9

“The High Priestess of Jazz”

Vaughan stepped offstage and made her way through the crowded club to Birdland’s bar. She’d finished her set and wanted to relax.

“A guy at Birdland was standing at the bar,” Vaughan told jazz journalist Nat Hentoff in January 1955. “He kept looking at me and looking at me. Finally he came over and said, ‘I’m not buying any of your records anymore! For the first time, you have a hit. You’re going to change! I feel it. And I never thought you’d do a thing like that.’”¹ Vaughan laughed as she told the story to Hentoff, but she was frustrated too. The exchange took place a month earlier, in December 1954, during the same three-week engagement at Birdland where she happily announced that “Make Yourself Comfortable” would become her first smash pop hit. “I just looked at him. The man was really serious. Now what can I say? I hate to get into that kind of conversation anyway,” Vaughan continued. “I guess he hadn’t heard any of the EmArcy sides. Of course, I’ll never change. I couldn’t.”²

EmArcy was the newly minted jazz subsidiary for Mercury Records, and thanks to her unique dual contract, she no longer had to compromise her artistic integrity with her commercial aspirations. But the fan’s disapproval, masked as concern, was familiar territory. It mirrored the censure and reprimands doled out by jazz critics during her years at Columbia—the same critics who worried that Vaughan had forsaken her jazz roots in favor of ball gowns and commercial success. Even though she disliked discussions about selling out—their reliance on labels like “jazz” and “pop,” the collection of values so often associated with these labels, and the assumptions people made about what she, as a black woman and artist, should and should not sing—she understood that those same jazz critics and devotees needed to have the conversation. They needed her reassurances that jazz remained her main priority, her one true love. And her new dual contract presented the perfect opportunity. “My contract with Mercury is for pops and my contract with EmArcy is for me,” she told Hentoff. “I have to sing jazz.”³

Vaughan’s passion for and commitment to jazz was finally backed by executives at her record label. Fueled by this support, she embarked on a decade of intense creativity and productivity, releasing a series of albums, first on EmArcy (1954–1959) and then Roulette (1960–1963), that have become jazz classics. Her initial releases for EmArcy restored her credentials as an important jazz recording artist and an influential voice of modern jazz singing, while refining the innovation and boldness of her earliest bebop recordings, all recently reissued as collector items. Her new releases paired elegant, deceptively simple crooning with agile, spontaneous improvisations that reminded listeners not only of the sheer power of her voice but also of the brilliance of her musical mind, her genius. And thanks to her pop successes on Mercury, her audiences grew as she continued to bring new listeners to jazz, both in the United States and abroad.

On Thursday, December 16, 1954, following her three weeks at Birdland, Vaughan stepped into Fine Recording Studios to record the follow-up to Images, her critically acclaimed debut jazz album on EmArcy. The second album was titled simply Sarah Vaughan. It was late at night. The atmosphere was relaxed and casual. According to Hentoff’s description, Vaughan wore slacks and a blouse, and the musicians—her trio, with Jimmy Jones on piano, Joe Benjamin on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums, plus Clifford Brown on trumpet, Herbie Mann on flute, and Paul Quinichette on tenor saxophone—had taken off their ties and unbuttoned their shirts at the collar. Recording director Bobby Shad was at ease too, happy to let the evening unfold naturally, at its own pace. The tensions so often present in high-stakes pop sessions employing dozens of musicians and engineers were replaced by an easygoing camaraderie. The musicians joked and laughed as they rehearsed. Vaughan stood behind Jones with her arms draped over his shoulders, holding the lead sheet as he played piano. They shared a comfortable familiarity born from eight years of making music together.⁴ The other musicians looked on, and together they all worked through the head arrangements for each tune, experimenting, adding and discarding ideas as they collaborated. “I get ideas all of the time from my trio while I’m singing. We have a ball together, all of us, and wherever I go or work, they’re going with me,” Vaughan told Hentoff. “We really have a lot of fun on these jazz sessions.”⁵

The music created that night, and on Saturday, December 18, was extraordinary, and many consider Sarah Vaughan her best, most iconic album. Her singing was deceptively simple, with a refined, often sublime eloquence. Gone were many of the flashy vocal swoops, leaps, and turns that defined her earlier work. Instead, the nine tunes on Sarah Vaughan revealed her voice, laying it bare. She frequently sustained notes, creating a languorous, more drawn-out feel. Listeners can hear the smaller, more subtle turns and slides she added to her phrasing and how she intensified and slackened her vibrato. Each note became a miniature drama filled with anticipation and enticing tension.

And in a nod to her jazz roots, she did something unusual for a vocalist. On the album, she assumed the role of a horn and often sang without words as she harmonized with the other instruments in the ensemble. She paired with Herbie Mann’s flute during the introductions and final bars of “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Jim.” On “September Song,” “I’m Glad There Is You,” and “He’s My Guy,” all the musicians layered their voices together, their musical motives intertwined as the song’s momentum built, and then they came together in the final bars for one last flourish. Vaughan fully integrated herself into the ensemble and, together with her fellow musicians, created a seamless progression of tone colors and timbres as each pairing came in and out of focus. Together, they crafted a distinct sonic world.

Sarah Vaughan is full of beautiful, transcendent singing. But equally important are the silences. Those moments when Vaughan chose not to sing and let the music breathe. “April in Paris” begins with Vaughan singing the tune relatively straight. It’s a romantic, contemplative ballad and Vaughan sings slowly. She’s backed by her trio, but it’s really an intimate duet with her longtime pianist Jimmy Jones, who complements her voice with a contrapuntal line, adding complexity and nuance to the tune. Then trumpeter Clifford Brown takes a solo. When Vaughan returns, instead of embellishing the reprise as she often did, she simplifies it even further, parsing the phrases to create shorter, more intense musical statements. She sings the lyric “April in Paris,” then pauses, letting the listener savor the moment. As the listener waits, Brown adds a short fill, echoing the musical ideas from his earlier solo. Vaughan continues, singing “chestnuts in blossom,” again Brown follows. They trade phrases again and again, until Vaughan and Brown finally come together. Vaughan finishes the tune with Brown noodling behind her, creating more contrapuntal lines. And at the end Mann and Quinichette enter, playing a series of chords, almost like a chorale, as Vaughan sings with them.

“April in Paris,” along with every other track on Sarah Vaughan, feels like an intimate conversation between Vaughan and the musicians in the ensemble. They stretch out and explore, playing off one another as they make art for art’s sake. It’s never contrived or forced, but instead relaxed and easygoing, leisurely. “She sings more freely here than even in most of her nightclub appearances,” wrote Down Beat’s reviewer. “There is less of the emphasis on virtuoso effects and more on the kind of after-hours singing Sarah excels at.”⁶

Sarah Vaughan was the kind of album that jazz critics needed Vaughan to sing, and by envisioning her in an after-hours session in their reviews, critics like Hentoff signaled Vaughan’s return to her roots and the jazz fold. It signaled her authenticity and integrity as a jazz musician. During the 1940s and 1950s, the idea of the after-hours session had become a romanticized symbol of jazz in its purest, most authentic form. Away from the commercial demands of paying gigs, musicians after hours could be true to their personal artistic visions, creating new, innovative music. And many in the jazz community believed that the real innovations took place behind the scenes, after hours. More than a decade earlier, bebop developed after hours, during intense late-night jam sessions. Virtuosity and masculine bravado reigned, as musicians, almost exclusively men, flaunted their prowess and potency on their instruments. And, for the most part, women sat on the sidelines.

With Sarah Vaughan, however, Vaughan was front and center. She reimagined the after-hours session, placing a woman’s creative voice at its heart. Instead of sensational displays of individual, often heroic prowess, which can be a distancing experience for listeners, she emphasized collaboration, intimacy, and more subtle forms of vocal prowess.⁷ Although critics of the day lauded Sarah Vaughan for its absence of “virtuoso effects,” her singing on the album was unquestionably that of a virtuoso. It was a study in vocal control: her finely tuned vibrato; her understated vocal turns, those microtonal bends rather than the dramatic, two-octave swoops; her use of vocal placement (where in her throat a sound began) to create the album’s tonal palette, the contrasts in color and timbre as she shifted between her roles as soloist and sideman; not to mention the breath control required to sing all of those long, sustained notes. And the intimacy praised by critics was incredibly difficult to achieve. It demanded phenomenal ears and a sensitivity to the musicians around her, paired with the skill, the musical toolbox, to instantly respond. Vaughan’s excellence was second nature, and whatever the moment demanded she could create. Her execution was effortless and flawless, and even though she could have blown many of her collaborators out of the water with her vocal acrobatics, she chose not to. Instead, she put forward a different model for virtuosity, one practiced by a woman and vocalist and once again expanded both the technical and expressive boundaries of the idiom. In the process, she set the course for modern jazz singing.

“That’s one of my favorite records,” vocalist Dianne Reeves said while discussing Sarah Vaughan. “I think, actually, that record was the life-changing record for me. I just loved it. As a kid, my uncle gave it to me and I couldn’t stop listening to it because there’s so much stuff on it; so musical.” Reeves was in high school in the 1970s and an aspiring vocalist. Like Vaughan, she had a big voice with a broad range, but she didn’t yet know how to use it. By listening to Vaughan, she learned. “Sarah Vaughan was the first singer that I’d ever heard that really defined her instrument like any instrumentalist would,” explained Reeves. “She actually looked at her voice, and I don’t know if she would say it this way or not, and [said], ‘It has ability to do this and has the ability to do that. I’m going to put this [in] and keep building it and keep stretching it and exploring it.’ To me, she was the first one to really do that [with] jazz vocals.” This had a profound impact on Reeves and how she conceived of herself as an artist and creative being. It influenced how she understood her place in the larger musical landscape, a landscape that so often tried to relegate vocalists, predominantly women, the girl singers, to the musical sidelines. “It made me realize more than anything that I’m a musician,” she said. “This is the instrument that I play. It just happens to be built in.”⁸

The jazz community celebrated Vaughan’s return to jazz. For them it was a welcome change from the crass commercialism of her Columbia years. Producer and EmArcy head Bobby Shad, however, viewed all of Vaughan’s jazz albums as commercial endeavors. He was a businessman and needed to make money. Shad began working for Mercury in 1951 as their director of artists and repertory, and in early 1954, when tasked with creating a new jazz series for Mercury, he quickly realized that jazz listeners were very particular, discerning customers. He needed to create a separate, distinct jazz label to satisfy their expectations. In early 1954, as EmArcy began to take shape, Mercury had only two artists under contract capable of creating high-quality jazz: Vaughan and blues singer Dinah Washington. As Shad aggressively built EmArcy’s list of artists—a catalog that soon included pianist Erroll Garner; trumpeter Clifford Brown; saxophonists Cannonball Adderley, Georgie Auld, and Gerry Mulligan; and drummer Max Roach—Vaughan and Washington served as the front women for the fledgling label. They became the centerpiece of EmArcy’s print ad campaigns, and Vaughan’s Images was one of the label’s inaugural releases. Shad also took care to attractively package the new albums, often using photos from the studio sessions for covers, a choice that provided a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the creative process and enhanced the albums’ authenticity. Record stores then displayed the covers as “mammoth-sized cover blow-ups on easel stands.”⁹ And Shad made sure that his artists received a level of exposure similar to their pop counterparts. He sent new albums to approximately 750 jazz disc jockeys, and in 1956 Shad told Down Beat, “One of the main points of our program has been an effort on our part to have pop disc jockeys play jazz.”¹⁰ By January 1955, four months after the label’s launch in October, EmArcy had released 55 LPs and 108 EPs, and in October 1955, as the label completed its first year, EmArcy had cut and marketed another 30 LPs, for a grand total of 85. In less than a year, Shad had solidified EmArcy’s reputation as an important jazz label known for releasing excellent jazz.

But he didn’t want to stop with jazz fans. Shad believed that there was a market for jazz albums among a wider, more mainstream audience. And, here too, Vaughan was central to his strategy. As her star rose in the pop arena with the successes of “Make Yourself Comfortable,” “How Important Can It Be,” and “Whatever Lola Wants,” her fan base grew, and the new fans wanted to hear more Sarah Vaughan. Shad wooed them. The deceptively titled Sarah Vaughan at the Blue Note had no ties with the famed Chicago club. It was not a jazz album but rather a collection of romantic ballads backed by a lush string orchestra, released, tellingly, on Mercury. But it was accessible, an appealing entrée for her new pop fans. And Vaughan’s next releases for EmArcy were decidedly less jazzy, clearly geared toward a pop market. Sarah Vaughan: In the Land of Hi-Fi, for one, was a swinging big band album pairing Vaughan with saxophonist Adderley. It epitomized an easy, cool hipness in the vein of Frank Sinatra. In other words, Bobby Shad engineered a reverse crossover moment, using Vaughan’s popularity, versatility, and accessibility to bring new audiences to jazz. Vaughan had been doing this for years with her live performances, but now, with her albums for EmArcy, she took it to a new level.

On Monday night, June 3, 1957, Vaughan and the Count Basie Orchestra opened at the Waldorf Astoria’s Starlight Roof. As New York’s most prestigious, premier venue, the Waldorf regularly showcased the biggest names in the business: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Doris Day. It was the first time that either Vaughan or Basie performed there—another career milestone for both. It was also an important moment for jazz. While black artists like Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Pearl Bailey had all appeared at the Waldorf in the past, this was the hotel’s first “all-negro” show. And it was the first time it showcased jazz.

But in a twist, Vaughan and Basie shared the bill with the Haitian Moon Dancers, a troupe of two men and four women clad in colorful island-inspired costumes dancing production numbers like the West Indian limbo. The Waldorf Astoria management billed the floor show as a “Calypso Carnival” and installed a new, Caribbean-themed decor with exotic birdcages and palm trees fashioned from bamboo. The Starlight Roof transformed into a calming, exotic paradise with the calypso dancers “provid[ing] tropical relief from the jazz session.”¹¹

“I don’t dig this calypso bit,” Basie’s vocalist Joe Williams told Jet magazine.¹² And Vaughan, asked to participate in one of the Moon Dancers’ more provocative production numbers, rebelled. “Sarah Vaughan really gave the boot to the Waldorf-Astoria policy and emerged triumphant,” Dorothy Kilgallen wrote in the Washington Post and Times Herald. “Sensing that the hotel management’s attempt to turn her into a ‘calypso’ performer resulted in a bagel at the dinner show, she staged a revolution, and did her own act for the suppertime guests.”¹³

“I just don’t feel right throwing my hips around that way,” said Vaughan to Jet.¹⁴ It’s also likely that the calypso tune required that she sing in a faux West Indian patter, much as she had on her 1950 recording of “De Gas Pipe She’s Leakin’ Joe” for Mitch Miller. That tune relied on a narrowly defined, stereotypical notion of blackness for novelty value. The Waldorf’s “Calypso Carnival” was a commercial concession too, an attempt to broaden the show’s appeal to the Waldorf Astoria’s more staid, conservative (and very white) audiences. These patrons were more accustomed to the folk-inspired calypso stylings of Harry Belafonte than the hip, modern bop-infused stylings of Vaughan, the brassy jump music of Count Basie, or the down-home blues of Joe Williams. But Vaughan, as an artist and black woman, didn’t want to perform tropical music (with its associations to primitivism and exoticism) for New York’s upper crust, clad in their tuxedos and glamorous evening gowns. She wanted to introduce these audiences to her unique musical voice and artistic vision, which was cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and an expression of black creativity, innovation, and genius. “I believe in just singing what comes naturally,” Vaughan told Newsweek. “If I can’t be myself, I’ll drive an elevator or something—which has its ups and downs too. I don’t sing rock ’n’ roll and I don’t sing calypso.”

“For a singer whose utterances to the press are generally confined to ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ and ‘I guess so,’ this statement might be construed as ‘Sarah’s Law,’” wrote Newsweek. It was a bold and unusually frank assessment for the reserved, press-shy singer, yet entirely in line with her long-held aesthetics, her values as a jazz musician, and the care she took with her musical presentation, especially the larger social and cultural message that it conveyed.

“I like old songs best,” she explained, standards like “If This Isn’t Love,” “Over the Rainbow,” and “Poor Butterfly.”¹⁵ But she made sure that they never sounded boring or too familiar. “Miss Vaughan is a stylist of depth and dimension,” Variety’s reviewer explained. “She follows an almost pure musical line that has a languid content at times and yet creates its own excitement.”¹⁶ She also thrilled them with up-tempo rhythm numbers like the brassy “Old Devil Moon” and a scat-filled “How High the Moon,” which, in a wink and nod to the jazz fans in the house, paid tribute to Ella Fitzgerald. And she always sang with mastery and confidence, an ease that allowed listeners to relax and immerse themselves into the beauties of her voice. In the process, she made the complexities of bebop accessible to audiences unfamiliar with jazz. “[The] show is Sarah’s, we’re just the background music,” a modest Basie told reporters.¹⁷

The show quickly transformed itself, eliminating most of its original calypso elements, to focus instead solely on jazz. And the Waldorf’s regular patrons loved it. “Dowagers draped in diamonds were among those who couldn’t resist the Basie beat and were on the dance floor every set,” the Pittsburgh Courier reported. “Their masculine counterparts were swooning with the rest as Sarah bent her lovely tones around some old favorites and even as she ‘scatted’ some real ‘hep’ vocals.”¹⁸ The show also drew a new demographic to the Waldorf: the so-called “prom set.” Younger, “hepper” fans, both black and white, who “dig the jive.”¹⁹ During the summer of 1957, with the help of Vaughan and Basie, the Starlight Roof became an incubator for change, a place where musical, generational, class, and, ultimately, racial boundaries began to break down. “This mixture of audiences has created a bit of peering-through-the-lorgnettes as the occasional ‘mixed’ couples (Harlem and ofay) whirl around the floor,” Variety reported. “Although very un-Waldorfian, the Roof’s business is jumping especially with the prom kids.”²⁰

Vaughan and Basie broke attendance records for the Starlight Roof. Less than two weeks into their four-week run, the Waldorf’s management extended the package for another two weeks, until July 13, and re-signed them for another five weeks, August 13 until September 18, to finish off the summer season. The successes of Basie and Vaughan at the Waldorf also improved the fates of all jazz musicians in New York. An unusual number of venues began to program jazz, and the local press began to refer to the summer of 1957 as the “Summer of Jazz.” Combined with the explosion of new summer jazz festivals, prompted by the success of the Newport Jazz Festival, now in its fourth year, the doldrums of summer, once the slow season, now represented prime time for jazz musicians.²¹

Jazz was in the midst of a resurgence unseen since the heyday of swing almost fifteen years earlier. With the help of performers like Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Stan Kenton, with their versatility and widespread appeal, jazz was growing in both popularity and profitability. Equally important, however, was a perceived shift in the cultural status of jazz. Echoing sentiments first expressed in Variety, the black press touted the arrival of Vaughan, Basie, and Williams at the Waldorf, “the ivory tower of chic society,” as “the first real surrender to ‘jazz,’ to a ‘beat,’ and to the notion that what’s good enough for Birdland is good enough for the Waldorf.”²² It was an important moment. Jazz was slowly beginning to shed its associations in the popular imagination with nightclubs and the seedy underworld of drugs, its status as lowbrow folk music, and was ever so gradually emerging as a respectable, sophisticated music worthy of America’s finest venues. Jazz, with its origins in black culture and musical traditions, was in the early stages of its journey toward becoming highbrow.

Despite Vaughan’s professional triumphs at the Waldorf, the summer of 1957 was a difficult one personally, as her marriage to George Treadwell came to an official end. In the years since the couple first separated in 1952, they weathered ups and downs, trying to make their marriage work, often under the scrutiny of the press in search of gossip-column fodder. During her appearances at the Waldorf, Vaughan confided to her assistant Modina Davis that she thought she and Treadwell should divorce. “The meetings were too unhappy,” said Davis. “They were always fighting.”²³ After Treadwell filed for divorce, Vaughan stayed in New York, working the Starlight Roof, and Treadwell traveled to Juarez, Mexico. In early July, Justice Martinez Arrio awarded him a final divorce decree on grounds of incompatibility.²⁴ Weeks later, Treadwell married Fayrene Williams, a model from Los Angeles. According to reports in the black press, Treadwell gifted his new bride a seven-room ranch home in Englewood, New Jersey. And Williams, now Mrs. Treadwell, became her husband’s new assistant in his talent management office.

Vaughan wished the couple well. “No hard feelings,” she said. “We simply couldn’t or didn’t make it so now I hope only the best for his new marriage.”²⁵

Gossip columns speculated that it would take time for Vaughan to get over her divorce and Treadwell’s remarriage, reporting that, following her divorce, associates of Vaughan observed a “strange, thoughtful calm that settles over Sarah Vaughan whenever she’s alone for a few minutes.”²⁶ In August, weeks after Treadwell remarried, Vaughan learned that he and Fayrene were expecting a baby. Vaughan and Treadwell had desperately wanted to start a family together themselves, but it never happened. After consulting with doctors, Vaughan learned that she couldn’t have children. Upon hearing the news of Fayrene’s pregnancy, Vaughan wired her congratulations.

After divorcing, Vaughan and Treadwell continued to work together, and she remained one of his biggest clients. Buoyed by his longtime association with Vaughan, his roster now included her former boss Earl Hines and, for a brief time, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, and blues vocalist Ruth Jones, whom he promised a makeover treatment, just like Vaughan’s. He also found success with the Drifters, a vocal quintet (sometimes quartet) he created in 1953 and managed through its many iterations. The group, which helped define the sound of doo-wop and gospel-influenced soul, featured an evolving collection of singers: Clyde McPhatter, the group’s co-founder; Johnny Moore; Ben E. King; and Rudy Lewis. Early on, Treadwell bolstered the group’s visibility by arranging photo ops between McPhatter and Vaughan. After a flurry of R & B hits in 1953 and 1954, the group truly broke through in 1959, with “There Goes My Baby,” which peaked at No. 2 on the pop charts. They followed this up with a series of hits on Atlantic throughout the 1960s. But the musicians earned no record royalties. Instead, Treadwell, who owned the copyright to the band’s name and shared writing credits with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for “There Goes My Baby,” paid his musicians a weekly salary. It was a lucrative setup for Treadwell.

Vaughan’s decision to stay with Treadwell’s management company was puzzling. As the divorcing couple came to a financial settlement, Vaughan discovered that only $16,000 remained in their joint bank accounts. It’s unclear where the money went. She’d worked nonstop for fifteen years, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in appearance fees and record royalties. The business of being Sarah Vaughan had grown considerably. In 1955, as her pop tunes for Mercury climbed the charts and she earned $11,000 a week, the New York News reported that Vaughan had thirty-one people on her payroll, a fleet of cars that included station wagons and four convertibles, a half floor of office space on Broadway in the heart of New York’s theater district, a music publishing firm, and a half dozen other enterprises. She also supported her family. Perhaps she was overextended financially. When asked about her newfound fame and fortune in 1955, Vaughan agreed that she had come a long way since her early years. But she qualified her answer, explaining that now she had “no peace of mind.”²⁷

Her friend Modina Davis suspected that Treadwell was being spiteful and vindictive, that there must have been more money somewhere. After all, he had recently purchased a new home for his bride. And when many in the jazz community learned of the financial settlement, it simply confirmed their beliefs that Treadwell was just another hustler.²⁸ Vaughan trusted Treadwell completely, and this betrayal, whether gross financial mismanagement or something more devious, must have been heartbreaking. Vaughan and Treadwell each took $8,000 and a car and went their separate ways.

“I want to forget that. I never want to think about that again,” Vaughan said when asked about her failed marriage four years later, in 1961. “All George ever did for me was really for himself. You know, nobody wants to print that, but it’s the truth, and I wish people would understand that.”²⁹

Vaughan kept working, maintaining her usual demanding schedule and performing nearly fifty weeks a year, now not because she loved singing and life on the road, which she wholeheartedly did, but because she had to financially. As she rebuilt her life and reestablished her fiscal security, however, Vaughan’s musical family—her trio—began to fall apart as well. Bassist Joe Benjamin left in 1956 and was replaced by Richard Davis. And at the end of 1957, after nine years with Vaughan, pianist Jimmy Jones decided to leave to pursue a career as an arranger. Vaughan and Jones had met in 1946, during her first Café Society engagement, and weathered those early lean years together. She often cited him as her favorite pianist. They were musical kindred spirits that complemented one another perfectly, relying on an unspoken communication, an intimacy born through years together. His departure must have been a musical and personal loss for Vaughan. She threw him a farewell party, which, not surprisingly, doubled as a press event. Photos showed Vaughan presenting Jones with a diamond wrist watch, reportedly valued at $750, as his replacement, Ronnell Bright, looked on.³⁰

Bright was an up-and-coming pianist from Chicago who had just moved to New York. Born in 1930, he met Vaughan in Boston in November 1957 while playing Storyville. Vaughan knew of Bright through their mutual friend vocalist Carmen McRae, and, as she so often did, Vaughan listened in on Bright’s set. “Hey, man, Sarah is sitting at a table right behind you checking you out,” Bright’s guitarist, Ray Crawford, told him. “I didn’t really pay much attention to what Ray said,” Bright explained during an interview with Marc Myers. “We played opposite her for about a week.”³¹

When Jones moved on, Treadwell invited Bright to a meeting at his offices in the Brill Building. “He said Sarah was deciding between me and Wynton Kelly and that it was down to money,” he recalled. “I said it would be [an] honor to play for Sarah and whatever she thought would be fair was fine with me.”³² Bright began work immediately.

Two months into his new gig, Bright found himself back in Chicago at Mr. Kelly’s. Vaughan, still a favorite for Chicago audiences, appeared regularly at the club. “Singer draws ’em in like flies to a picnic spread,” Variety reported on opening night, February 25, 1958, “and her fortnight at this nitery is a happy foregone conclusion for the spot’s bookkeeper.”³³ It was a routine two weeks in Chicago, until Friday, March 7. After their third set of the evening, Vaughan and her trio of Bright, Davis, and Haynes rushed over to the London House.

The club, under the same ownership as Mr. Kelly’s, was hosting a special after-hours recording session for Vaughan’s next album on Mercury, a follow-up to her successful live album Sarah Vaughan at Mr. Kelly’s, recorded that past August. Basie sidemen Thad Jones and Wendell Culley on trumpet, Henry Coker on trombone, and Frank Wess on tenor saxophone joined Vaughan and her trio, creating a special, one-night-only pickup band of sorts. There were no rehearsals, arrangements, or charts. “There was not time,” said Bright. “Sarah went out and bought piano sheet music for each musician and passed it out on stage, at 2:00 A.M., just before we started recording. We had to transpose the sheet music to her keys. Everyone had to scuffle.”³⁴

Including Vaughan. She had not recorded any of the eight tunes before, and most were not staples of her live sets. She, like the musicians backing her, had to think on her feet. She had one take to get it right, and that would become the album Sarah Vaughan After Hours at the London House.

“That was an amazing night,” said Bright. “Everyone I knew was there: bassist Johnnie Pate, pianist Dick Katz, the guys who wrote ‘Detour Ahead’ [a song on the set list]—guitarist Herb Ellis and bassist John Frigo. The place was packed.” And, for the most part, the evening went well. Vaughan was in fine voice and in sync with her trio, despite their lack of rehearsal time. Basie’s sidemen noodled in the background and took the occasional solo, but in a symptom of the session’s ad hoc origins they never became fully integrated into the fabric of the ensemble as Clifford Brown, Herbie Mann, and Paul Quinichette had on Sarah Vaughan three years earlier. Yet there was a spontaneity and energy in the room, and the audience was engaged and excited.

Bright began the evening’s final number: “Thanks for the Memory.” Following his introduction, a series of arpeggiated chords, Vaughan entered and sang the familiar lyrics: “Thanks for the memory / Of candlelight and wine, castles on the Rhine.” Then she stopped and missed her next entrance. Puzzled, the trio slowed, faded out. “Parthenon. Parthenon. Parthenon,” Vaughan said, practicing the word. “I got stuck on the word.” She repeated it again and again, each time with greater emphasis, as Bright played filler in the background. “Sarah had sheet music for the song, like everyone else, and was reading the word ‘Parthenon,’ which was hyphenated,” Bright explained. “She was unfamiliar with the word or what the Parthenon was. So she couldn’t figure out where the emphasis was supposed to go. She stopped cold and calmly worked it out. That was Sarah, recording session or no recording session. No one on stage was prepared for that, as you can hear from the record. It was a live recording, and Sarah doing that was a little scary. But this is what made the session so exciting.”³⁵

Bright began again, this time with a new introduction. Vaughan entered, embellishing the tune’s opening “Thanks,” drawing it out into three syllables, pausing for a new trumpet fill, before she continued. She sailed through the first two lines, and launched into the problematic third. “The Parthenon . . .” she sang and stopped again, unable to gain momentum and flow into the next lyric. “I don’t get this word, here,” she said. Bright was about to say “Parth-ah-non” to help her but stopped himself, remembering that they were recording live. “Sarah worked her way through it and kept the moment alive,” said Bright.³⁶ “Parthenon,” Vaughan said, enunciating the world emphatically. “One more time, then we can go home.”

Bright began again, with a third introduction subtly different from the first two. Vaughan entered, singing another extended melisma, mastered “the Parthenon,” and successfully made her way through her choruses. A lovely muted trumpet solo followed. But when Vaughan returned, reprising the B section, she soon stumbled and missed another lyric. This time she didn’t stop. She winged it, inventing her own lyric on the spot. And as the tune entered its final chorus, she acknowledged the chaos of the evening: “Thanks for the most craziest, upset-down-side-ist recording date I ever had in my life.” The audience laughed. Vaughan continued, humming the melody, “Da da da dah. Da da da da dee,” her voice growing louder and more determined, until she finally reached the tune’s final line. “So glad that it’s overrrr . . .” More laughter from the house, followed by a man yelling out “Thanks!” “And thank you,” Vaughan sang, adding one last dramatic pause, “So much.” It was finally over.

“Y’all go home now,” Vaughan instructed the crowd as the band vamped behind her. “Thank you so very much ladies and gentlemen for coming out.” It was four in the morning, and the session had lasted less than an hour. The musicians packed up their instruments and joined Vaughan for an early breakfast.

Vaughan was a perfectionist, and it’s hard to say if the final product created that night met her exacting standards. She did firmly believe that live performances should have imperfections; otherwise they were simply like her studio recordings, but this was also a recording session. Regardless, it is clear that she loved the process and found the mental gymnastics of it all exhilarating: the spontaneity and uncertainty of the musical unknown; the thrill of venturing out onto a musical precipice, then finding her way back; and the constant exploration and striving for innovation. She pushed herself to create something new and different each and every night and expected the same from the musicians she worked with.

“You had to, or Sarah would hear you trying to do what you already did, which to her would be lazy,” Bright told Marc Myers when asked about the three distinct introductions he created for “Thanks for the Memory” that night. It was a common refrain, repeated time and again by the musicians who worked for her. “Sarah rarely did anything the same way twice,” Bright continued. “She came up through the ranks with Charlie Parker. It was a badge of honor to do things differently each time. There was no other way.”³⁷

Even when Vaughan did have a tried and true arrangement, she often went off script. “Sarah would change keys in the middle of a song. She’d go somewhere else, and we’d have to find her,” Bright explained. “She taught all of her sidemen ear training. You had seconds to figure out what she was going to do. It became intuitive. But once we were comfortable with her, we’d do the same thing to her. She’d sing in one key and we’d change keys so she’d have to find us. She liked the challenge.”³⁸

Her bassist at the time, Richard Davis, agreed. “That’s what made it so beautiful playing with her,” he explained. “She had all that range! She was a monster. I mean that in a positive way. Sarah was like any horn, like a saxophone player. What she did with a lyric, what she did with the sound of her voice, she would bend those notes into five different shapes. One note. Five different shapes! And you say, ‘God, what’s she gonna do next?’ And she could scat her butt off, too.”³⁹

“This woman was a pure genius,” said drummer Roy Haynes.⁴⁰ He had worked with saxophonists Lester Young and Charlie Parker before joining Vaughan in October 1953. “It was hip to be with Sarah then,” he explained.⁴¹ She was different, with a sound and style all her own, and her musicianship was unparalleled. “She would go up to piano players and tell them what notes to play or what keys to play in, that’s not something most vocalists can do.”⁴² Haynes loved the spontaneity on the bandstand each night, the constant push to be innovative, and the thrill of always testing one’s limits. “I, I, considered Sarah Charlie Parker,” he said. “And she was with him. She was with Earl Hines when I first met her. And then she, well she was very tight with Billy Eckstine. So to me, she was a female Charlie Parker.⁴³

In April, however, as Vaughan’s band played their first gig at the famed Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, her trio—her musical family—was about to change again. After almost five years, drummer Roy Haynes gave his two-week notice.

“I stayed too long at the fair,” said Haynes when asked why he left the trio. “I enjoyed it. It was happening, and I was enjoying it. I liked the clubs. I wasn’t making a whole lot of money, but it was pretty steady.”⁴⁴ He had started his own family and was entering a new phase of his life. “When I was with Sarah Vaughan, man, I was buying a house then,” he said. “My first house, boom.”⁴⁵ But Vaughan toured nearly fifty weeks a year, with only a short break each summer. In 1955, Miles Davis told critic Nat Hentoff that Haynes “has almost destroyed himself working with Sarah so long.”⁴⁶ Her schedule was relentless, and when Haynes decided to leave the band in 1958, she was preparing for a four-month tour of Europe. Haynes was exhausted and needed time to recuperate. He wanted to explore new creative directions, and, as he explained, “I wanted to hang with my children.”⁴⁷ Vaughan was upset. “She barely talked to me,” Haynes remembered. “I felt very bad about it, because I had loved her. Some people who didn’t know us thought that I had been married to her.”⁴⁸

On Friday, April 11, 1958, just days after finishing her week at the Fontainebleau and playing with Haynes for the last time, Vaughan and pianist Bright landed in London. It had been a long flight, made longer by delays. Treadwell, with flowers in hand, greeted Vaughan in the arrivals hall. Mercury’s Bobby Shad was there too, hoping to fly Vaughan to Paris that night for a guest appearance at the Mercury International Convention, but her plane arrived too late. Instead an exhausted Vaughan went straight to her hotel for a press conference.

“Miss Vaughan, why are you called ‘Sassy’?” asked Maurice Burman of Melody Maker. “I really don’t know—but I’d like a drink,” she answered, fatigue mixing with impatience and irritation at yet another silly question. It was well known that John Malachi bestowed the nickname during her years with the Eckstine band. Her drink, gin and water, arrived, and Vaughan continued, “Al Hibbler gave me my name. I guess you’d better ask him.” It was a confrontational interview. She was testy and Burman grew increasingly frustrated. “You’re not talking too much are you?” Burman said. “Oh, darling don’t be that way,” Vaughan replied, softening. “I guess I sing better than I talk—much better. And I’m so very tired. I’ve sat upright in a plane for 10 hours and 45 minutes, and my spine hurts. I ask you, should I be happy or unhappy?” “Happy, because you have come through it alive,” he insisted. “I’m happy to be here,” she said. “But all I want to do is to get my first show over. I’m worried and I’m nervous. I guess I’m always worried before I go on.”⁴⁹

The next morning, rehearsals began for her first London performances, scheduled for that night, Saturday, April 12, at the Odeon in Leicester Square. With pencils in hand, she and Bright reviewed her arrangements. For the next two nights, two shows a night, she would perform with Ted Heath and His Music, an English big band in the style of Stan Kenton’s modern bebop-inspired ensemble. She hadn’t found a replacement for Haynes, and her bassist, Richard Davis, wouldn’t join her until later in the tour. Bright was the only musician there with an intimate musical knowledge of Vaughan and her preferences. Then Treadwell told Bright that he would be conducting Ted Heath’s ensemble during the gigs too. “Oh, man, how am I going to do that? Can they do Sarah’s material?” Bright asked Treadwell. “Do like Dizzy: Just kick a leg and the band will do the rest. You have to do it,” said Treadwell. “So I did,” Bright said, laughing. “Heath’s band was great. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they could play.”⁵⁰

“Sarah is a knock-out,” proclaimed the headline for Max Jones’s Melody Maker review of opening night. “Each time I hear Sarah Vaughan in person she seems to have got substantially better.” Vaughan conquered her nerves and performed fifteen songs during a fifty-minute set. She began with “If This Isn’t Love,” mixing in standards like “Mean to Me,” “Lover Man,” and “Tenderly” and newer tunes including “Passing Strangers,” her duet with Eckstine that had become a hit in England, and concluding with a scatted version of “How High the Moon.” The emphasis was squarely on her, and even though she performed the same set twice a night on Saturday and Sunday, she never sang a song the same way twice. “I can’t remember ever looking forward so much to a fourth performance of the self-same programme,” a musician from the Heath band told Jones.⁵¹

After her London concerts, Vaughan did two weeks of one-nighters through England and Scotland, this time backed by another collection of British musicians. Before embarking on a tour of the Continent, Davis rejoined the group and along with Bright and the drummer from Ted Heath’s band created a new trio for Vaughan. She spent May at the China Theater in Stockholm, Sweden. More one-nighters followed.

When jazz musicians, especially African American musicians, traveled in Europe, they were greeted with an enthusiasm, respect, and admiration that they often did not receive in the racially divided United States. When Vaughan had arrived in London in 1953 for her first European tour, she was treated like royalty. Representatives from Melody Maker met her transatlantic ship and ushered her through customs; fans, bestowing gifts, greeted her train at Paddington Station; and the press tracked her every move, reporting on her rehearsals, state of mind, and, of course, concerts. While jazz, with its roots in black culture, still fought for legitimacy back home, in Europe it was embraced as a sophisticated and important art form. Jazz musicians were skilled, innovative artists. They were celebrities.

Five years later, when she arrived in Amsterdam on Saturday, June 7, 1958, Vaughan performed two high-profile yet very different gigs. She began the evening on the elaborate set of a television studio in Bussum, a small town twenty miles outside of Amsterdam. In the States, Vaughan had starred in a handful of movie shorts and regularly sang a pop song or two as a guest on television variety shows, but she had never appeared in a longer, more in-depth television segment devoted solely to her jazz singing. She sang seven numbers in front of a live studio audience, five of which eventually aired on Dutch AVRO Television’s The Weekend Show. The camera focused on Vaughan, capturing the subtleties of her body language and facial expressions and revealing details, an intimacy, previously unseen by her European fans. Her eyes were nearly closed as she sang plaintive ballads like her mesmerizing “Over the Rainbow.” Tiny smiles were paired with a twinkle in her eyes or raised eyebrow as she prepared for especially difficult vocal turns or twists. Her white sequined mermaid gown swayed as her body internalized the beat, and the subtle movements of her arms defined both the macro and micro beats, especially during her languorously slow ballads. She was confident as she sang, calm and controlled, often serene in appearance.

But then the music stopped and the shy, more introverted Vaughan returned. She became uncomfortable and uneasy, overly aware of the cameras as she thanked the studio audience for their applause between numbers, announced her next tune, or explained a song’s history. After the final number of the set, an exhilarating up-tempo “Sometimes I’m Happy,” Vaughan thanked the studio audience one last time and blew an awkward farewell kiss into the camera.

Backstage Vaughan and her trio packed up their gear and traveled to Amsterdam for a midnight show at the famed Concertgebouw, home of the Royal Concertgebouw orchestra. Even though the concert didn’t sell out, the audience spilled onto the stage, sitting behind the band on risers, creating an intimacy and closeness in the cavernous hall. Vaughan, now wearing a form-fitting strapless black gown with white sequined trim on the bodice, headlined the second half of the concert. She began with her usual set opener, “If This Isn’t Love,” and effortlessly worked her way through a dozen numbers. Her banter, while still sparse, was more relaxed, and the audience’s enthusiasm increased as her set gained momentum, culminating with her usual finale, “How High the Moon.” This time, however, tenor saxophonist Don Byas, bassist Arvell Shaw, and drummer Wally Bishop, all featured on the program’s first half, joined Vaughan and her trio. With her virtuosity on full display, Vaughan scatted, traded fours with Byas, and urged her fellow musicians on during their solos as the energy in the hall continued to grow.

Vaughan was not perfect during her performance at the Concertgebouw. At times, her voice sounded less polished, and, surprisingly, an occasional note was uncharacteristically ever so slightly out of tune. But the energy of the evening was unmistakable and infectious. The jazz critics in the house gushed in amazement. “Sarah does magic with her voice, and in doing so she astonishes more than many a magician with his tricks. Through her magic she demonstrates a musicality, a refinement of taste and a humanity which many of her classical colleagues can envy her,” wrote Kees Diemer in the Vrije Volk, concluding, “This miraculous voice sparkled like a diamond in the nocturnal darkness of the Concertgebouw.” Michiel de Ruyter of the Parool tempered his praise, insisting that Ella Fitzgerald remained his favorite jazz singer, but conceded that Vaughan’s concert was “a rare experience.” “What one hears is a completely new musical instrument in the shape of a female figure,” he wrote. “One must constantly remain aware that in fact one doesn’t hear an instrument but a voice. Its range exceeds that of all other singers. Vaughan can color her sound more than anyone. Her phrasing, the rhythmic aspect of her singing, everything makes a purely instrumental impression, and the only sensible comparison possible would have to be drawn with the greatest of the instrumental soloists in modern jazz, a Charlie Parker or a Miles Davis.”⁵²

Offstage, as the band toured Europe, Vaughan worked to infuse levity and unpredictability into the daily grind. Always a prankster and mischief maker, she devised ways to keep her musicians on their toes, sometimes quite literally. During the European tour, Bright remembers her hiding the trio’s shoes moments before their curtain calls, forcing them to go onstage in stocking feet. Turnabout, of course, was fair play and the trio played their fair share of pranks on Vaughan. Tired of seeing Vaughan wear the same pink satin gown night after night, the trio buried it in a box outside. When Vaughan asked about the gown, the trio confessed nothing. Another time, the band prepared to go on in San Remo, Italy. “I would be the first to walk on stage,” Bright recalled. “As I’d pass by Sarah in the wings, she’d typically hand me a list of songs in the order she wanted to sing them. But on this night in Italy, as I passed her, she let the list drop to the floor on purpose to see if I’d bend down to get it.” Bright did not pick up the list, and he walked out to the piano. “That night we played what I wanted, and Sarah had to follow,” said Bright, laughing.

Vaughan never dropped the set list again. But she understood that this kind of fooling around and camaraderie was important. It disrupted their routines, warded off complacency, and ultimately made the music better—more spontaneous, energized, and fresh. It marked her status as one of the guys, just another musician in the band. And it symbolized the trust and closeness between Vaughan and her trio. Just like your family, your band had your back when you went out on a musical limb. “Sarah called me her ‘backbone’ and was very protective of me and all her musicians,” Bright explained.⁵³

“When we were on the road together, it was a family, man,” said road manager Johnnie Garry.⁵⁴ But like any family, especially one spending a lot of time together in unusual, often stressful situations, they had their squabbles and disagreements. Vaughan could be temperamental. While en route to a jazz festival in Knokke, Belgium, she disregarded their travel schedule and almost missed their train. Garry reprimanded Vaughan, and they argued. “I’m the boss, and you’re fired, and you can worry about how you’re going to get home,” Vaughan said. “Are you crazy?” he retorted. “I have all the tickets.”⁵⁵

The band arrived in Knokke on time for Vaughan’s concert. She performed the first set, and Ella Fitzgerald the second, after intermission. Then they joined forces for a grand finale. “I told Sassy, ‘whatever you do, don’t let her go into an up-tempo song to start,’” said Garry. “Well, at the end of her set Ella called Sarah to the stage, and began with ‘Somewhere there’s music, it’s where you are. Somewhere there’s heaven, how near or far.’”⁵⁶ Fitzgerald was singing “How High the Moon,” the lightning-fast bebop standard that had become one of her signature numbers. Even though Vaughan scatted her heart out to “How High the Moon” during the finale to her own sets every night, hers was a tribute to Fitzgerald and her now-legendary prowess. “And for the next hour they went at it!” said Gary.⁵⁷ “They were taking choruses and scatting. Sassy started singing, ‘Ella, baby, I’m leaving,’ and Ella sang, ‘Sassy, baby, I’m just beginning.’”⁵⁸ Back home, black newspapers ran a photo from the festival, with Vaughan looking on, arms crossed and deep in thought with her brow slightly furrowed, listening, as Fitzgerald stood at the mic singing.⁵⁹ “Both were swinging so hard that they were sweating,” said Garry. “Ella would pat Sarah’s forehead with a handkerchief, and Sarah did the same for her. The audience was sitting there in amazement.”⁶⁰

After the concert, Fitzgerald invited Garry to a party. Vaughan was there too and asked Garry how the finale had gone. “I told you not to let her begin with an uptempo song!” he reminded her. “She kicked your ass!”

Vaughan, the “Divine One,” was widely regarded as the queen of ballads. She specialized in songs like “Lover Man,” “Tenderly,” “Body and Soul,” “Over the Rainbow,” and soon a new tune by Erroll Garner called “Misty.” But Fitzgerald had been the queen of rhythm numbers since her early days with the Chick Webb band and her first hit, “A Tisket A Tasket,” from 1938. While Fitzgerald experienced leaner years during the late 1940s and early 1950s as Vaughan emerged as a star, her popularity exploded under the management of producer Norman Granz. He founded the influential Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series and, more recently, the Verve record label, which had released Fitzgerald’s now-iconic and extraordinarily popular collections of the great American songbooks. Granz took control of her career in 1955, and by 1958 Fitzgerald had eclipsed Vaughan in both fame and popularity, and she, “the First Lady of Song,” would remain the most visible, well-known jazz singer in the world until the end of both of their careers.

Vaughan’s successes in Europe during the summer of 1958 were part of a larger trend. During the previous six months, Fitzgerald, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Bud Shank, Bob Cooper, June Christy, Oscar Peterson, Benny Goodman, and Jazz at the Philharmonic had all also performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The popularity of jazz was surging in Europe, fueled in part by the regular broadcast of jazz on Voice of America, first by Leonard Feather’s program Jazz Club USA, which debuted in 1952, and then its replacement Music USA, launched on January 6, 1955. Hosted by Willis Conover, the program played daily in Europe, Africa, and Asia, usually during peak listening hours. In 1955, thirty million listeners enjoyed jazz in eighty countries, and during the next decade the audience grew to one hundred million.⁶¹ “Last year I sold more records in Europe than in America,” Vaughan reflected in 1959. “I guess people are people and cats are cats everywhere, regardless of how they think on politics.”⁶²

Vaughan’s European tour culminated with her appearances at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. It was the first expo since World War II, and celebrated the “rejuvenation of civilization from the destruction of war through the use of technology.”⁶³ The fair’s most iconic image, the Atomium, a massive model of a unit cell of an iron crystal, with nine spheres each representing a single atom, was, according to fair organizers, a “symbol of a peaceful world.” During its six-month run, between April 17 and October 19, more than forty-one million people from all walks of life visited the sprawling five-hundred-acre site. It housed an amusement park; gardens with illuminated dancing water fountains; seventy cafes and restaurants; an International Palace of Science; demonstrations by the Frogmen, deep sea divers exploring a huge tank; exhibits of fine art; countless concerts, including an installation of Edward Varese’s groundbreaking Poème Electronique in the Philips Pavilion; and pavilions representing the United Nations, Red Cross, and Catholic Church, as well as fifty countries, each sharing their vision for the future. It was a bustling coming together of the world, a momentary thaw in the Cold War, and the impetus behind Vaughan’s tour of Europe.

On July 29, 1958, Vaughan and her trio began the first of six nights performing at the American Pavilion during “American Days.” She performed twice a night and shared the bill with soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, who immigrated to Paris in 1950, and the Newport International Youth Band, assembled for the fair. The U.S. State Department asked producer George Wein, the former proprietor of Storyville in Boston and founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, which he launched in 1954, to present a program representing America’s most vibrant musical art: jazz. He excelled at creating programming that demonstrated the diversity and history of jazz. Bechet represented the early roots of jazz in New Orleans, Vaughan the sounds of bebop and modern jazz, and the International Youth Band the future and growing international influence of jazz. Voice of America’s Willis Conover emceed. All of the acts returned for the show’s grand finale: an ad-lib blues jam session featuring all of the musicians on the program.

“After almost every concert, I’d hang out with Sarah Vaughan and Johnnie Garry, her road manager at the time,” Wein wrote in his memoir. “One night, at about one o’clock in the morning, we went to a bar to have a drink, where we received some antagonism from a group of intoxicated Americans who voiced their disapproval of having a black man and woman drinking at the same bar as they did. It looked as if there might be some serious trouble. I’m not a fighting man, but I joined Johnnie in standing up to challenge these drunken jerks. They backed down and left the bar, to my great relief.”⁶⁴

It was a chilling reminder of the racial intolerance that awaited Vaughan and her trio when they returned home. It was the same brand of racism that prompted many African American jazz artists, including Bechet, Josephine Baker, Bud Powell, and eventually Nina Simone, to relocate to Europe. And it was a stark contrast to the way the U.S. State Department portrayed America’s race relations abroad. Race—the inhumanity of segregation, Jim Crow, and the way that white America treated its black citizens—had long been America’s Achilles’ heel, a source of criticism from the international community, especially the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1955, as Martin Luther King Jr. led the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, ushering in a new phase of the black freedom movement, the U.S. State Department enlisted jazz to rehabilitate the country’s tarnished image. They designated prominent African American jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington as goodwill ambassadors and sent them around the world to promote American freedom and democracy. It was a calculated move that embraced jazz’s ever-growing international popularity, a way to use American culture as a more subtle form of propaganda. Performing abroad, black jazz artists became symbols of racial harmony and equality. They represented the ideal of a color-blind American democracy, despite the tensions and intolerance at home. And jazz, with its improvisation, fluid ensemble dynamics, and perceived spontaneity, embodied American democracy and freedom too. For many, jazz was the United States’ most important, resonant cultural export.⁶⁵

The American Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair wrestled with similar tensions. It was the largest international exhibit of American culture during the 1950s, and the State Department wanted it to be a “silent ambassador for American ideals.”⁶⁶ It was designed to be a testament to America’s vision of democracy, freedom, and an enthusiastic embrace of capitalism—all essential to counter the evils of communism, embodied by the Soviet Pavilion, located, conveniently enough, across from the American Pavilion. Surprisingly, however, the American Pavilion also included an exhibition called “Unfinished Work” that addressed the United States’ problems and its commitment to fixing them, in particular its problem with race. Displays attempted to explain American racism while discussing the work of the emerging civil rights movement. The exhibit was controversial and was shut down following complaints from powerful southern congressmen offended by the exhibit’s portrayal of the unrest in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the federal government mandated that the city desegregate its public schools.⁶⁷

By the time Vaughan, Bechet, and their sidemen took the stage at the end of July, they were token minorities, remnants of the State Department’s attempts to present the United States as tolerant, welcoming of diversity, and proud of black culture. It was an idealized, largely unrealistic portrayal, but it was also in many ways an improvement. Unlike the fair’s pavilions devoted to the Belgian Congo, which depicted an ideal relationship between colonizer and colonized in the “Congolese Village,” a human zoo trading in notions of primitivism and exoticism, Vaughan and Bechet presented an alternative image of blackness to the world, one that celebrated black intellect, creativity, and genius, not to mention modernity.

Vaughan’s appearances at the World’s Fair represented an opportunity for George Wein too. He believed that the time they spent together that week, plus his willingness to stand up against racism at the bar in Brussels, strengthened his relationship with Vaughan. He hoped it would help him gain her trust, something she rarely bestowed. He’d known her since 1951, when she began singing at his Boston club, Storyville, and even though she could be difficult to work with, she was brilliant. “I worshiped Sarah as an artist. No one could emulate her supreme musicianship and quality of voice,” he wrote. “Sarah was already a star, but I felt that she could reach an ever greater audience.” In the summer of 1958, Vaughan was seeking new management, and Wein wanted to take her career to the next level, in much the same way as Norman Granz was doing for Ella Fitzgerald. So one night in Brussels, Wein turned to Vaughan and asked, “Sassy, why don’t you let me be your manager?”

Vaughan looked at Wein, puzzled. “How can you be my manager?” she asked. “Aren’t you still going with the girl in Boston?”

The girl in Boston was Wein’s future wife, Joyce. “It surprised me that this was a deciding factor,” Wein explained. “I never had eyes for Sarah Vaughan.”⁶⁸ He advised Vaughan that mixing her personal and professional lives harmed her career, but Vaughan wanted a manager involved in every facet of her life. Someone to travel with her, share her love of music, and love her. She wanted to re-create the arrangement she had had with George Treadwell, but hopefully this time with a happier-ever-after ending.

Vaughan had just experienced a tremendous decade. With her pop and jazz successes, not to mention her growing international acclaim, it must have seemed that her career, propelled along by the power of her voice, had unlimited potential. But the music industry was on the verge of a seismic shift. Audiences’ tastes and consumption habits would change, and everybody in the business—record executives, disc jockeys, and the musicians themselves—would scramble to keep up. Vaughan, along with her jazz contemporaries, would struggle to find where she belonged in this new musical landscape. She would need an excellent manager, someone possessing the business savvy, connections, and clout of a George Wein or Norman Granz.