14

“The Marian Anderson of Modern Jazz”

On March 27, 1974, Sarah Vaughan turned fifty. It was a personal milestone, celebrated publicly. Governor Ronald Reagan presented Vaughan with a proclamation from the state of California, her new home, as did Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley.¹ President Richard Nixon sent Vaughan his birthday wishes, writing, “These wishes come to you from the heart of a nation that respects and honors your talent.”² And a month earlier, on February 26, Congressman Thomas Rees of California paid tribute to Vaughan in the House of Representatives. “She is a legendary figure in the entertainment world, one who bridges gaps—generation and otherwise—incorporating into every performance a special warmth and rare depth of feeling which can only be accomplished by one who is blessed with ‘soul.’ I am of course, referring to Sarah Vaughan, whom many call ‘The Divine Sarah.’ . . . It is my pleasure to report to you that on March 27, 1974, this giant of the music industry—this lovely, talented lady—will mark an important milestone in her life—the celebration of her 50th birthday,” he said. Rees praised her artistry, international appeal, and role as “an official ambassador of good will for the United States,” adding, “Sarah Vaughan has been called ‘the greatest singer in the world’ by Tony Bennett and many other greats of the entertainment world. If music is, indeed, the universal language, ‘The Divine Sarah’ is a linguist without peer. She is not merely a vocalist; she is a brilliant interpretative musician able to improvise, leave her audience breathless with her fantastic versatility, whether in person or via her many recordings.”³

“Imagine what it feels like to have your birthday permanently recorded in the Library of Congress,” Vaughan told reporter Bill Pollock. “I don’t much care about New Year’s Eve, but I do care about my birthday.”⁴ It was a satisfying moment, perhaps a moment of vindication, for the vocalist, who at times felt underappreciated, especially by record executives. These public proclamations confirmed what she had come to understand about her legacy and status as an artist. “Over the years, though, I’ve recorded some pretty bad songs, trying to get a hit, and they keep haunting me,” she explained to Leonard Feather in April 1974. She was referring to “Broken-Hearted Melody,” of course. “It’s nice to have a hit, but I’m lucky; I don’t need it. Billy Eckstine and I have a lot in common; he always works and does very well, with or without a big record. To be a legend is what keeps you going. When I was completely off the record for those four or five years, that’s when I realized I must be a legend, too. It sure is a nice feeling to know that people will remember you after you’re gone—that you’ll manage to be a little bit of history.”⁵

Soon after her fiftieth birthday, buoyed by this new awareness of her place in music history, not to mention the wisdom that comes with a half century of living, Vaughan embarked on two new projects that would determine the course of the rest of her career. The first was an unexpected silver lining, a postscript of sorts, to her contentious years at Mainstream.

During the recording sessions for her final album at the label, she discovered the new Steven Sondheim tune “Send in the Clowns,” and she was intrigued. That night, she phoned friend Robert Richards to tell him about her day in the studio. “It was terrible, terrible. I just hated the songs. I don’t like them, I don’t ever want to hear this record,” he remembered her saying. “But you know, there was one song that I think it’s a good song but I didn’t have time.” She didn’t have time to delve in and explore, to put her distinct stamp on the tune. “I think that’s a good song,” she said. “I’m going to learn that song.”⁶

Pianist Carl Schroeder remembered a similar conversation. They were working Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago in April 1974 and listened to her Mainstream master. “You know, it’s nice,” said Schroeder.⁷ But Vaughan didn’t like Paul Griffin’s funk- and disco-infused arrangement. “I despised [it],” she told Jay Scott of the Globe and Mail a decade later. “I never even heard the arrangement; I was dubbed over it. It was too fast. You could dance to it. Nobody dances to ‘Send in the Clowns.’”⁸

“Sass, did you ever hear the original version?” Schroeder asked during their rehearsal at Mr. Kelly’s. “Send in the Clowns” was the signature song from Steven Sondheim’s new musical, A Little Night Music, which won a slew of Tony awards weeks earlier. “I’d be interested,” she said. “Marshall, can you get me a copy of ‘Send in the Clowns,’ like a lead sheet, the actual lead sheet?” Schroeder asked. “So Marshall comes in with ‘Send in the Clowns’ and I played through the lead sheet in E-flat major as printed.” (The lead sheet was, in fact, in D-flat major.) Vaughan listened, then said, “Yeah, that’s how we should do it.”⁹

Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns” for the musical’s lead, Glynis Johns, and tailored it to the limitations of her voice. She had a small range and struggled to sustain long notes, so he composed short, declamatory phrases that ended in consonants built from simple motivic lines. He used the weaknesses of her voice, her uneven vibrato and slight rasp, to enhance the emotional impact of the song and her character’s vulnerability. Johns, who had also recently turned fifty, portrayed Desiree Armfeldt, an aging actress with a fatherless daughter at home in the care of her grandmother. Fourteen years after their original affair, she reconnected with the father of her daughter, but he rejected her. “Send in the Clowns” explores the pain of youthful regrets, lost love, disappointment, and the cruel ironies of life.

The parallels to Vaughan’s personal life were uncanny, but it was unlikely that these similarities drew her to the song or that she knew the plot of A Little Night Music. “The lyrics didn’t count that much,” explained Schroeder, a sentiment echoed by most of her musicians.¹⁰ Rather, she was drawn to the music: the complexities of Sondheim’s harmonic language; the way he built his chords, often layering dissonant tones together; and the shift from D-flat major in the verse to F minor in the bridge. Sondheim also played with meter. He used more difficult compound meters and regularly shifted between ¹²/₈ and ⁹/₈ as the lyrics required. And even though the melody was simple, built from one or two motives stated again and again, it gave Vaughan room to stretch out and explore.¹¹

Schroeder wrote Vaughan’s arrangement for “Send in the Clowns.” He transposed the tune from D-flat major to E-flat major, one of Vaughan’s favorite keys. “I played the lead sheet part as written and then I rearranged the bridge, the middle part,” he explained, “to make it a little quicker in ⁶/₈ and have Walter [Booker], the bass player, play some kind of a counter line, and then we go back to the original [verse].” The arrangement was sparse. Instead of playing thick, layered chords and adding filler between phrases, the pianist played simple, arpeggiated chords. The bassist didn’t enter until the bridge, and when he did he played arco, with his bow, rather than the usual, more rhythmic plucking. The drummer also stayed in the background, entering only occasionally to introduce a new timbre or texture that enhanced the song’s musical climaxes. “Once she got ahold of that [arrangement], she started singing the heck out of it,” said Schroeder.¹²

Vaughan transformed “Send in the Clowns.” Whereas Glynis Johns’s range barely spanned an octave, Vaughan’s spanned nearly four. Johns often cheated. She did not—likely could not—dip down to the lowest notes that Sondheim composed for her. In contrast, Vaughan’s interpretation surveyed the full range of her voice. She explored the depths of her baritone and then spiraled up to the heights of her soprano, often in the same breath. And Vaughan slowed the tempo dramatically. When played straight through at a medium pace, the chart clocked in at three and a half minutes. Vaughan nearly doubled that. Her interpretations ran six, often seven minutes. She broke the piece open, adding her trademark vocal inflections. She added melismas and turns, vocal bends and slides. She shifted her timbre from deep and chocolatey to light and silky, almost ephemeral to thick and throaty, and then back again. Sometimes she simply sustained a note, for bars at time, gradually building from soft to loud, a vocal feat that, from a technical standpoint, is incredibly difficult. Other times she experimented with her vibrato or added new vocal turns. When she came to the final reprise of the verse, her trio dropped out. She sang a cappella. In a sense, it was the introduction to her cadenza—that moment in a concerto when the soloist dazzles the crowd with her virtuosity and prowess. Vaughan glided through scales, again demonstrating her range and vocal dexterity. She repeated the final phrase, the hopeful “Maybe next year,” over and over, each time adding a new variation and another brilliant vocal feat. In a way, it was the musical realization of the optimism at the center of her personality and worldview.

Vaughan took her listeners on an emotional journey, from a place of pain and heartache to one of optimism and strength. In the musical, Desiree’s personal fulfillment, her happy ending, is postponed until the reprise of “Send in the Clowns,” when after twists of fate she and her lost love, the father of her child, are reunited. They sing together triumphantly, joyfully. Vaughan, however, accomplished this by herself, on her own terms. In the hands of Sarah Vaughan, “Send in the Clowns” became a vocal tour de force, a vehicle for displaying her vocal mastery and creative vision. She used the same kind of inflections and embellishments that she introduced thirty years earlier. As the spirit, the momentum and energy, of the song grew, so did the intensity of her voice, constantly building until she reached the tune’s musical climax. These were all techniques grounded in the black church, the gospel singing of her youth. But now she sang them with an expansive boldness and operatic flair. She transformed a pop song into a vocal masterpiece, a through-composed jazz aria.¹³

“The song belongs to Sarah Vaughan,” reviewer Jay Scott wrote in 1984, a decade after she introduced it into her repertoire. “In about six minutes—six minutes replete with references to Gregorian chant and nearly every musical mode since—she communicated a lifetime of lust and longing: she may be the only singer alive capable of compressing La Traviata into the space of a show tune.”¹⁴

Other critics disliked the tune. For them, her interpretation of “Send in the Clowns,” which had become her obligatory encore, was too mannered, too predictable, and too over-the-top. “‘Send in the Clowns,’ which has become little more than a vehicle for her vocal high dive, should be given a rest,” concluded John Wilson of the New York Times. He was a fan of Vaughan’s and had been reviewing her performances for more than thirty years. For others, “Send in the Clowns” simply illustrated a larger problem with Vaughan’s singing. She was too driven by technique, too enamored with her vocal prowess, so much so that she often lost sight of a song’s larger meaning and emotional impact. “The results tend too often to the mannered and even fussy—vocal virtuosity run loose, as a thing in itself,” explained John Rockwell, also of the New York Times. And Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for the New Yorker, concluded: “She’s a person of tremendous technique and talent and probably should have been an opera singer. As a result, she’s in the middle between straight pop singing and classical singing, so I find her a kind of freak because she doesn’t respect her songs most of the time. Everything is sacrificed to technique and four octaves while the extraordinary voice and lyrics go out the window. I admire her, but she doesn’t move me. I have to be moved.”¹⁵

Vaughan didn’t care. She clearly enjoyed exploring her voice and showing listeners the remarkable, almost superhuman things she could do with it. And she must have enjoyed the unconditional acceptance and embrace of her fans, despite the disapproval of some critics. By singing this way, she felt empowered and fulfilled as an artist. Confronted by another terrible experience in the recording studio, a bad arrangement fueled by the shortsighted, commercial aims of a record producer, she transformed it into something positive, something truly her own. Once again, she rendered records irrelevant. “Send in the Clowns” became a phenomenon during her live shows, and she sang it her way for seven years before finally recording it again in 1981 with the Count Basie Orchestra. “Send in the Clowns,” a song that embraced a woman’s maturity and life experiences, became her signature song, a personal anthem of sorts. It replaced “Broken-Hearted Melody” as her most requested song, and in many ways it helped revive her career.

I’m happier than ever and it shows while I’m on the stage,” Vaughan told Ebony’s Louie Robinson in September 1974. “That’s because my personal life is wonderful . . . a great husband, a loving mother, and daughter, many close friends.”¹⁶ The previous summer, five months after the death of her father, Vaughan and Fisher bought a house in Hidden Hills, an exclusive, gated community overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Fisher helped her relocate her mother, adopted sister, and twelve-year-old daughter from Newark, and they all lived together as a family in the new house. After years of constant touring combined with bicoastal living, Vaughan was finally reunited with her family.

“Sarah wanted to marry him,” Michiyo Tanaka remembered Fisher telling her. “He didn’t want to because he had a feeling they would divorce someday.”¹⁷ Fisher had been married twice, had three children of his own, and wanted to avoid the legal mess of another divorce. In public, however, Vaughan referred to Fisher as her husband. In him she found a partner completely devoted to her. Someone who loved the music as much as she did. Vaughan was still an intensely private woman, but at fifty she was coming into her own. She began to feel more comfortable in her skin, more comfortable with her role as a public figure. “All of this has helped me to be more at ease with the public than ever,” she explained. “Today I talk to people and they talk to me. I love them and I feel their love for me.”¹⁸

“I try to insulate her from all the crap around her, but I stop at the stage,” Fisher told Les Tomkins in 1977. “Our philosophy is based on musical integrity. Everything that I do is directed into music—the sound. And I also feel that the best judge of the material that she should do, and the way she should do it, is Sarah. There’s simply no other considerations, in my opinion. I work on the perimeter, to direct it all towards making it possible for her to do what she wants to do.”¹⁹

“My career really began when I met Marshall,” Vaughan said during the same interview, in a now-familiar show of support for the current man in her life. “I had two husbands that . . . well, that’s it, for that subject—I had two husbands, period. Then I married Marshall, and now my business is taken care of. I have an accountant. I don’t have to worry about anything. All he wants me to do is sing.”²⁰ This is what Vaughan had always wanted and needed.

“If you don’t have your business properly taken care of . . . ,” she added, then paused to reflect. “Before, I had accountants, and it was them that told me: ‘You’re going to get busted for income tax. I’ll see you later!’ Now I have a very good accountant, and I know I can look back as far as ’69, and see where my money went, things like that. He sends me an account every week, a thing at the end of the month; I put ’em in my notebook, and I can find out who got a check or something. I have Marshall to thank for that. It’s hard when you’ve got things on your mind, like: ‘Where’s my money? I’m working this week, but where’s it going? Who’s gonna get it? Not me.’ Now everything is perfect.”²¹

On July 13, 1974, Vaughan launched her second new project after turning fifty, an endeavor that would soon become the third and final crossover phase of her career. She performed a program of American composer George Gershwin’s music with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at their summer home, the Hollywood Bowl, before an audience of 14,336. She collaborated with conductor and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas, the twenty-nine-year-old musical director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, who was making his debut at the Hollywood Bowl. The concert, developed by Tilson Thomas, demonstrated the sheer breadth of Gershwin’s output, surveying the composer’s opera and orchestral works, sweeping film scores, and his deceptively simple, comparatively short songs for musical theater, which soon became part of the American songbook. Tilson Thomas was in search of a vocalist who could sing the material while also demonstrating its potential for further creative exploration. He approached Vaughan. She was excited to participate; she chose arranger Marty Paich for the project, and rehearsals began at her home in Hidden Hills. “We sketched out what the tunes would be, how the medleys would work, and what could happen,” Tilson Thomas explained. “Right away I was happy because the arrangements were rich, and Sassy’s ideas were terrific.”²²

“Michael Tilson Thomas just had a great admiration for her,” said bassist Bob Magnusson. “He could see the genius in her. Sometimes being a jazz artist, you get classical snobs.” Magnusson had grown up immersed in the classical tradition. His father was the principal clarinetist with the San Diego Symphony, and before switching to jazz Magnusson played French horn for twelve years. “But Michael, he could see what it was and he would rehearse with her with him playing piano. She would do amazing things, and he would be astounded at it.”²³

“She was very, very nervous, she could get so nervous,” Tilson Thomas said, remembering their first rehearsals with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “We were going to do a medley that began with ‘Summertime.’ I was supposed to go onstage and start the orchestra, and from offstage Sassy was supposed to sing and then walk onstage singing ‘Summertime.’ The first time we did it, from offstage came this strangled squeak, which was Sassy trying to get some notes out. Standing offstage, she was paralyzed with fright. We realized that she had to overcome that moment of walking onstage. She was really amazed [to be] doing this with a big orchestra.”²⁴

She’d performed for large crowds many times. She’d worked with popular music’s finest arrangers and composers, including Michel Legrand, Marty Paich, and Henry Mancini, usually backed by an orchestra. And she’d performed in many of the world’s finest venues: Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York, the Civic Opera House in Chicago, the Royal Albert Hall in London, and the Salle Pleyel in Paris, not to mention the famed opera houses of Italy. But this was her first appearance with a major symphony orchestra in twenty-five years, since 1949, when she and Duke Ellington performed with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra at Robin Hood Dell.

Jazz was still set apart from the world of classical music. The symphony orchestra was a revered cultural and musical institution with hundreds of years of history. It represented the establishment, and the classical music that it played, complete with its European pedigree, epitomized highbrow culture. Despite a growing body of criticism and scholarship, jazz, because of its origins in African American aesthetics and its links to nightclubs, still remained, for many in the world of classical music, decidedly lowbrow—an inferior and marginalized outsider. And classical music, its institutions and prestige, had long been off-limits for most black artists. Performing with a symphony orchestra was a big deal for any jazz artist, but perhaps more so for Vaughan, whose parents had dreamed of her becoming a concert artist like her childhood idol Marian Anderson.

Six years earlier, in 1968, a Newark journalist dubbed Vaughan the “Marian Anderson of Modern Jazz.”²⁵ And for years, critics proclaimed that she possessed a “legitimate voice.” With her beautiful vocal production, almost four-octave range, and control of both her vibrato and breath, she could have been an opera singer. In 1974, when Leonard Feather asked her if she ever wanted to be an opera singer, she answered, “Yes, I always wanted to; but you have to start early, and I couldn’t afford the money for lessons.” Learning languages and mastering the classical repertoire all took years of study at a conservatory. Anderson, the first African American woman to sing with the Metropolitan Opera, benefited from well-connected, wealthy patrons. Vaughan did not, so she turned to the world of jazz. “I was thrilled once to receive a telegram of congratulations from Marian Anderson and flattered when [conductor] Zubin Mehta said it was his loss and popular music’s gain,” she added. “But I think I’m happier where I am. After all, opera can be taught; but what I do I have to feel, which I believe is better.”²⁶

While opera could have offered Vaughan a certain kind of prestige and respectability, it would have limited her creative freedoms. As a classical musician, she would have been beholden to the score, to the vision of the composer. Even the operas of modernists like Bartok, Berg, and Schoenberg would not have offered her the same opportunities for harmonic exploration, going out to the precipice, as she so often did, especially during the early, most innovative days of bebop. With opera, her artistic license, her personal mandate to craft her own unique vision of music, solely on her own terms, would have been stifled.

Vaughan’s debut performance with Tilson Thomas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic received mixed reviews. “For Miss Vaughan, it was a win some, lose some proposition. Her rangy voice with its plush lower register and wistfully warbled top, her improvisatory skills, and her imaginative way with a phrase amply renewed the wonder of tunes like ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,’ ‘Embraceable You,’ and ‘But Not For Me,’” reviewer Melody Peterson of the Los Angeles Times wrote, attributing the effectiveness of the first half in large part to the wonderful arrangements of Marty Paich. “However, Miss Vaughan’s encounter with Thomas as piano accompanist in ‘Stairway to Paradise,’ ‘Do It Again,’ ‘Who Cares?’ and ‘Fascinatin’ Rhythm’ seems to have been ill-advised from its inception.” Tilson Thomas was not a jazz musician and did not swing, and, like most classically trained musicians, he was committed to stylistically authentic arrangements, including a faithfulness to the songs’ original keys, which were unfortunately at odds with Vaughan’s range and needs. Her discomfort was obvious. She used a music stand, and before launching into a blisteringly fast “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” Vaughan confessed, “I tried to get out of it but Michael wouldn’t let me.”²⁷ “Michael was a pusher,” explained pianist Carl Schroeder. “He wanted to get it done. It was all in Michael’s court. He wanted to have a Gershwin program.”²⁸

It was an uneasy alliance between their two musical worlds. But Vaughan and Tilson Thomas fine-tuned their collaboration, worked out the kinks, and eventually took the all-Gershwin show on the road. They began in upstate New York with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Tilson’s home, on October 10, 1975. Four months later, on Sunday, February 1, 1976, Vaughan, Tilson Thomas, and the Buffalo Philharmonic appeared at Carnegie Hall, as part of a concert series celebrating American music and the bicentennial. They performed with the San Francisco Symphony on March 13, and other concerts followed.

A friendship developed between the two artists. After performances they hung out and shared new music. “I’d play Berg, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky,” said Tilson Thomas. “I remember playing the last two or three minutes of Berg’s Violin Concerto with its wonderfully evolved chords that are as complicated, as beautiful, and as painful as any chords that exist in classical repertory. It’s actually a harmonization of a very simple little Bach melody, and the harmonies are way out there. And each time I played it, they’d say, ‘Oh no! Say it isn’t so, Michael. Have mercy!’” Although Vaughan was a voracious listener, she had not been exposed to classical music’s twentieth-century modernists and their daring, often atonal, harmonic language. “Michael, when you play those chords, I just go out so far,” she would say, “and when you stop playing, I come back to the room, and I think: I don’t know where I’ve been for the last five minutes.”²⁹

In the 1970s, as jazz clubs closed, new performing arts centers, each with its own symphony orchestra, were being built around the country. An abundance of arts funding, from both the public and private sectors, fueled this growth and expansion. “Because of the symphonies in those comparatively small communities, there are more good places to work,” Marshall Fisher explained to Down Beat’s Arnold Jay Smith in 1977. “Tulsa now has a performing arts center. There are more good halls being built every day all over the country. So we are staying out of the hotels, out of the saloons as much as possible.”³⁰ Vaughan focused more of her energies on concerts with symphony orchestras and began touring the Gershwin program without Tilson Thomas. She expanded her orchestral book, adding new arrangements of material by other composers, including Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” and incorporated her trio into the act. In 1975, she performed with eight symphony orchestras, usually during their pops concert series, followed by fourteen in 1976 and sixteen in 1977. She continued her work with symphony orchestras throughout the 1980s. Vaughan and her trio played with the Boston Pops directed by the legendary Arthur Fiedler, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and the National Symphony. They also appeared with dozens of regional orchestras throughout the country—in Louisville, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas, San Jose, Rochester, Peoria, Toledo, Richmond, and other cities. As she performed with these symphony orchestras, she expanded her reach. She crossed over again, this time introducing the pleasures of her voice and the world of jazz to new audiences: the staid, musical traditionalists who frequented the symphony and performing arts centers.

Yet each time she sang with a symphony orchestra, Vaughan and her trio experienced the clash of musical cultures all over again. “[Arthur Fiedler] didn’t really know what Sarah Vaughan was all about,” said pianist Schroeder.³¹ He met privately with Fiedler for extra rehearsals, playing piano as Fiedler, then in his eighties and approaching his fiftieth anniversary with the Boston Pops, conducted and sang Vaughan’s parts, even though he couldn’t sing. Another conductor, assuming he knew best, removed all of the “blues” notes from Vaughan’s arrangements. “Oh, yes, there’s a wrong note there. I had to feex it,” Schroeder recalled the French conductor telling Vaughan.³² Of course, there were no wrong notes; the conductor simply didn’t understand that the blues with its flatted thirds, fifths, and sevenths was the core of much jazz and Gershwin too. The conductor’s “feexes” transformed Vaughan’s arrangements from jazz into something more closely resembling Schubert.

Other conductors struggled to follow Vaughan’s trio. Her rhythm section would be in one spot, and the orchestra, sixty or seventy strong, would be three bars ahead. Yet during an extended orchestra interlude, the conductor dramatically waved his arms about. “All the guys in the band are lookin’ funny at the conductor,” said Schroeder.³³ They were accustomed to the intimacy of their trio and the subtle, almost intuitive style of musical communication they shared. While members of the symphony orchestra were excellent musicians who had devoted decades to mastering the classical repertory, most didn’t know how to improvise or swing. To compensate, Schroeder remembered crafting arrangements in ¹²/₈ in an effort to notate the feel of a swing rhythm.

At one appearance, they played in an outside amphitheater, as they often did. “We did the rehearsals. Everything was good. We get to the gig. We start the gig. All of a sudden the wind starts blowing. Next thing you know all of the music is flying, like eight feet above the orchestra,” reminisced pianist Schroeder, chuckling. “So we’re back to playing the trio and there’s this music flying around in the sky. And then Sarah turns to the guys. She turns to the cello player on her left and she invites [him to play].” “I don’t know the music,” he replied. “Just join in,” she urged. “You can jam. Just play something.”³⁴

It didn’t occur to her that her request was terrifying for most classical musicians. For them, the score provided security, a safety net. It was their job to faithfully realize the music as written, not use it as a point of departure for musical exploration. But that Vaughan could do this—improvise, spontaneously jam, and sing her way out of trouble with such ease, often in the face of chaos—was a fundamental part of who she was as a musician. It was the source of her freedom. For her, these were basic musicianship skills, and she assumed that her classical counterparts possessed them too. After all, she studied classical piano as a child. In the 1970s, she played piano in her act, often incorporating excerpts from the classical repertory, adding a wink and nod to the audience, as if to say, “I bet you didn’t realize I could do that.” While rehearsing with symphony orchestras, she could hear, then point out, an out-of-tune violin or trumpet among the sea of instruments. And symphony musicians marveled at her flawless intonation, one of the core yet very difficult skills required of classical musicians. This came easily to Vaughan too. She had perfect pitch.

There were, however, aspects of performing with symphony orchestras that terrified her. She still became terribly nervous before each performance. She fumbled with her microphone and music stand, and often missed lyrics, even though she too had a score in front of her.³⁵ And she still didn’t understand many of the symphony orchestra’s traditions and customs. She never quite mastered the art of making her entrance. Instead of walking through the little path made by the first violinists, as soloists usually did, she walked out in front of the orchestra. “Of course the orchestra is set up to about within a foot at the edge of the stage,” explained Schroeder. “You’re talking about sixty people on stage. So she’s got to walk this one foot little crazy walk to get [to the piano and microphone].”³⁶ It was like walking a tightrope while wearing a glamorous evening gown as several thousand applauded in anticipation. But she didn’t know. “The whole spectacle of it broke the ice,” said Schroeder. “In one sense it was accidental, but in another it was almost deliberate, because then she could feel that she had broken the ice. She could feel comfortable. What could possibly happen after that? . . . But once she hit the stage, forget it, then there was no nervousness.”³⁷

On the whole, though, Vaughan loved singing with symphony orchestras. She loved the way her voice sounded backed by the full force of a sixty-piece ensemble, the mixing and melding of timbres as dozens of lush strings, horns, and woodwinds bathed her voice in a way that only a symphony orchestra could. Vaughan must have also appreciated the approval and acceptance, the legitimacy, that performing with symphony orchestras represented. That she, a jazz musician from Newark, had been welcomed into the hallowed halls of classical music, whose roots were steeped in the traditions and institutions of Europe. She also finally realized her childhood aspirations. In 1976, critic Leonard Feather asked her again if she ever sang opera. “No, I just always thought about it. I don’t think even my mother realized that,” she reiterated, adding, “But now that I’m making these appearances with the symphonies I feel as though I’m doing it anyway.”³⁸

Rio—the greatest place I think I’ve ever been on earth,” Vaughan proclaimed in the documentary Listen to the Sun. After following Vaughan as she performed in Newport, Philadelphia, and Houston in August 1977, filmmaker Thomas Guy and his crew joined her for a week in Rio de Janeiro in October. It was the end of a three-week tour of Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and finally Brazil, and her third tour of Brazil in six years. Listen to the Sun gave audiences a glimpse into her life behind the scenes as she traveled, rehearsed, and interacted with the press and her fans, and it was clear that Vaughan had come to love Brazil, its music, food, language, and people. “Let me tell you, the audiences in Brazil, they are the greatest audiences I have ever seen. I don’t believe them. I don’t believe that people like me that much,” she confessed in a private conversation with Milton Nascimento, a prominent Brazilian guitarist and singer-songwriter, a week after her show at Rio’s Hotel Nacional on October 21. “When I saw you there at the thing, I saw something that I never saw in my life,” he agreed. “The music comes out in Rio,” she concluded, perhaps referring to Rio’s rich musical heritage and the inspiration she felt there.³⁹ “Whenever she sings, her soul comes out of her mouth,” explained a concertgoer interviewed by Guy, and the woman sitting next to him agreed. “That’s right, that’s right,” she said. “We really love her.”⁴⁰

This trip to Brazil was different. After gigs in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Vitória and a vacation with her trio, Vaughan prepared to enter the recording studio. It had been four months since Atlantic scrapped her Beatles album and canceled her contract, and she hadn’t signed with a new label. She decided to take matters into her own hands. For the first time in her career, she would produce her own album. She was no longer beholden to record executives motivated more by financial gain than artistry. She would have full creative control to choose who she worked with, what she sang, and how she sang it. And in recent years, she had become fascinated by Brazilian music. While much of the new popular music being written in the United States buckled under the force of Vaughan’s voice and her constant need to explore and delve deeper, Brazilian popular songs could support Vaughan’s creative vision. This growing repertoire of contemporary pop music was known for the richness of its harmonic and rhythmic language, and it offered Vaughan a new, dynamic sound world to discover. Given the high esteem in which Brazilians held Vaughan, she had her pick of the country’s finest musicians and composers. They brought songs to her like the Magi bestowing gifts, hoping that she would do them the honor of singing their compositions.

She hired the influential singer, composer, and producer Aloysio de Oliveira to organize the five days of sessions. Born in 1914, Oliveira had played a pivotal role in bringing Brazilian music to an international audience, first as a member of the Bando da Lua that toured with Carmen Miranda for twenty-six years until her death in 1955, and then as a producer and composer who collaborated with bossa nova greats, including Antonio Carlos Jobim. Oliveira was an elder statesman within the Brazilian music community and capable of bringing together the country’s finest musicians for Vaughan’s sessions. On October 31 and November 3, she recorded with Nascimento, who made his international debut on Wayne Shorter’s 1974 album Native Dancer and would go on to work with Paul Simon, George Duke, Quincy Jones, and Duran Duran. On November 4, she worked with keyboardist Jose Roberto Bertrami, founder of the trio Azymuth, which mixed Brazilian samba and bossa nova with jazz, funk, and folk rock. On November 5, she collaborated with Dorival Caymmi, a driving force in the bossa nova movement and considered by many a grandfather of Brazilian popular music. And finally, on November 7, during her last day in the studio, she paired with Jobim, the most influential and famous composer in Brazil. He introduced international audiences to the bossa nova with his compositions “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Corcovado” in the 1950s.

Unlike many of her past recording sessions, producers did not rush Vaughan to cut costs or limit her creative freedom. She had time to immerse herself in the material. On October 29, she held a two-hour, free-ranging rehearsal with Nascimento. On first hearing, a recording of the rehearsal could be mistaken for a party. The room was crowded. People laughed and talked as a piano played in the background. The pianist, likely Bertrami, was running through the chord changes for “Bridges (Travessia),” composed by Nascimento. Then Vaughan began to hum, quietly in the background, and Nascimento joined her. She was learning the melody, feeling out the tune. At one point she chose one of her exquisite notes, something not found in the original, and emphasized it until the pianist incorporated the new harmonization into the arrangement. Moments later, she ran through another set of chord changes as she composed what would become her cover’s unique tag. After ten minutes, she began to sing the tune’s English lyrics. Nascimento joined her, singing in Portuguese, and she said, “English lyrics, kid.” “What key is that in?” he asked. “Put it in G. How about G?” she replied. They ran through the song four more times. There was a flurry of conversation and laughter between takes as the musicians shared their ideas. After thirty minutes Vaughan was done, but the music making continued for another hour as the arrangement took shape. Nascimento sang his part again and again, the percussionists joined in, and Vaughan, who could be heard chatting away in the background, occasionally returned to sing. The pace was leisurely, the mood joyful and light-hearted. The entire process was organic and spontaneous, a coming together of musical minds—the kind of music making that Vaughan loved.⁴¹

During her five days in the studios of Rio de Janeiro, Vaughan recorded more than a dozen songs, plenty for her new album, which would be titled, appropriately, I Love Brazil! It would be the first of three albums of Brazilian music that Vaughan would release in the coming years. Singing Brazilian songs would become another important creative outlet for Vaughan, and she would become known as one of their finest interpreters. But when Vaughan returned home in November 1977, she had no way to manufacture or distribute the album. For this, she would need to ally herself with a new record label. She turned to Norman Granz, Ella Fitzgerald’s longtime producer and manager, whom she had known since 1948 when she and Charlie Parker headlined one of his popular Jazz at the Philharmonic tours.

In 1973, thirteen years after selling Verve Records to MGM, Granz founded Pablo Records. He hoped that the new label would bolster the careers of his favorite jazz musicians who struggled to find recording contracts as the industry changed. “It’s criminal that someone like Sarah Vaughan was allowed to go without making a record for five years,” Granz explained in 1971, as he began to dip his toes back into record producing. “The record companies have changed. Executives today are only concerned with the fact that they can gross $9 million with the Rolling Stones. They forget that a profit is still a profit, and that you’re still making money if you only net $9,000. I keep telling people that, and they think I’m crazy.”⁴² Like Bobby Shad of Mainstream, Granz believed that jazz was on the cusp of a resurgence. Unlike Shad, Granz was committed to recording traditional, more mainstream acoustic jazz. At first, he recorded musicians that he managed: Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, and Joe Pass. His friends. Artists who during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s had fueled his career as a record producer and concert impresario. Now a wealthy man, he wanted to give back to the community who had given him so much. For Pablo, he produced albums in line with his larger vision for jazz. He still favored down-and-dirty jam sessions where musicians spontaneously improvised on standards, chorus after chorus. Although record sales rarely reached even his modest expectations, Granz distributed promotional discs to reviewers and disc jockeys in order to keep artists’ names in the public eye. As the 1970s progressed, he expanded the label’s roster beyond this core group of musicians, termed “Pablovians” by critic Gary Giddins, to include Dizzy Gillespie, Zoot Sims, Milt Jackson, Clark Terry, and, in the spring of 1978, Sarah Vaughan.

After signing with Pablo, Vaughan leased I Love Brazil!, which she owned, to Norman Granz for three years, and it was finally released in July 1979. More than a year earlier, however, on April 25, 1978, Vaughan stepped into the studio with Oscar Peterson on piano, Joe Pass on guitar, Ray Brown on bass, and Louis Bellson on drums for her first session produced by Granz. They recorded nine tracks of standards, five with the full ensemble and the remaining four with Vaughan in a duet with each member of the quartet, including an unconventional pairing with drummer Bellson. They worked quickly, producing the album that would become How Long Has This Been Going On? in a single day.

All-star albums featuring a collection a marquee artists jamming were a staple of Norman Granz’s catalog. Fans loved hearing their favorite artists on one album, working and creating together, and they made sense financially. But they also presented challenges. There were too many egos in the studio, and the music often suffered. As the headliner of How Long Has This Been Going On?, Vaughan, technically speaking, was the musical leader of the session. She expected to be in control, and as she usually did, she suggested chord changes for pianist Oscar Peterson to play behind her. This irritated Peterson, a star in his own right with his own distinct musical voice. “Oscar said to me, ‘If she touches that keyboard again, I’m walking out,’” Granz told his biographer, Tad Hershorn, in 2001.⁴³

Although critic Gary Giddins disliked this hasty recording schedule (in his opinion, three tracks merited retakes), he hailed the album’s release in October as “cause for breaking out the champagne for two reasons—it’s one of the best albums she’s ever made, and it documents another, if not a new, side of Sarah Vaughan.” After her years with Mainstream singing primarily contemporary pop, Vaughan finally reestablished her jazz footing on wax. It was a relaxed session, reminiscent of her days with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. She was swinging and adventurous, and she embraced the blues. “I can’t think of another Vaughan album with such an abundance of blues locutions, variations, and riffs,” wrote Giddins, concluding, “It will be interesting to see if she continues to work with producer Norman Granz, because if he parades the entire Pablo stock company through her sessions (including, one hopes, a set of Benny Carter arrangements), he will be mining the most valuable lode since Ella Fitzgerald discovered songbooks.”⁴⁴

How Long Has This Been Going On? was nominated for a Grammy in February 1979, Vaughan’s third nomination. (Her second nomination was for More Sarah Vaughan Live in Japan, released by Mainstream after she sued for a release from her contract.) I Love Brazil! received a nomination in 1980, and critic Leonard Feather deemed it one of the top ten jazz records of the 1970s.⁴⁵ Critics praised Vaughan’s choice of material and ability to capture the essence of Brazil without losing her own distinctive take on the material. She recorded a follow-up album, Copacabana, during her next tour of Brazil in 1979. And her next studio session for Pablo, a collection of Ellington songs, received another Grammy nomination, her fifth, in 1981.

Vaughan had successfully weathered the difficult years a decade earlier, as the musical landscape seemed to shift around her, and emerged a stronger, more resilient and determined performer. She was back in the recording studio. She continued to tour internationally to great acclaim. And thanks to her successful concerts with symphony orchestras, which were both financially lucrative and prestigious, she was no longer beholden to the week-in, week-out grind of the nightclub circuit for her livelihood. She was singing what she wanted, how she wanted to.