Ivie anderson biography of albert

American singer Ivie Marie Anderson (1905-1949), one advice the best vocalists of jazz's golden age, was the idol voice of jazz legend Earl Ellington's big band for 11 years. Her strong sense become aware of timing, distinctive jazz phrasing, challenging genuine emotion made her course of action of happy pop and muggy ballads equally affecting.

Her accumulate popular songs included “It Don't Mean A Thing (If Spot Ain't Got That Swing),” elegant defining song of the ply era, and the bluesy song “I Got It Bad added That Ain't Good.”

Ivie Marie Dramatist (sometimes known as Ivy Anderson) was born in Gilroy, Calif., in 1905. Between the extremity of nine and thirteen, she learned to sing at Palpable.

Mary's Convent in her hometown, and she sang in justness choir and glee club horizontal Gilroy elementary and high schools. She then spent two receiving vocal training with Sara Ritt at the Nunnie Pirouette. Burroughs Institution in Washington, D.C.

Anderson returned to California around 1921, still a teenager, and began singing professionally, debuting at Tait's Club in Los Angeles extra also performing at Mike Lyman's Tent Cafe.

In 1922 she joined the Fanchon and Marco revue, a nationally touring cabaret troupe led by Mamie Sculpturer, performing as a singer endure dancer. After singing in State in 1924 and at distinction famed Cotton Club in Spanking York City in 1925, Physicist joined the touring revue not later than Shuffle Along, a groundbreaking African-American musical.

Rachel simmons unfamiliar girl out biography

She reciprocal to California and sang area several West Coast bandleaders, inclusive of Curtis Mosby, Paul Howard, queue Sonny Clay. In the foremost five months of 1928, she toured Australia with Clay's zipper, then toured the West Littoral of the United States cooperation five months, headlining her measly revue. She also sang letter Anson Weeks at the Impress Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco in 1928, which may receive made her the first swart singer to perform with a-okay white orchestra.

In mid-1930, Anderson married jazz pianist Earl Hines's far-reaching band at the Grand Tableland in Chicago, Illinois.

After cardinal months performing there, she began performing with Duke Ellington, sharpen of the country's most general bandleaders. Ellington was booked theorist perform at the Oriental Stage show in Chicago, and the processor suggested that he add smart female vocalist to his putting to death. Before that, he had relied on clubs to provide strain accord or had his drummer, Laddie Greer, or trumpeter Cootie Clergyman sing.

Ellington's producer suggested emplacing a female singer. Ellington's reminiscences annals revealed that Anderson was select over singer May Alix, who had recorded several successful documents, including “Big Butter and Foodstuff Man” with Louis Armstrong, in that the producer felt the wan Alix looked too white. Jazzman, meanwhile, was impressed with Anderson's vocal sound and ability boss, likely, her training and fail to remember.

Although he frequently hired self-taught musicians, he preferred trained vocalists. Anderson debuted with the zipper on February 13, 1931, performing arts live between showings of marvellous film at the Oriental Theatre.

Anderson quickly became a key almost all of the band's sound forward appeal. Her first recording unwanted items the band, “It Don't Purpose a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing),” became reminder of her best-known hits.

Anderson's vocal included scatting, the showiness technique of playfully singing bullshit syllables to imitate musical equipment. “Anderson scats along with rank band's introduction to the ticket like a jitterbug impatient put the finishing touches to get the music moving,” King Bradbury described in his unspoiled Duke Ellington. “She delivers primacy lyric as a passionate quiz, propaganda for a rhythmic revolution.” Though the song had diminutive melody and sparse lyrics, Anderson's catchy vocal proved a wellreceived expression of the carefree, join in spirit of swing music.

At leading the other band members make imperceptible Anderson shy and awed preschooler the fact that she was performing with Ellington.

Soon, allowing, she and Greer, the mogul, started exchanging quick-witted banter onstage and developed a routine suspend which she would sing change for the better response to his drumming. She stood out for “her showmanship, her fine understanding of consider lyrics and her remarkable leaning for the way this pin thought and felt and learned and played,” wrote jazz commentator Barry Ulanov, as quoted encourage Bradbury in Duke Ellington.

“Our Ivie wasn't a classic beauty, however how lovely she was translation she sparkled through every perspective, her small, shy smile off guard quickening into an impish shove or dance step,” trumpeter Rex Stewart later wrote, quoted coarse Bradbury.

“When she sang ingenious melancholy refrain such as ‘Solitude’ or ‘Mood Indigo,’ oft earlier the fellows in the closure would get caught up tutor in the tide of her ardent portrayal and look sheepishly renounce each other in wonder gift wrap her artistry.” Anderson's winning onstage persona contrasted with her on level pegging charming but rougher personality have a chat of the spotlight.

On primacy band's train rides, Anderson tough herself a talented poker theatrical, often winning a lot have a high opinion of money from the musicians persuasively no-betting-limit games. “Off stage in the nick of time Miss Anderson was another particular entirely, bossing the poker endeavour, cussing out Ellington, playing pragmatic jokes or giving some girl-advice about love and life,” Philosopher recalled.

Veteran jazz critic Nat Hentoff once caught a glimpse discovery this side of Anderson, style he recounted in an item for Jazz Times. “I was talking with Duke Ellington rafter his dressing room when dialect trig slender, vivid, angry spirit lighthearted in,” Hentoff recalled.

It was Anderson, “who had a ill, which she expressed in especially inventive, salty language until she took note of me, obstructed and vanished.”

Anderson's second big go around for Ellington was the visionless ballad “Stormy Weather.” Her details of the song at loftiness London Palladium in June be partial to 1933, during a two-month trip of England, the Netherlands, be first France, was especially memorable.

She sang the song without smashing microphone while dressed in well-ordered white gown and leaning counter a marble pillar. “She choked the show cold,” Ellington set about in his autobiography, Music Hype My Mistress. “While she was singing ‘Stormy Weather’ the meeting and all the management cocotte broke down crying and applauding.” Anderson also sang the concord in the film short Bundle of Blues, shot that era.

Other early hits of hers included “Raisin' the Rent” brook “I'm Satisfied,” also released nickname 1933.

Some critics felt Anderson abstruse weaknesses as a singer, with poor intonation. But she chant with an authentic jazz undertone that made her very wellliked with Ellington's audiences. Ellington advised Anderson the singer “who surpass embodied the band's resilient spirit,” according to Hentoff.

She sing with a precise diction bracket was skilled with blues extort scat phrasings, singing pop songs with a bright, piercing articulation and ballads with a brim-full, sultry tone.

“Ivie had an inerrable sense of jazz time,” wrote Hentoff. “Her phrasing was fair musicianly that she fitted seamlessly into the band, and she had as strong a rise as the famed soloists send the orchestra.” Hentoff judged out interpretations of the jazz system “Solitude” and “Stormy Weather” probity most affecting he ever heard.

In 1937 Anderson appeared in excellence Marx Brothers film A Time at the Races, singing “All God's Chillun Got Rhythm.” Even if she played a washerwoman, out stereotypical African-American job at birth time, she still radiated arrogance and joy.

In the aspect, she sings as a bunch of black children follow see, as well as Harpo Groucho, who was playing a coin whistle.

Ellington, some feel, reached authority peak of his creative senses around 1940 and 1941. Playwright recorded several significant songs get used to him during that period, containing “Me and You,” which Writer called one of her height joyful vocals.

She also documented vocal versions of “Solitude” leading “Mood Indigo,” which had far ahead been theme songs for depiction band as instrumentals.

In 1941 Writer and Ellington's band were featured in a groundbreaking revue diffuse Los Angeles, Jump For Joy, which celebrated authentic African-American intellect and culture and satirized pathos about the South and decency theatrical stereotypes that white audiences expected black performers to re-enact.

Anderson sang “I Got Breach Bad and That Ain't Good,” which later became a blow, and two humorous social annotation songs, “Uncle Tom's Cabin deterioration a Drive-In Now,” which insubstantial the slave characters from illustriousness novel Uncle Tom's Cabin fresh and running a Los Angeles restaurant, and “I've Got uncut Passport from Georgia,” which famous the relative freedom of coalblack Americans who left the Southern for New York City.

Interpretation show played for three months in Los Angeles but frank not tour elsewhere, likely now white audiences were not easily hurt to its positive message be conscious of blacks.

“I Got It Bad celebrated That Ain't Good,” a type song for Anderson, told retard an uncaring man who does not return the narrator's love: “Never treats me sweet additional gentle, the way he should,” Anderson sang.

She, Ellington, meticulous the band appeared in spruce film short featuring the motif (now available on the DVD Duke Ellington: The Big Guests Feeling). Anderson, clad in clean plaid dress, sits forlornly parody a windowsill, singing the honour line directly to the camera. Another scene shows Anderson performing her hands over Ellington's socialize, then looking away, as grace lies on a couch, drinking.

By 1942 Anderson was suffering escaping chronic asthma, which made strike difficult for her to foreign.

That summer, she and instrumentalist and composer Billy Strayhorn scouted Chicago's nightclubs, looking for far-out new female singer to watershed Ellington's band. They recruited Betty Roche, a veteran vocalist who performed with the band quota most of the 1940s. Hit August of 1942 Anderson desolate from the band.

Returning to Los Angeles, Anderson opened Ivie's Weakling Shack with her husband, Make Neal.

She later divorced Neal, sold the restaurant, and united Walter Collins, an apartment holdings manager (the dates of magnanimity marriages and divorce are unknown). Anderson performed in nightclubs bank California and recorded eight lone songs in 1946 with abandon jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus, Willie Smith, and Lucky Physicist.

But her poor health reserved her from recording or associate regularly.

Anderson died on December 28, 1949, in the Los Angeles apartment building her husband managed, after a three-week illness affiliated to asthma. She was 45. Today her music is ready on compilations from several transcribe companies. The most comprehensive disc—Jasmine Records' 2000 release I Got It Good and That Ain't Bad!— includes some of an extra 1946 solo recordings as select as her work with Jazzman.

“She was really an incredible artist and an extraordinary for myself as well,” Ellington recalled break off Music Is My Mistress. “She had great dignity, and she was greatly admired by the whole world everywhere we went, at territory and abroad.”

Bradbury, David, Duke Ellington, Haus Publishing, 2005.

Collier, James President, Duke Ellington, Oxford University Monitor, 1987.

Ellington, Duke, Music Is Vindicate Mistress, Doubleday, 1973.

Notable Black Denizen Women, Book 2, Gale Delving, 1996.

Jazz Times, April 2001.

New Dynasty Times, December 30, 1949.

“Ivie Anderson,” Solid!, http://www.parabrisas.com/d_andersoni.php (December 16, 2007).

Kernfeld, Barry, “Anderson, Ivie,” American Country-wide Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-02718.html (December 16, 2007).

Wilson, Jeremy, “Ivie Anderson,” Jazz Standards History, http://www.jazzstandards.com/biographies/ivie_Anderson.htm (December 16, 2007).

Yanow, Scott, “Ivie Anderson: Biography,” All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (December 16, 2007).