When I write vintage jazz music, a few of you might wonder how I decide on the subject. Sometimes, like last month, it is a big name that is only waiting on me to take the time to 1) do the necessary research and 2) decide upon some good performances to showcase. Other times, it is pure serendipity. Like today. And here is how it happened.

A couple of weeks ago, Marianne and I watched an old movie. It was a 1941 film called Blues In The Night. An odd mashup of musical and film noir, it is about a small band trying to make it playing good jazz. It was also the place where the famous title song made its debut. The music, all by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, included another, less celebrated song that has had a long life – This Time The Dream’s On Me.

This second song (performed here in the film by Priscilla Lane) tugged at my memory, and I recalled a version on June Christy’s defining 1954 album, Something Cool. (1) June’s version was quite short, and I became curious about who else had kept the song alive. It turns out that it got some traction early on with both the Glenn Miller and the Woody Herman bands (in very different treatments) right after the movie was released. The pioneering bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker gave the song a second wind when he incorporated it into his repertoire in the late 1940’s.

So, at that point, I had decided to feature that song and noodled through some other versions. It was purely by chance (and by the Tube of You’s algorithm) that I stumbled upon this sublime rendition by Annie Ross and Gerry Mulligan. At first, I could not place Annie Ross. But I (and devoted readers here) know Gerry Mulligan. One listening lead to another (and another), and I decided that Annie was enough of a topic that she could elbow my new (and temporarily) favorite song aside.

So, who was Annie Ross? She was born Annabelle Short to a family of Scottish vaudevillians on July 25, 1930. Her family came to America for a short time in the 1930’s, giving young Annabelle the chance to enter (and win) a radio contest run by bandleader Paul Whiteman. The prize was a contract with MGM, which led to her living in Los Angeles with an aunt in show business (Ella Logan), while the family returned to Scotland. Young Annabelle got a couple of movie roles, including a 1938 performance with Our Gang when she was age 7. Her swinging-kid version of Loch Lomond can be seen here. And at 14 (as Annabel Logan) she won a songwriting contest for Let’s Fly, which was later recorded by Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers (here).

Halfway through high school she headed back for Europe, where she began a professional singing career. But then she was back on the west coast in 1952, when she plugged into the local jazz scene. She met the head of the small Prestige record label, who asked if she could write lyrics. After her “yes”, she was handed a stack of the company’s records to see if she could come up with words for any of them. The next morning she came back and sang the Wardell Gray composition Twisted, which was good for an immediate recording session – her first.

Twisted was an early version of something called “vocalese”, in which lyrics are added to an instrumental jazz piece. (For those wanting a really deep dive today, here is the tenor saxophonist Gray’s original version of the song.) Ross’ lyrics for Twisted were quite clever, and her performance earned her Downbeat Magazine’s New Star award for the year – something she did not learn of until later because she had been asked to travel back to Europe for a tour there with the Lionel Hampton band. Twisted has been covered a few times, notably by Joni Mitchell in the mid 1970’s.

In 1957 she was introduced to a pair of singer-lyricists, Dave Lambert and his friend, Jon Hendricks. The two were working on a project that would put vocals to some Count Basie instrumentals. In an interview later in life (2), Ross remembered that the professional singers hired for the date simply didn’t (and couldn’t) swing. At the last minute, Lambert and Hendricks tried multi-tracking Annie and themselves doing the various vocal parts, which brought the whole thing together. That album, their first of five, was released in 1958 as Sing A Song of Basie, under the group which was soon named Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.

LH&R won wide recognition and won the Readers Poll in Downbeat Magazine four years in a row, starting in 1959. They popularized vocalese singing and paved the way for later popular groups like The Manhattan Transfer. I usually prefer studio performances to live ones because the careful sound engineering usually does a better job of showing off the music. Here, however, I will share a televised performance of Horace Silver’s Doodlin’. This is a clip from a 1959 or 1960 episode (3) of Hugh Hefner’s syndicated program, Playboy’s Penthouse – from a time when Playboy could make people think of jazz and cocktail parties instead of fat middle aged men staring luridly at girlie magazines. Silver’s instrumental version is here, for the curious.

Sadly, Annie Ross followed many other jazz musicians of her era in becoming addicted to heroin. She left LH&R in 1962 following a performance in London. She stayed there, got clean, got married, and opened a jazz club. She later worked her way into British cinema and had a regular series of small parts in film and television into the 1990’s in both England and the U.S. She became a U.S. citizen in 2001 and spent several of her last years as a cabaret singer in New York. She died there on July 21, 2020, just four days shy of age of 90.

After this quick trot through her life and career, it is fitting that we come back to where I started with Annie – the 1959 album with Gerry Mulligan. What might be my favorite track of the whole (and most excellent) album is How About You. Older readers might associate the tune with Frank Sinatra’s 1950’s association with Nelson Riddle, and those younger will probably think of the Will Ferrell holiday movie Elf.

Ross said that she never enjoyed singing before a big band because it was too confining. This recording shows how adroitly she could riff with a small number of top jazz musicians. A treat on the album is the appearance of Chet Baker on trumpet, several years after his time with Mulligan in their quartet of the early 1950’s. Baker and Mulligan had an eerie ability to predict where the other was going musically and adding Ross to that mix only makes it better.

Annie Ross is one of those old jazz performers who lives in the borderlands between fame and obscurity. She lived a hard life with substance abuse and financial instability for many years, but eventually became recognized (at least in her New York musical circle) for the living legend she was. I am so glad to have discovered her and spent some time listening. And I am also glad to be able to share my discovery with all of you. She left a lot for us to enjoy.

(1) The song was not on original 1954 version of the album, which was released in the short-lived 10-inch L.P. disc format. A year later the album was re-issued as a 12-inch disc with four additional songs, including this one.

(2) Annie Ross’ recorded interview with Monk Rowe, January 13, 2001, which can be viewed here.

(3) Other guests on this episode included singer Tony Bennett and the great Count Basie, who plays the piano behind LH&R’s numbers.