“Sarah's creative imagination is exuberant. I have
worked with Sarah Vaughan, I have accompanied her, and can vouch for the fact
that she never repeats herself or sings a song the same way twice. Whether she
is using what we call a paraphrase improvisation—an enhancement of the melody
where the melody is still recognizable—or whether she uses the harmonic changes
as the basis of the song to improvise totally new melodies or gestures, Sarah
Vaughan is always totally inventive. It is a restless compulsion to create, to
reshape, to search. For her a song—even a mediocre one—is merely a point of
departure from which she proceeds to invent, a skeleton which she proceeds to
flesh out.”— American composer, conductor, horn player, historian, educator,
publisher, and jazz musician Gunther Schuller (1925-2015), “The Divine Sarah,”
in Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (1989)
Today marks the centennial of the Newark, NJ-born jazz
singer and pianist Sarah Vaughan (1925-1990), “Sassy” or “The Divine One” to
her legion of fans. I blogged on her in this post from a decade ago, but
her artistry is such that I thought she deserved another.
In this post seven years ago from the blog“Largehearted Boy,” music historian Elaine M. Hayes discussed six songs
that shaped her biography Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan.
(The image accompanying this post is an
August 1946 photograph of Sarah Vaughan at Café Society in New York, from the
William P. Gottlieb Collection of the Library of Congress.)
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