Sarah Vaughan

By 1950 Sarah Vaughan had already been through the Billy Eckstine Band and the bebop years, had already sat in at sessions with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and had already developed the harmonic sense and the physical instrument that would make her career. What the Columbia recordings did was introduce that instrument to the wider public, and the introduction was startling.

The range alone was something: a three-octave voice that moved between registers without effort, the lower tones as rich as a contralto, the upper register clear and controlled rather than strained. But what separated Vaughan from other technically gifted singers was the way she used that range as a musical resource rather than a demonstration of power. She treated the melody as a starting point, stretching syllables and repositioning phrase endings in ways that any jazz improviser would recognize as improvisation, even if the voice was not technically a horn.

Jimmy Jones was her ideal accompanist at this period, attentive and harmonically sophisticated, never getting in the way. The orchestrations are professional and unobtrusive. Everything is arranged to make the voice as audible as possible, which turns out to be all the arrangement these recordings need.

The follow-up Columbia collection deepens the case made by the first. By 1952 she had settled into the specific qualities that would define her throughout the decade: the enormous voice used with absolute control, the wide vibrato that was either beloved or criticized depending on the listener, and an interpretive intelligence that treated the popular song as a vehicle for something closer to improvisation than performance.

The bebop years had given her harmonic knowledge that most singers simply didn't have. She understood the structure of the chord changes well enough to place syllables and phrase endings in unexpected positions without sounding arbitrary. It always sounded intentional, always musical, and always unmistakably her. You could pick a Vaughan recording out of a mixed program in the first two notes of the first phrase, which is a rarer quality than it sounds.

The accompaniment is restrained and professional throughout. Jimmy Jones was still her accompanist, and his sensitivity to where she wanted to go harmonically was a significant part of what made these recordings work. He never anticipated her or tried to steer her; he followed and added, which was exactly the right approach for a vocalist this confident about her own direction.

By 1954 Vaughan had moved to Mercury and its jazz subsidiary EmArcy, and the EmArcy recordings showed what could happen when a label stopped thinking of her as a pop act and started thinking of her as a jazz artist. Images was an orchestral date that showcased the operatic dimensions of her voice: the sustained tones, the wide range deployed without caution, the ability to fill a large acoustic space without straining anything.

Hal Mooney's arrangements are lush without being cloying. He gave the voice room to move and arranged the orchestra to support rather than compete. The result is a record that sounds bigger than most vocal jazz of the period, which is appropriate because the voice at its center was bigger than most vocal jazz of the period. When Vaughan holds a note at the top of her range and the strings swell beneath it, the effect is genuinely cinematic.

Less bebop-inflected than the best of her EmArcy small-group work, but a necessary record in the catalog: it demonstrated that the voice worked at every scale, in every setting, against any kind of musical context. She could not be overwhelmed. The orchestra could only frame her.

Clifford Brown was twenty-three years old and had been recording for two years when this session took place in December 1954. He was already playing with a completeness that nobody had heard from a trumpet since before he came along: a warmth and lyricism that didn't sacrifice any of the speed or harmonic sophistication the bebop era demanded. He died in a car accident in June 1956. This album is among the most compelling evidence of what was lost.

The pairing with Vaughan was more than a commercial idea. Both of them shared a fundamental quality: they sang, whether or not they were using their voices. Brown's trumpet had a vocal quality that matched Vaughan's improvisational approach, and when the two of them play through the same changes they sound like a single musical mind working from two different angles. Paul Quinichette's tenor adds warmth to the front line; Jimmy Jones, who had been Vaughan's accompanist for years, was essential as always; Roy Haynes played with a lightness exactly right for the material.

There is a specific quality in Vaughan's singing on this record that she didn't always allow herself elsewhere: a restraint, a willingness to let Brown lead and match his tone rather than dominate it. The best tracks feel like a conversation between equals. That she was capable of playing that role, with that voice, on any given night, was the full measure of her musicianship.

The hi-fi boom of the mid-1950s gave record labels a marketing hook and gave listeners a reason to upgrade their equipment: high-fidelity recordings that demonstrated what a good turntable could actually do. Jazz vocalists were ideal for this purpose because the voice was familiar enough to serve as a reference point and demanding enough to expose the limitations of lesser equipment. EmArcy understood that Sarah Vaughan's voice in particular was a hi-fi showcase, because it contained more sonic information than almost anyone else's.

Hal Mooney's arrangements are brassy and full, designed to give the voice a context that matches its scale. Vaughan was not going to be muffled by an orchestra the way a lesser singer might be; if anything, the competition seemed to clarify her priorities. She comes in on top every time, not by forcing anything, but by knowing exactly where to place each phrase within the orchestral texture. The big arrangements actually illuminate something about her control that the smaller group dates keep more subtle: the ability to adjust her volume and tone instantaneously, to sit inside a brass chord or ride above it at will.

Not the most personal date in her catalog, but probably the most spectacular. This is the record to put on when someone asks what all the fuss was about.

The Mercury pop side of her work in 1955, the recordings designed for commercial radio play rather than the jazz audience. Vaughan maintained a dual recording life throughout this period: the EmArcy jazz dates on one hand and the Mercury pop dates on the other. The division was partly commercial and partly artistic, a recognition that her voice worked in multiple registers of the music industry, not just in the one that jazz critics cared about.

The material here is more accessible than the Clifford Brown session, the arrangements smoother, the tempos more considerate of a listener who might not be sitting down to concentrate. But Vaughan's interpretations are never merely polished. She finds something worth saying in even the thinner songs, some phrase or vowel or sustained note that elevates the material above what a less imaginative singer would do with the same notes. The vibrato is more pronounced on the slower ballads than on the jazz dates, deployed with the kind of calculation that looks effortless.

A useful document of the range she covered in a single period, and a reminder that the categories of jazz and pop that critics used to organize the music mattered considerably less to her than they did to the critics.

The nickname stuck because it was accurate. There was always something in Vaughan's delivery that had an edge underneath the beauty, a consciousness of exactly what she was doing and a refusal to be modest about it. She had been called Sassy since her earliest years in the music and she wore it as a description of craft rather than temperament: the confidence of someone who had worked out exactly what her voice could do and was going to use all of it.

This orchestral EmArcy session is where that quality comes through most fully. Hal Mooney's arrangements provide a backdrop that could go anywhere she wanted, and she wanted to go everywhere. The bebop vocabulary is closer to the surface here than on the Columbia pop dates, the improvisation more audible, the connection to what Gillespie and Parker had done with the standard repertoire most direct. She treats pitch as something to approach from below or above rather than land on precisely, treats rhythm as something to play with rather than submit to, treats the lyrics as a source of melodic material rather than a script to be delivered.

The quartet format strips away everything that could obscure what she was doing technically, and what she was doing technically is as close to pure jazz improvisation as any vocalist has ever come. The voice is extraordinary. The musicianship behind it is more extraordinary still.