Wasn't She Rich
by Jeff Weinstein
FEBRUARY 10, 2009 TAGS:
She did “Send in the Clowns” exactly the way Stephen Sondheim, its composer, said it shouldn’t be done.
“Isn’t it riiiiiiiich, isn’t it queeeeeeeer...”
He wanted those target words spoken, almost clipped, but she drew the vowels out as if pulling errant threads from a sweater, and at the end she left the hearts of those who heard her scattered all over the supper-club floor.
Singer Blossom Dearie died February 7, 2009 in her home in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood she personified for the whole last half of the last century. When Jules Feiffer’s beatnik sprite in black leotard and ballet slippers danced her springtime dance, it was to Dearie’s voice, most likely to her own sarcastic confection, “I’m Hip”:
I dig
I'm in step
When it was hip to be hep, I was hep
I don't blow but I'm a fan
Look at me swing
Ring a ding ding
Marguerite Blossom Dearie was born April 29, 1926, in a small town near Albany, New York, studied classical piano, then went to the Big Apple to sing with a group called the Blue Flames, part of the Woody Herman band. Like so many American jazz musicians, she moved to postwar Paris. But soon Dearie married a musician, met the owner of Verve Records and started recording. She went back home and became successful performing in cabarets and on early TV talk shows -- hosted by Jack Paar, Dave Garroway, and Merv Griffin. But she never became an Eisenhower, or even Kennedy, household name.
It’s a truism to say that a particular artist’s voice is “unique.” In opera, a mélange of skill, training, and style will inform a voice’s recognizable identity, so you can tell Callas from Tebaldi from Sutherland the moment you hear them negotiate the same aria (you certainly knew who they were when you saw them). So when weighing the loss of Blossom Dearie it’s not immediately valuable to say she had a voice like no other. Bobby Short, Jimmy Scott, Annie Ross -- with whom Dearie roomed and worked in Paris -- all have or had “their own” voices. But Dearie’s voice, girly, breathless, tentative, is her own twice. No one else would dare try to sing with it the way she did.
It’s tempting to say her voice is a cross between Betty Boop’s and … whose? One writer said Chet Baker’s, which is perfect. She was cute, femme cotton candy drizzled with a contradictory syrup of opium and Bleecker Street espresso. Watch out for sweetness, every line warns, there’s a knife behind it.
Yet her heart was on every listener’s sleeve. She sat at her keyboard -- the piano bench was her home -- and made the standards hers, articulating lyrics with a pedantic exactitude no one I know can match. When Dearie stood up, she wound herself around the mike like a vine. A superbly modern singer, she understood the attraction of a song’s primitive emotion, but kept a knowing distance. That was her genius. Sincerity was never in question, but the sweet pleasure of her artistry always trumped the content.
Lucky for us, it still does.
“Isn’t it riiiiiiiich, isn’t it queeeeeeeer...”
He wanted those target words spoken, almost clipped, but she drew the vowels out as if pulling errant threads from a sweater, and at the end she left the hearts of those who heard her scattered all over the supper-club floor.
Singer Blossom Dearie died February 7, 2009 in her home in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood she personified for the whole last half of the last century. When Jules Feiffer’s beatnik sprite in black leotard and ballet slippers danced her springtime dance, it was to Dearie’s voice, most likely to her own sarcastic confection, “I’m Hip”:
I dig
I'm in step
When it was hip to be hep, I was hep
I don't blow but I'm a fan
Look at me swing
Ring a ding ding
Marguerite Blossom Dearie was born April 29, 1926, in a small town near Albany, New York, studied classical piano, then went to the Big Apple to sing with a group called the Blue Flames, part of the Woody Herman band. Like so many American jazz musicians, she moved to postwar Paris. But soon Dearie married a musician, met the owner of Verve Records and started recording. She went back home and became successful performing in cabarets and on early TV talk shows -- hosted by Jack Paar, Dave Garroway, and Merv Griffin. But she never became an Eisenhower, or even Kennedy, household name.
It’s a truism to say that a particular artist’s voice is “unique.” In opera, a mélange of skill, training, and style will inform a voice’s recognizable identity, so you can tell Callas from Tebaldi from Sutherland the moment you hear them negotiate the same aria (you certainly knew who they were when you saw them). So when weighing the loss of Blossom Dearie it’s not immediately valuable to say she had a voice like no other. Bobby Short, Jimmy Scott, Annie Ross -- with whom Dearie roomed and worked in Paris -- all have or had “their own” voices. But Dearie’s voice, girly, breathless, tentative, is her own twice. No one else would dare try to sing with it the way she did.
It’s tempting to say her voice is a cross between Betty Boop’s and … whose? One writer said Chet Baker’s, which is perfect. She was cute, femme cotton candy drizzled with a contradictory syrup of opium and Bleecker Street espresso. Watch out for sweetness, every line warns, there’s a knife behind it.
Yet her heart was on every listener’s sleeve. She sat at her keyboard -- the piano bench was her home -- and made the standards hers, articulating lyrics with a pedantic exactitude no one I know can match. When Dearie stood up, she wound herself around the mike like a vine. A superbly modern singer, she understood the attraction of a song’s primitive emotion, but kept a knowing distance. That was her genius. Sincerity was never in question, but the sweet pleasure of her artistry always trumped the content.
Lucky for us, it still does.
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