anderson sang with the bandleaders Johnny Otis and Russell Jacquet in the forties, and was only 19 when she recorded the bebop blues, “Good Lovin’ Baby,” with Shifty Henry in Los Angeles in 1947.
In 1953, she toured with Lionel Hampton’s legendary band that included Jones, as well as Clifford Brown, Art Farmer, Gigi Gryce, and Benny Golson. Through that association, she recorded the first vocal version of the lyric that Jon Hendricks wrote for Gryce’s “Social Call.” Notwithstanding the esteem she was held in by musicians, Ernestine had mostly frustration to show for her efforts around New York in the mid-fifties, so she relocated to Sweden at the invitation of trumpeter Rolf Ericson. That sojourn coincided with her winning Down Beat’s New Star award in 1958 when she was 29. Ernestine returned to the States the following year after signing with Mercury Records, but she enjoyed little success with the five albums she recorded for them, even though, as a 2015 release on High Note Records reveals, she was in excellent form Swinging the Penthouse in Seattle in 1961.
Rock’n’roll laid waste to singers like Anderson, who shelved her pipes and spent the better part of ten years working as a domestic and switch board operator between London, Stockholm, and Los Angeles. When she came home to Seattle in the early seventies, a local jazz critic, Maggie Hawthorn, persuaded her to begin performing again. It wasn’t long before Concord Jazz came knocking, and in 1976 she recorded her label debut, Hello, Like Before, accompanied by Hank Jones and Ray Brown. Concord got her back on track as a recording artist, and she went on to release about 15 no-frills albums for the late Carl Jefferson’s reliably mainstream label.
Anderson was in peak form in the eighties, and among my personal favorites from the period is her blues-drenched opus, When the Sun Goes Down, which features Brown, pianist Gene Harris, and saxophonist Red Holloway. Recorded in 1984, and quite possibly the first new release that arrived at WFCR after the inception of Jazz à la Mode, it includes the classics “Goin’ to Chicago” and Leroy Carr’s “In the Evening,” and the newly-minted blues gems, “Someone Else Is Steppin’ In,” and “Down Home Blues.” (Here she sings “In the Evening” with Milt Jackson, Monty Alexander, Niels Henning-Orsted Pedersen, and Ed Thigpen.)
Speaking of blues, Anderson made her first recording of B.B. King’s “Never Make Your Move Too Soon,” in 1980. It earned her the first of her four Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, and it remained a show-stopper for the rest of her career. Here she sings it, complete with an improvised narrative of seriously signifyin’ proportions. She’s backed by the hard-swinging Frank Capp-Nat Pierce Juggernaut featuring Red Holloway on tenor. It doesn’t get more soulful than this.
Ma Rainey’s classic blues “See See Rider” was the first tune Ernestine recorded with Johnny Otis. She’d paid a lot of dues between then and this 1984 reunion with Otis, so no wonder it’s full of the kind of down-home joy that makes lines like “I’m gonna get me a pistol/Just as long as I am tall,” ring with affirmation. Ernestine was the first of the great ladies to sing with Otis. Little Esther, Big Mama Thornton, Sugar Pie Desanto, Etta James, Margie Evans, Linda Hopkins, and Barbara Morrison followed, but it was in Ernestine that he said he heard “pure jazz and blues.”
Here, in contrast with that big, adoring crowd at Monterey, Ernestine sings a masterful take on “Summertime” with the great vibes master Milt Jackson and the Benkó Dixieland Band in a rehearsal room in Hungary. It was filmed in 1993.
When she signed with Quincy Jones’s Qwest label in the early ’90s, Anderson recorded Stix Hooper’s arrangement of Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” She dedicated it to Dizzy on the album Then and Now, and did so when she sang the bebop classic in concert. She does so here with pianist (and South Hadley, MA native) Allen Farnham.
Lastly, here’s a wonderful novelty from 1967, Ernestine singing the Bobby Timmons soul jazz classic “Moanin’,” with the South African-born organist Cherry Wainer and drummer Don Storer.
It’s tempting, almost to the point of cliche, to declare something grandiose whenever a great artist passes on, but in Ernestine’s case, I’m afraid that a style and an era are truly passing with her.
Ernestine Anderson, 11/11/28-3/10/16, R.I.P.