In 1951, Columbia Records released one of the most important vocal jazz albums of all time, Night in Manhattan, by Lee Wiley, with pianist Joe Bushkin “and his swinging strings.” Shortly afterward, Wiley went to work for the first time at a club called Storyville in Boston, which was owned and operated by future Newport Jazz Festival impresario George Wein. It was at this point that she was first heard by, and began to exert an influence on, a pair of local singers named Teddi King and Barbara Lea. Of the two, Lea sounds by far the closer to the older woman’s burnished, smoky sound. Still, even while King reflected other influences in her sound and her overall approach, both women lived up to Wiley’s ideal of cabaret jazz.
Both Lea and King were born in 1929, a short while before Wiley came to New York and hit the big time; Lea in Detroit, Michigan, on April 10, King in Revere, Massachusetts, on September 18. Both grew up singing as children, teaching themselves songs when and where they could; King studied piano as well. Lea gravitated toward jazz at an early age, especially when she later found that she could overcome her considerable stage fright (shades of Lee Wiley) when she found the safety in numbers of a band; King’s first idea was to become a legit actress, and she only began to study singing seriously when she realized that this skill would give her access to a wider variety of roles. Both were singing with local bands in Boston in the late forties, where Lea had come to major in music theory at Wellesley.
Teddi King, who died at the age of forty-eight in 1977, is something of an anomaly. In the beginning at least, she seems to have regarded herself as a “pure” jazz singer, having been raised on Billie Holiday, Mildred Bailey (and of course Wiley), and, by the time she established herself as a professional singer, she had fallen deeply under the sway of Sarah Vaughan. Her producers, as we shall see, sometimes had other ideas.
King’s career began in earnest in 1949 when she won a singing contest at the Boston RKO Theatre. Shortly thereafter, she was singing with the then local pianist Nat Pierce, who was leading a “progressive” orchestra in the approximate style of Woody Herman (shortly thereafter, Pierce would become a prominent arranger for Herman himself). Through Pierce she had the opportunity to make her first record, which was done for the local Motif label. Supposedly, King was trying to reinvent herself as the white Sarah Vaughan (a singer who, perhaps not coincidentally, had also muchly impressed Lee Wiley), while the record company itself pressured her to sound as much like June Christy as she could. Whatever the influence, the finished disc, a novelty called “Goodbye, Mr. Chops” (presumably by an area composer), became something of a local hit.
As it happens, King’s early recordings, made between 1949 and 1955 in Boston and New York, are probably, overall, the best of her career. Teddi King: In the Beginning, 1949–1954 (Baldwin Street Music) is ostensibly a collection of early rarities, but actually includes some of the very best, not to mention jazziest, singing King ever put down on records. A balance of standards and amiably dopey tunes (“Mr. Chops,” surprisingly, is funnier than it sounds, and “Tea Kettle and Coffee Pot” somehow percolates nicely), the set includes five boppish numbers with Nat Pierce, and some unusual early song demos with just piano. The core of the CD, however, is the group of six numbers she made with George Shearing’s classic 1952 quintet: Here she blends effortlessly with the group’s famous doubled-and-tripled-note mix of piano, guitar, and vibes. She also concentrates on offbeat standards—a move that would soon be a trademark—like “Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere.” These are some of the nicest sides Shearing ever made with a vocalist, and considering that he’s recorded with everyone from Dakota Staton to Nat Cole to Peggy Lee to Nancy Wilson to Mel Tormé to Joe Williams to John Pizzarelli to Carmen McRae to Ernestine Anderson to Michael Feinstein, that’s really saying something.
In the early fifties, King made three albums produced by George Wein, for his Storyville label: two 10″ LPs, ’Round Midnight (1953), done with just Beryl Booker on piano, and Miss Teddi King, with a quartet featuring pianist Jimmy Jones and trumpeter Ruby Braff (1954), and one 12″ album, Now in Vogue, which varies between the rhythm section and a more ambitious group that adds four horns. The Storyville albums, although not as well recorded as her later RCA sets, are consistently rewarding. Another concert producer, Jack Kleinsinger, later coined the useful term “cabaret jazz” for this kind of singing. King and Barbara Lea are both—like Wiley—more lyric-specific than Anita O’Day deconstructing “Tea for Two,” but far looser and jazzier than, say, a Mabel Mercer waltzing over loves gone by.
The first Storyville album, ’Round Midnight, with just piano, is the straightest of the three, but King loosens up considerably on the second thanks to the presence of Milt Hinton and Jo Jones on bass and drums, as well as pianist Jimmy Jones’s Basie-like accompaniment—not to mention Ruby Braff’s obligatory obbligato prodding. There are slow numbers here, too, like the haunting “Love Is a Now and Then Thing” and “It’s All in Your Mind”—possibly learned from Vaughan. Now in Vogue is quite strong, too, if not as much so as the previous sets, in that King sounds a little uncomfortable with the cool jazz-style horn section. Still, the slower numbers (particularly “This Is Always”) and the trio-only numbers are just dandy; there are also two fine tips-of-the-bonnet to Wiley, “Fools Fall in Love” and “A Ship Without a Sail,” songs King could have learned from no one else.
In 1955, she was given a shot at major label success via a contract with RCA that resulted in three 12″ LPs, as well as a series of singles. The RCA material in toto is not as consistently excellent as the Storyville output, even though she was given two outstanding orchestrators, Al Cohn and George Siravo, and apparently allowed to pursue her taste for eclectic material. On the Storyville projects, King seems to have perfected a sound and a style all her own, whereas she sounds more generic on some of the RCA material, which runs the gamut from moving and/or swinging to disappointingly dull. It’s neither jazz nor cabaret at times but straight-down-the-middle pop singing—not of the sparkling Doris Day-Margaret Whiting variety but of the comparatively stiff Giselle MacKenzie—Gogi Grant—even Jane Morgan kind. This is especially true of the seventeen singles she cut for the corporation, but, as with the three RCA albums, there’s some fine stuff there, too. Like many artists, King seems to have courted commercial success at the same time she chafed against it. In 1954, while trying to attract the attention of a major label, she took the iniative to produce her own session. The results turned out to be much more mainstream pop-oriented than anything that RCA or Coral would foist upon her: For an arranger, she hired her friend Dick Jacobs, a highly conservative hitmaker, and they picked four absolutely forgettable pop tunes (though I confess to a certain fondness for “The Dragon,” a very late-in-the-game slice of faux-chinoiserie by Gladys Shelley) to sing.
The three RCA albums, Bidin’ My Time (1955, with Cohn) and To You (1956, Siravo), and A Girl and Her Songs (1957, Siravo), have their strengths and their weaknesses. “The Way You Look Tonight,” which opens To You, could be absolutely any voice on a jukebox or on a Sunday night TV variety show. She has a very pretty voice, but here, at least, not a distinctive one. It’s highly competent and professional but lacking any spark of personality or individual style; this isn’t a singer one would compare with Wiley, Christy, or Vaughan.
However, the first track on A Girl and Her Songs, “A Sailboat in the Moonlight,” swings in a hot and lusty way I wouldn’t have thought her capable of. In fact, “Sailboat” is only one tune out of a four-song session that marks the best of her RCA dates; backed by trumpeter Doc Severinson and rhythm section only, these four titles are a worthy follow-up to her earlier work with Ruby Braff. Among the other tunes here are a second item she learned from Billie Holiday, “Laughing at Life,” and “My Future Just Passed” from the repertoire of both Annette Hanshaw and Kay Starr.
Although King sounds a trifle precious here and there, overall there are more than enough inspired performances throughout to keep the albums interesting: “How Come You Do Me like You Do” finds King’s Wiley and traditional jazz roots showing through, and the song’s bluesy edge turns out to be surprisingly compatible with her (at times) rather precious vibrato. At the same time, Jonah Jones’s insistent trumpet obbligato is by itself worth the price of admission. As with the work of Barbara Lea, part of the fun is hearing songs one doesn’t often encounter on fifties vocal albums: “How Come You Do Me” being one, Cole Porter’s “Where Have You Been,” and Eckstine’s “Mister, You’ve Gone and Got the Blues.”
King seems to have had a comparatively freer hand in choosing the songs on her albums, but RCA’s A&R men most certainly picked out the contemporaneous pop songs that she recorded as singles. I can only imagine what she thought of some of these second-rate tunes, but there is some outstanding singing here as well. Surprisingly, she recorded Irving Berlin’s 1932 “Say It Isn’t So” as a single, and the result was a dark but swinging ballad; even more strangely, she also recorded “There’s So Much More,” a Rodgers and Hart obscurity (from the 1931 Americas Sweetheart) as a 45. Particularly rewarding are the other movie and show tunes she cut as singles, such as “Traveling Down a Lonely Road,” an English-language version of the theme from Fellini’s La Strada. There’s also “A Ride on a Rainbow” from Jule Styne’s TV musical version of Ruggles of Red Gap and “Married I Can Always Get” from Gordon Jenkins’s update of Manhattan Tower. These are some of her finest vocals, proving that she could do the mainstream pop thing whenever she wanted, and making one wonder why she was never tapped by either Broadway or Hollywood. (True, King was only four foot eleven, but she was also extraordinarily fair of face.)
On one of her first RCA dates in 1955, she recorded the title song from the forthcoming Broadway musical Mr. Wonderful. It became a hit for her, her only entry of note on the Billboard charts. For the rest of her life she was lukewarm about it. It’s neither the best nor the worst of her RCA singles (admittedly, Peggy Lee’s Decca version is a superior sample of pop singing). But, like Sylvia Syms and “Get Me to the Church on Time” and Felicia Sanders and “Where Is Your Heart,” King’s “Mr. Wonderful” is an important reminder of an age when a quality-driven but marginal artist such as King could actually have a hit record.
After leaving RCA, she made one album, All the King’s Songs, and some miscellaneous tracks for Coral. All the King’s Songs is no better or worse than the RCA LPs, although there are no surprises like the Doc Severinson quintet sessions to liven things up, nor are there offbeat tunes (like “I Poured My Heart into a Song” on Bidin’). It’s a treat, though, to hear the verse to “Flamingo.”
Teddi King pretty much falls off the radar in the sixties. Friend and researcher Ted Ono theorizes that the singer signed an exclusive agreement with the international circuit of Playboy Clubs, which forbade her from appearing anywhere else, including on TV or making recordings. She was also a victim of the same cultural devastation that blighted the career of every other quality singer of the era.
In the seventies King resurfaced, more marginalized than ever, and began to appear in clubs and record again just as she was diagnosed with the disease lupus. As was made clear at a 2002 tribute to her, produced by another old Boston colleague, Richard Sudhalter, for the JVC Jazz Festival, the disease ennobled her. King already was much loved by everyone in the traditional jazz community, but by devoting so much of her energy to fighting and finding a cure for lupus, she began to be spoken of as a saint. Indeed, at the 2002 tribute, King was generally described as a combination of Ella Fitzgerald and Florence Nightingale. She had made three new albums after 1973 (none of which, to my ears anyhow, is in the same league with the best of her fifties work) and was working on a fourth, a set of duets on Ira Gershwin tunes, when the lupus took her life in 1977.
At the time of her death, she was loved especially by the fraternity of lovers of jazz and the Great American Songbook who were based in the New England area. They regarded Teddi King as a genuine star, much the same way that jazz fans in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia regarded Etta Jones and Teri Thornton. If Ella Fitzgerald and Lee Wiley herself are remembered as first-rate jazz-pop singers, I hope it doesn’t sound cruel to regard Teddi King as a very credible second-tier artist. And at her best, she was even more than that.
When Barbara Lea came out to do her one number at the aforementioned 2002 JVC salute to Teddi King, I remember thinking that it would be more appropriate if the Wein office would put its considerable resources behind a major effort to promote Lea herself. Here was a woman, I was thinking, who has devoted decades and decades of her life in service to jazz and the Great American Songbook. She’s done nothing but the highest-quality songs in the company of the best musicians she can get. Without sounding as if she’s imitating her idol, Lee Wiley, Lea has nonetheless kept the memory of Wiley alive, sharing something of the older woman’s husky voice if not quite her open, earthy eroticism, as well as Wiley’s tradition of teaming with the best traditional jazz and swing players. (That thought was somewhat ungrateful: It would probably be impossible for Wein and Co., who have consistently supported her in any way they could for more than fifty years, to do more for her.)
Lea inspires writers as well as musicians and singers: It’s not surprising that such erudite player-scholars as Sudhalter and Loren Schoenberg would collaborate with her whenever they could, because she’s just as much a historian as they are. About the only thing Lea never achieved was an audience big enough to keep her working. In this book, I speak of both Lee Wiley and Teddi King as somewhat marginal, yet compared to Lea, despite her many excellent qualities, they’re practically mainstream.
Born Barbara Ann LeCocq in Detroit in 1929, Lea came to Boston to study music theory at Wellesley College. She quickly became part of Bean Town’s bustling jazz scene, and in the inner circle as it were, of Messrs. Wein and Charlie Bourgeois. When Lee Wiley played Storyville for the first time in 1951, the twenty-two-year-old Lea was collecting admissions for Wein. The cover charge was $1.25, and she never could arrange to deliver exactly the right amount of money; she told me that Wein would be more upset when the till wound up with more rather than less money than it was supposed to. “George didn’t mind if we were short, but he didn’t want me to clip anybody by mistake” In any case, Lea had plenty of opportunity to listen to—and study—the great Lee Wiley. Within a short while, Lea was one of the few whom Wiley considered a close friend.
Lea moved to New York for the first time in 1952, and essentially her career has been based there for the last fifty-plus years. In 1954, she made her first recording for the short-lived Cadillac label; the producers wanted her to do one “commercial” side, a pleasant piece of fluff entitled “Bet You a Kiss,” while she apparently selected the flip, the Arlen-Mercer standard “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” Actually, the pop side is quite appealing, if for no other reason than the naïveté of the enterprise, not on the part of Miss Lea—already an accomplished vocalist—but on the part of the producers. It’s hard to imagine that they could possibly have imagined this charming number was “commercial” enough to dent the charts.
In quick succession, Lea made three fine albums: A Woman in Love, done for Riverside in 1955, one of producer Orrin Keepnews’s first sessions and a very late entry in the 10″ LP format, and two for Prestige, Barbara Lea (1956) and Lea in Love (1957), both featuring New England trumpeter Johnny Windhurst. Clearly, Lea was a later bloomer than her friend Teddi King, who was reaching the apex of her career just as Lea was starting hers. However, the Riverside and Prestige records show that her style was fully formed by her mid-twenties, and that she had already perfected her own Wiley-inspired brand of cabaret jazz—too hot for the Blue Angel and too formal for Birdland. Lea was Wiley’s successor, but never her imitator.
Like King, Lea ceased recording in the late fifties, and wasn’t heard from again on disc until the seventies. In the interim, she worked as an actress (in off-Broadway, summer stock, and regional theater), got married three times, moved back and forth to the West Coast, and matriculated at San Fernando Valley State College, where she received an M.A. in drama. Lea did everything, it seems, except sing professionally. She gradually eased back into making music with the encouragement of old friends like Alec Wilder and Marian McPartland.
After a twenty-year absence from the studios, Lea returned, appropriately, with the 1976 Remembering Lee Wiley on Audiophile. For the next thirty years or so, her output was steady and consistent. She’s recorded well over a dozen albums, most for George Buck’s New Orleans-based Audiophile label and producer Wendell Echols. She’s participated in a diverse variety of concept projects, often song-books—Willard Robison, Hoagy Carmichael, Noel Coward—as well as in such historical projects as the first recording of Duke Ellington’s last theatrical work, Pousse-Café.
My favorite Lea album, however, is not a theme album at all but You’re the Cats! This 1989 effort is a conceptless collection of great songs hardly anyone else ever bothers to do—like Rodgers and Hart’s title track from The Hot Heiress, the Gershwins’ ”Do What You Do,” and two infrequently heard pieces by Fats Waller, “Dixie Cinderella” and “There’s a Man in My Life.” The accompaniment is just as good as the material: a later edition of the Yank Lawson-Bob Haggart Jazz Band, also known as the World’s Greatest Jazz Band. Whenever I listen to it, I wonder anew why more people haven’t heard of Barbara Lea. She followed this with, among other things, The Melody Lingers On, a project co-produced by the late scholar Roy Hemming, and inspired by the title of one of his books on popular music; it contains some wonderful songs I never thought I’d hear anyone sing after the 78 era, like “A Rainy Night in Rio” and “Humpty Dumpty Heart.”
It would be overdramatic to call Lea a local legend or a New York treasure; perhaps her main virtue is that she represents a high level of musicianship, an overall quality of material, presentation, and professionalism that was once taken for granted. If the three major Bostoncentric female jazz vocalists—Wiley, King, and Lea—are a family of sorts, perhaps they might be compared to a far more famous family from the same area. Lee Wiley is like Joe Kennedy, the founder of a dynasty; Teddi King is like JFK, who had a short, brilliant career and left us at an early age; Barbara Lea is the Teddy Kennedy of this bunch, who did consistently good work for decade after decade.
In her own way, she is also a pioneer—the first singing scholar and so the spiritual mother of such major cabaret singer-historians as Michael Feinstein, Mary Cleere Haran, Susannah McCorkle, Andrea Marcovicci, and more recently Maude Maggart.
As late as the excellent 2006 release Black Butterfly (a remarkable album done with Loren Schoen-berg’s big band), Barbara Lea showed she was still capable of putting a song over and singing a lyric as if she meant it. By the time of her eightieth birthday, in April 2009, she had unofficially retired from performing, due to health issues. But throughout the seventies, eighties, nineties, and into the twenty-first century, it was possible to catch her with some regularity in New York, and almost everyone who sings jazz or cabaret in this city had been to hear her at one time or another—and learned something from her.