In August 1970, Vaughan opened at PJ’s on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. She seemed uncomfortable and uptight as she began her usual set. The club was unbearably hot, with harsh, unflattering lighting. The sound system didn’t work, and, adding insult to injury, it was a sparse crowd. Vaughan did her best to work the room. While singing “Lover Man” she joked about the heat, replacing the opening lyric “I don’t know why, but I’m feeling so sad” with “I don’t know why, but I’m feeling so hot.” The joke fell flat. When the substandard PA system became more than she could bear, she dropped her mic onto the floor and pretended to stomp on it. And she tolerated the chatter of patrons, clinking of glasses, and the clang of the off-key cash register until a waitress walked in front of the stage, mid-song, to serve drinks. Vaughan stopped singing, looked around, and reassessed. She sat down, dangled her legs over the bandstand, and asked for requests. An exquisite reading of “Tenderly” followed.
During the 1960s, PJ’s had been a fashionable jazz club frequented by celebrities. By 1970, it was in transition, shedding its jazz roots in favor of a more youthful rock ’n’ roll format. As the 1970s progressed, the club, now renamed the Stanwood, would become an incubator for Los Angeles’s burgeoning rock scene and a proving ground for bands like Van Halen and Mötley Crüe. That night, however, Vaughan opened for a five-piece Filipino rock band called the Jade.
It was a difficult evening for critic and longtime Vaughan advocate Leonard Feather to watch. “Miss Vaughan still owns the most sumptuous voice ever to emanate from a female larynx,” he wrote in his review for Melody Maker. For him, her reception at PJ’s was an affront to both Vaughan and jazz fans.1 But it was a sign of the times. The music industry was changing, and despite the protestations of critics and its biggest fans, jazz continued to lose ground as its popularity waned. In the mid-1950s when rock ’n’ roll first emerged on the scene, most in the industry did not take it seriously. The songs of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard were considered frivolous rubbish that appealed to teenagers. Jazz, on the other hand, was thoughtful, adult music, and few doubted its superiority or its future. But during the 1960s rock ’n’ roll overpowered the industry. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones burst on the scene in 1964 during the so-called British invasion. Artists like guitarist Jimi Hendrix infused rock with brilliant virtuosic improvisations previously found only in jazz. Bob Dylan went electric in 1965, modernizing the tough, often moralizing folk music aesthetic. And Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and many of their contemporaries were skilled songwriters who captured the social, political, and cultural ethos of the 1960s—one defined by a youth culture with an antiestablishment and counterculture bent. During the 1960s rock matured, becoming a more sophisticated, adventurous, and serious form of creative expression. While it still appealed primarily to young audiences, rock began to interest more and more adults.2 Critics began taking rock ’n’ roll more seriously too.
“The Beatles were just part of what changed jazz in the sixties. Pop-rock, in general, soaked up so much of the cultural atmosphere that it changed everything,” explained producer Jack Tracy. He produced Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and other jazz artists while working at Mercury in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “Radio stations changed their formats from a mix of different types of music to just rock. But chasing after hot singles was perilous. When Chubby Checker’s ‘Twist’ hit in 1960, record companies spent millions of dollars trying to find artists to record it. But by the time those records came out, the Twist was already passé.” As record companies devoted their substantial promotion budgets to searching for the next rock hit, there was, of course, little money left for producing and promoting other talent, including jazz musicians, and Vaughan experienced this firsthand during her final years at Mercury. Labels reassigned their most skilled jazz producers to their rock division, where most floundered, and paired their rock producers with jazz artists, in an attempt to revitalize sales. Over time, there were fewer and fewer producers who specialized in and understood jazz. “I think jazz lost its market when it lost the support of radio,” Tracy continued. “Before the Beatles, we had no problems getting jazz played on stations. Not the far-out stuff by artists like Ornette Coleman, of course, but Gerry Mulligan, Quincy Jones, and Dave Brubeck. The Beatles’ arrival was a huge game changer. By the mid-sixties, it was almost mandatory for jazz artists to record Beatles songs. But most of their efforts were hopeless.”3
Count Basie released Basie’s Beatle Bag in 1966. Ella Fitzgerald recorded contemporary pop and incorporated the latest hits into her live sets. And during her post–Quincy Jones sessions at Mercury, Vaughan recorded Pop Artistry of Sarah Vaughan and The New Scene; both included covers of Beatles songs and other pop-rock hits, all in a desperate attempt to remain current, to chase the latest fads. But the performances too often fell flat and did not satisfy, not because artists executed the material poorly but because their interpretations seemed irrelevant and out of place. The industry had shifted its focus to the emerging singer-songwriter model. Tunes became indelibly linked to a single artist, and rock musicians didn’t need an outsider to cover their songs, to create new interpretations that added nuance and depth, one of the core principles of jazz. They had already created their own singular, iconic performances, defined not only by their signature sound, but also by their image and brand. In response, many jazz musicians tried to modernize their images. Dizzy Gillespie grew sideburns, and Vaughan experimented with short skirts and go-go boots in 1969 while touring Europe. But by now Vaughan and her bebop contemporaries were now in their forties and fifties. Swing icon Duke Ellington was approaching seventy, as was Louis Armstrong, considered by many the father of jazz. After decades of perfecting their craft, of changing the course of American music, none of them were particularly hip or cool anymore.4
And jazz itself was rapidly changing as new, competing factions emerged and coexisted, all struggling to find viable audiences in a shrinking cultural space. The modernist beboppers of the 1940s inspired a cohort of hard bop musicians in the mid-1950s. Miles Davis, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Nina Simone, and others extended the language of bebop by reincorporating elements of blues, gospel, and rhythm and blues into their music. In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Miles Davis and John Coltrane introduced modal jazz, which used musical modes—alternative, often unusual-sounding scales—to create their harmonic frameworks rather than more typical chord progressions. At the same time, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, later joined by Coltrane, verged toward the avant-garde with free jazz, a style that abandoned fixed harmonic and rhythmic foundations in favor of collective free improvisation. And in 1967, Coltrane, who had emerged as the popular and charismatic face of jazz’s avant-garde movement, died at the age of forty. As the 1960s came to a close, jazz was not only in decline; it was in crisis.5
A younger generation of jazz musicians, those born in the 1940s, some fifteen to twenty years after Vaughan, however, searched for ways to maintain jazz’s core values while making it more commercially viable. These musicians, who came of age at the same time as rock ’n’ roll, formed bands that more closely resembled rock bands. Electric basses, guitars, and keyboards replaced their acoustic counterparts, and these new bands focused on a collective sound rather than the loose spontaneous interactions between soloists and a rhythm section that defined modern, bebop-based jazz combos. They moved away from swing, a lilting pattern of eighth notes, in favor of a backbeat, steady, pounding, very danceable eighth notes in straight time, like rock ’n’ roll. While older jazz musicians struggled to keep up with advances in recording technology that defined so many new rock ’n’ roll releases, preferring instead a more transparent approach to studio recording, younger jazz musicians embraced recording technology and electronic music. But instead of drawing inspiration solely from rock ’n’ roll, they turned to the chromaticism and layered, independent rhythmic lines of funk and soul. These elements added a harmonic complexity and rhythmic sophistication not found in rock ’n’ roll while creating a robust foundation for improvisation. Veteran Miles Davis reinvented his sound again and released the groundbreaking, and first commercially successful, fusion album Bitches Brew. Alumni of his band, which included the likes of Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and John McLaughlin, developed the idiom further, founding their own bands and achieving crossover successes throughout the 1970s. The new music was called jazz rock, then jazz fusion, and eventually simply fusion.6
Though Vaughan did not reinvent herself or embrace electronic music, she did mentor the next generation of jazz musicians, several of whom became major voices in these new, more commercial styles. She nurtured them along, showing them the ropes and encouraging their musical exploration, just like the guys in the Hines and Eckstine bands did for her decades earlier. After his four-year tenure as Vaughan’s musical director, pianist Bob James did studio work, produced records, and continued to tour. He soon became one of the founding musicians of what became known as smooth jazz, a more mainstream, commercially savvy outgrowth of fusion. Pianist Chick Corea, then twenty-seven and still establishing himself, replaced James in 1968 and briefly toured with Vaughan before joining Miles Davis. After the successes of his collaborations with Davis, Corea founded his own fusion band, Return to Forever, and experienced more crossover successes throughout the 1970s. When Corea joined Vaughan’s band, he was already bristling at the formalities and conventions of traditional jazz. Bassist Mickman, who became the trio’s musical director after James left, remembered that Corea wore sneakers with his tuxedo. One night Corea put incense inside the piano. “The piano was open and smoke is coming out of the piano, and we start playing,” Mickman recalled. “Sarah comes out and after the first tune she turns around, she smells it; she said, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ because the piano’s smoking.” And musically, Corea wanted to explore beyond Vaughan’s existing arrangements, prepared by James, to craft new, more experimental introductions for the standards Vaughan sang. One night, Vaughan didn’t recognize the tune and sang another tune in the same key. “He would also throw challenges out to her,” Mickman explained. “He would play some things and I think she actually liked them. He would throw an unusual chord out to her and she would catch it. She had such a good ear.”7 “The first time I heard her live, Chick Corea was playing piano,” bassist Bob Magnusson said. He was twenty-one and wouldn’t join Vaughan’s trio for another three years. “And he played some really far-out intros and she would just nail it. She didn’t care.”8
“I felt like I was playing, let’s say, with Miles Davis,” said pianist Jan Hammer. “It was basically [a] pure jazz attitude.” He joined the band in 1970 when he was twenty-two and still a student at the Berklee College of Music. He’d listened to jazz while growing up in Czechoslovakia. His mother was a jazz singer too, and he accompanied her as a teenager. This prepared him for his first gig with the band at the Hampton Jazz Festival in Virginia. It was in a big coliseum. There was no real rehearsal, only a sound check. “I had to just jump into the cold water, and it worked out fine,” said Hammer. “On a personal level, which was really what moved me very much, I spent my teenage years living in Europe, then eventually moving here, but being on the outside looking through the glass [at] what’s going on with the big leagues. I really felt that once I joined Sarah that I actually made it into the next level and they let me into their club,” he explained. “It was just fantastic and meeting all her great friends.” He met pianist Erroll Garner and vibraphonist Milt Jackson. Duke Ellington introduced himself to Hammer after a gig and complemented him on his playing. In the summer of 1970, a few months into his tenure, drummer Jimmy Cobb, who played on Miles Davis’s now-classic album Kind of Blue, joined Vaughan’s trio. “Playing with him every night was just such a dream come true for me,” Hammer said. “All the great, great musicians that I admired, all of a sudden I was sort of joining this club, and it was just a fantastic feeling.”9
Yet there was a generational gap, a clash of cultures. And Vaughan, like the jazz elders she introduced him to, was old school. She expected the guys in the trio to wear suits, usually a tuxedo and bow tie. Early in Hammer’s tenure with the band, Vaughan played the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in New York. Hammer knew that the band would be off camera, so he wore a casual, more relaxed jean jacket. “I was in the hippie times living in New York City, and I said, ‘Nobody’s going to see me.’ Well, that was a bad idea. Never did that again,” he remembered, laughing. “I got really, really nailed, and she really takes me hard.” Vaughan didn’t say much—she didn’t have to in order to get her message across. “She had [a] very powerful personality—and sassy,” Hammer said.10
After a year with Vaughan, Hammer handed in his notice. Like many younger musicians, he was intrigued by electronic music and fusion. He had an opportunity to join the Mahavishnu Orchestra, led by guitarist John McLaughlin. The band, mixing elements of rock, funk, and jazz with Indian and European classical music, broke through, becoming one of the first commercially successful fusion bands. Their albums topped not only the jazz charts but the pop album charts too. Hammer played a Minimoog synthesizer, which allowed him to explore beyond the fixed pitches of the piano by bending notes and creating new, more expressive sounds, much like Vaughan did with her voice. In the years after leaving Vaughan, he continued to tour and began composing film and television scores, including the music for Miami Vice in the 1980s. The television show’s soundtrack album went quadruple platinum and won a Grammy in 1986. “[Working with Vaughan] was a total life-changing experience,” Hammer said. “I don’t think I would be where I’m now if I didn’t make that first turn with her, that sharp, packing my stuff, leaving Boston, moving and just—it’s really worked out great for me, and I’m eternally grateful.”11
Although Vaughan embraced the experimentation of the younger, often avant-garde-oriented musicians in her band, she did not fundamentally change the way she sang, even as the musical landscape shifted around her. “She was in her own world,” said Hammer. “It was more like the traditional ’50s, ’60s style of approach to music.”12 This more traditional approach to jazz relied on existing pieces of music, standards, as a starting point for an artist’s development and expansion. She reimagined, reworked, and recomposed these tunes night after night. But aside from scat pieces like “Shulie a Bop” and “Sassy’s Blues” featured in her live sets, Vaughan never assumed the role of singer-songwriter or composed new material in the traditional sense of the word. And she could be stubborn. She had her own creative voice and preferences. Instead, she became a fierce advocate for herself and what she considered high-quality material. Now that she was no longer beholden to record labels, she reaffirmed her artistic agency and insisted on singing only music that she liked and found creatively satisfying, regardless of genre.
“I don’t care who writes the music. It just has to be good,” she told Tom Mackin of the Newark Sunday News in November 1968, almost two years into her new life without a recording contract. “I don’t purposely avoid new tunes. I do my own version of ‘Yesterday,’ the Beatles’ song. And I sing ‘If I Ruled the World.’ But I could never do the noisy, rock ’n’ roll kind of thing. ‘Tenderly,’ ‘Misty,’ ‘Poor Butterfly,’ these are the songs I like to do. And I believe they are what people expect me to sing when they come to hear me.”13
By most measures, she sang jazz during these live performances. But she systematically began to reject this label too. “People call me a jazz singer, but I hate that term. Either one is a singer or one isn’t. I like doing all types of material—just as long as it’s good,” she told Down Beat’s Bill Quinn in 1967. “I think in many cases the term jazz is outdated; it doesn’t cover the subject accurately. Either a musician is a good musician or he’s not.”14 It was a stance that she had been fine-tuning since the early 1950s when die-hard jazz critics and fans first accused her of selling out for singing pop, and along with her disdain for musical labels, it was a position that she reasserted and elaborated on for the remainder of her career. She’d been resisting labels foisted on her by the outside world since 1946 when John Hammond offered to make her a blues singer. And in the years since, her convictions had only become stronger and her desire to obscure all labels even greater.
By privileging quality, musicianship, and talent over genre or style designations, Vaughan sought to transcend these same labels, which were often informed by stereotypical assumptions about race and gender. She did not want to be limited or contained by these preconceptions. She wanted the freedom to create on her own terms—hence her insistence on being considered a “singer” rather than a “jazz singer”; her self-identification as one of the guys, a “musician” and “artist,” rather than just another girl singer. Her embrace of the designation “singer” rather than “vocalist” also upended a larger cultural hierarchy that differentiated between highbrow art forms like opera and lowbrow forms of cultural expressions, including jazz. It leveled the playing field and removed questions of her legitimacy altogether. When she made music, she became a woman instead of a black woman; a human being instead of an African American. It released her from social and cultural limitations. It was her way to claim her personhood, and it was a battle she had been fighting her entire career.
It was also a decidedly postmodern approach to art and life, but Vaughan, like many of her contemporaries, was ahead of her time. The music industry, and much of society at large, was deeply invested in labels. Record executives needed them to categorize and market artists. They needed to know where to list Vaughan in their catalogs, which bins to place her albums in in record stores, and which radio stations to send her albums to. And in their eyes, she was still a jazz singer and commercial gamble. Despite her widely acknowledged talent, she remained without a recording contract.
The last time I made a record session was a year ago last February. Isn’t that ridiculous?” Vaughan said to critic Leonard Feather in November 1968. Her last sessions with Mercury had in fact been in January 1967. Feather, and the jazz community at large, was appalled. He lamented that acts like the Turtles, Tiny Tim, the 1910 Fruitgum Company, and Engelbert Humperdinck made millions while artists like Vaughan remained without a contract. “The record companies feel a responsibility not to the preservation of art, not to the discriminating record buyer, but solely to their stockholders,” Feather concluded. With the exception of “Make Yourself Comfortable,” “Whatever Lola Wants,” and “Broken-Hearted Melody,” all from the 1950s, Vaughan’s discs rarely charted within a week or two of their release. “My records may not be hits, but at least they keep on selling,” she countered; “they’re long lasting, which is not bad; but it seems that’s not what the record companies are looking for.”
She still wanted to record, but on her terms. That fall negotiations with a new label failed when her manager, Preacher Wells, demanded what industry insiders believed to be an excessive advance against future royalties. “Isn’t it more logical,” asked Feather, “to assume that you owe your public a few albums? If you’d just recorded for AFTRA scale, wouldn’t that have been better than not being on records at all?”
“I believe so. I guess it was all a mistake,” Vaughan replied, in what Feather described as a “soft, diffident quasi-whisper.”15
Perhaps Wells had overstepped during negotiations. He lacked tact and diplomacy or assumed that he had more leverage than he actually did. After all, he was inexperienced in these kinds of dealings. In 1963, when Vaughan switched from Roulette back to Mercury, he’d only been with her for a few months, and Quincy Jones handled the negotiations. Or perhaps Wells simply got greedy, and his failure to negotiate, to come to a reasonable common ground, combined with financial negligence, contributed to his falling-out with Vaughan. They severed their personal and professional ties soon after. At the same time, Feather’s proposal was presumptuous, and it suggested that her responsibility to her fans superseded her responsibility to herself. That she should accept a new kind of exploitation from record labels and the music industry. That there was something virtuous in settling for less than she believed she was worth. And she believed that she was worth a great deal as a vocalist. Yet what if she could have full artistic control? Would it have been worth it then? Despite these setbacks, Vaughan, as she always did, remained optimistic and concluded, “Negotiations are going on now. I should be back in the studios before the year’s out.”16
Nothing came of these negotiations either. She received other offers, but she rejected them all, holding out for another two years. Vaughan didn’t step into a recording studio until the fall of 1971, almost five years after leaving Mercury in January 1967. As her recording drought persisted, however, she became more comfortable with her new, contract-free existence. “You know what? I have not really wanted to make records all that much,” she told Max Jones in November 1969. “You get no royalties; half the time you’re working for gangsters. Who needs it?”17 During her hiatus from recording, Vaughan came to understand her strength and resilience. And she learned that, despite conventional wisdom, she did not need new records to survive in the music industry. “I’m singing what I want to sing,” Vaughan confided in her friend and fellow vocalist Annie Ross during a conversation captured on tape. “I know. But wouldn’t it be lovely to have the money [from hit records]?” asked Ross. “Of course,” Vaughan replied. “But it’s not on my shoulders. It’s not troubling me. I’m proud of myself because I’m doing goddamn fucking good. Five years I made no records. And five years is when I found out that I had something going on. And I was working. And my salary was going up. I had no records out. I just went on and on and on. I worked.”18
One night, while I was working at Donte’s, Bobby Shad of Mainstream Records came in. He’d been my producer for years and years on Mercury,” Vaughan told critic Leonard Feather in 1972. “I said to myself, I’m going to talk to him and we’re going to make some records. A week later I was signed to his company.” She appeared at Donte’s in Los Angeles on October 6 and 7, 1971, almost five years into her recording drought. “People were trying to force me to do material I didn’t dig, and I swear I’ll never do that again even if I have to take another five years off,” she said. “Besides, I just got disgusted with all the hanky-panky in the record business. Seemed like everybody was getting the money but me, so I just gave up.”19
Shad founded Mainstream in 1964, six years after splitting with Mercury. At first, the label specialized in reissues of jazz from the 1940s and 1950s and rarely issued new releases. In 1971, however, Shad began to build his roster of jazz talent with artists like Vaughan’s former drummer Roy Haynes, trumpeters Clark Terry and Maynard Ferguson, and vocalist Carmen McRae. “I don’t believe these know-it-alls who tell you good music can’t sell,” he told Feather. “Maybe we went through a bad period, but now the young kids who have been into rock are getting to realize that they can find something in jazz too.”20 Convinced that jazz was on the cusp of a revival, he needed a marquee performer to carry his label and drive sales, and once again he turned to Sarah Vaughan. Her new manager and love interest, Marshall Fisher, rebuffed his initial overtures, demanding substantial advances, and progress stalled until Vaughan approached him that night in Donte’s. “You wanna make a date?” he asked. “Tell me when.”21
Vaughan had met Marshall Fisher nine months earlier, in January 1971, while playing the Tropicana in Las Vegas. “I don’t think I will ever forget,” said Fisher during an interview with Gil Noble in 1973, as Vaughan looked on, blushing. “I came to see her as a fan. Strictly as a fan. I’ve loved her for twenty-six years.”22 He worked a concession stand at the Tropicana, and one night he struck up a conversation with Vaughan’s drummer, Jimmy Cobb. “I sure would like to meet her,” said Fisher. “C’mon with me,” Cobb replied, and he introduced them at the hotel bar.23 “They shook hands, and according to him, they never released [their] hands,” said pianist Michiyo Tanaka, Fisher’s future wife. “They shook hands and they held hands for three hours. That is how it started.”24
Their relationship progressed quickly. “After the show at the Tropicana, a month later, I was in California,” Fisher explained.25 He moved into Vaughan’s condo in Los Angeles, and she soon introduced Marshall, a white man seven years her junior, to her friends and family in Newark. “He fit right in. The racial difference didn’t mean a thing to Sassy or any of us,” childhood friend Aretha Landrum remembered. “He was my favorite.”26
As usual, Vaughan installed Fisher first as her road manager, then as her personal manager. Like her previous suitors, he had no background in management or the music industry. Unlike her past romantic partnerships, he seemed to have Vaughan’s best interests at heart. Datebooks from his years with Vaughan meticulously outlined her gigs, recording sessions, appointments, and what she sang during each television and radio appearance. And tucked inside the pages of the date books were love poems that he penned describing his love for Vaughan.
“Marshall was just like a prince to her,” bassist Bob Magnusson said. “The best guy in her life that she ever had.”27 Friend and business associate Larry Clothier agreed: “He was one of the nicest people in the world. Marshall would do anything for Sassy. Sassy wasn’t used to that kind of treatment. Marshall would never have hit her in a million years. He took care of her. Anything she wanted, he tried to do it or to get it for her.”28 And according to Walter Booker, Vaughan’s bassist between 1976 and 1978, Marshall was “a hustler for her music, not her money.”29
On November 16, 1971, Vaughan returned to the recording studio for the first time since January 24, 1967. Saxophonist Ernie Wilkins, a Count Basie alum turned arranger, scored the new charts and directed the band, and Shad chose the songs. “My theory with Sarah was to start from scratch and introduce her with new material, not the old songs she’s been doing in her nightclub act,” he explained to Eliot Tiegel of Billboard. “I had to let people know this was a new Sarah, so she sang ‘Imagine,’ ‘Inner City Blues,’ and ‘Universal Prisoner.’”30
The session, which became A Time in My Life, was not straight-ahead jazz. Nor was it, by most reckonings, a foray into the commercially successful jazz-fusion style, although it did at times incorporate elements of funk and plenty of electric keyboards and guitars. Instead, it was another outing into the adult contemporary market. It seemed that history was repeating itself, and it must have been terribly disappointing for Vaughan. She had boycotted recording studios for almost five years because producers asked her to record material she didn’t like. And now, under the helm of Bobby Shad, she was once again chasing pop hits. She covered John Lennon and Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You,” Carly Simon’s “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” John Sebastian’s “Magical Connection,” and Michel Legrand’s “Sweet Gingerbread Man.” While it was a “new” sound for Vaughan, as Shad planned, the album lacked cohesion and a larger creative vision. The funky undertones of Gaye’s anthem “Inner City Blues” remained, but its peppy, polished disco feel was at odds with the serious, social-economic commentary of his original reading. The youthful storytelling of “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” was perfect for the then-twenty-five-year-old ingénue Simon’s debut album but wrong for the more mature, forty-seven-year-old Vaughan, now approaching her third decade in the music industry. And the saccharine “Sweet Gingerbread Man,” complete with sweeping strings and bouncy beat, was out of sync with much of the album, including the more somber and serious “Imagine.” It was an eclectic mix of tunes, unified only by the simple fact that they had been hits for someone else. Vaughan sang them well, with an admirable taste, but there was nothing uniquely “Sarah Vaughan” about the album—nothing that could not have been done by a singer with a fraction of her talent and imaginative flare.
“I thought he just picked terrible material,” her bassist Bob Magnusson said. “It was all like pop stuff, you know. And when I showed up at the studio, the contractors came over, and they were expecting an electric bass. I didn’t know anything about it. I walked in with my fiddle.” He assumed it would be an acoustic jazz session, like he played every night. “I was thrilled to get to record with Sarah,” Magnusson concluded. “But it wasn’t stuff that really, to me, showed who she is.”31
It’s hard to know if Vaughan was truly happy with A Time in My Life or Shad’s new vision for her. Neither bassist Magnusson nor pianist Bill Mays, the two musicians from her trio to play the session, heard Vaughan complain about the material or otherwise express concern, and she incorporated both “Imagine” and “Universal Prisoner” into her live sets. But this was typical. She rarely complained during recording sessions, and she usually added tunes from her recent albums to her live sets. In public, as she always did, she remained diplomatic, if unenthusiastic, professional, and polite, focusing on aspects of the album that she liked. “I’m pleased with this. Sure it’s good,” she told Melody Maker’s Max Jones in February 1972, two months after the album’s release. “With Ernie [Wilkins]’s charts you know the music’s got to be bang on.”32
Critical reception of the album was mixed. The pop-oriented Billboard praised A Time in My Life as a “super artistic-commercial package” that “should break the charts with sales impact.” It never made it onto any of Billboard’s charts, but Shad, in full PR mode, insisted that the album, especially its ballads, received strong radio play and sold well.33 Jazz critic Dan Morgenstern was less positive. He was happy to have Vaughan back on records but condemned Shad’s misguided attempts to give Vaughan a “new” image. He worried that the material was beneath her, that it didn’t give her the space to stretch her improvisatory chops, which, he believed, ranked alongside those of the finest jazz instrumentalists. “Let’s hope Sassy gets a better break next time,” he concluded.34
Vaughan chose her next project. “Jimmy [Rowles] played me a record by Michel [Legrand], the one with the theme from ‘Summer of ’42’ in it,” she told Leonard Feather. The French-born Legrand had just won an Academy Award for his original score for The Summer of ’42 and was an established arranger of both pop and jazz. He had worked with Barbra Streisand, Stan Getz, and Shelly Manne. “I’d never heard writing like that—French horns flying all over the place, and such beautiful writing for strings. I told Bobby [Shad] I wanted to make an album with Michel, and he spared no expense.”35
It was an ambitious undertaking, recorded over four days in April 1972 in a Los Angeles studio. Legrand conducted a massive ensemble numbering 114 musicians, made up of a thirty-eight-piece band, including eight French horns and a rhythm section of three keyboardists, four bassists, four drummers, and a guitarist; a forty-eight-piece string section; two harpists; and a sixteen-voice choir. Vaughan sang ten of Legrand’s original compositions with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
“The first take, as I recall, was ‘The Summer Knows,’” said Legrand. “Sarah sang her heart out, and I got swept up in the music too. We finished the song and I glanced around the studio, and nearly all of the musicians had tears streaming down their faces, they were so moved. In all my years of working with solid pros like them I’d never seen anything like it. The same thing occurred during almost every song. Sarah had the power to make us weep one moment then smile the next. She was making music from the skies. From the heavens!”36 Bassist Bob Magnusson agreed. He was the only member of Vaughan’s trio included, and for just three tracks. “[The contractors] didn’t know me from Adam,” he said. “So I think she went to bat for me.” Magnusson went on to play other studio dates and remembered that this one stood out, for both the quality of the material and the response of the musicians in the room. “They would have certain dates where they would applaud,” he continued. “But that was one of those dates. The whole orchestra would get up and applaud Sarah and Michel Legrand. I saw it with Johnny Mandell. Some of the really great writers. Patrick Williams. It was really rare.”37
“It was a beautiful session, and everybody on it was the best musicians that you could get—Shelly Manne and, I mean, just everybody. It was a touching session; there were tears shed—the guys were so moved. I looked over at Shelly, and tears were running down his face; same with a lot of guys,” Vaughan told Les Tomkins in 1977. “But now that I hear the album—in some parts, too much music was written. Good—but for vocal, too much, at times. However I still love it. The songs that Michel writes are absolutely gorgeous.”38
“I really hope it does well, just so [Shad] gets his money back. My God, if it doesn’t he’ll fire me!” she joked during an interview with Leonard Feather in 1972 while promoting the album.39 Sarah Vaughan and Michel Legrand crept onto the Billboard chart of top LPs at No. 200, on July 1, 1972, shortly after its release. It stayed there twelve weeks, peaking at No. 173. But it didn’t generate any hits. Shad didn’t fire Vaughan, but their future albums together would be more modest, budget-friendly endeavors, and Shad would continue his pursuit to find the always elusive hit. Tensions between Vaughan and Shad escalated as they tussled over their differing musical goals and visions. And these challenges in Vaughan’s professional life would be accompanied by a new, devastating blow in her personal life.