From the archives
Geoffrey Smith on Mildred Bailey, a jazz singer with a natural musicianship and a flair for communication
In the pantheon of distinguished jazz singers, Mildred Bailey (1903-51) remains frustratingly elusive. When she joined Paul Whiteman in
1929 she became the first full-time female band vocalist, producing a string of hits, most notably Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Rockin’ Chair’, which made her known as ‘The Rockin’ Chair Lady’. And that’s also the title of a new two-cd set (Retrospective RTS 4344), surveying the Bailey career and offering a superb portrait of an unjustly neglected artist who was as much a favourite with musicians as with the public, a pioneering white singer with a jazz feeling of her own.
Indeed, the tracks on this collection comprise a who’s who of Swing Era luminaries, including the likes of Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson, both of whom were Bailey devotees. In fact Teddy Wilson preferred Bailey to his legendary vocal partner, Billie Holiday: the starry session in which he, Bunny Berigan and Johnny Hodges join forces as ‘Mildred Bailey and her Alley Cats’, is a particular joy, demonstrating how sympathetic her peers found Bailey’s graceful, lilting, supremely musical style.
But perhaps those very qualities have undermined her legacy. Some fans may crave something more obvious than Bailey’s perfect phrasing and intonation, the subtle way she gets inside a melody to reveal its meaning, effortlessly riding the beat without hammering it into the ground. She was a natural, and her long time husband, vibraphonist and leader Red Norvo, was especially moved by her perfect diction: ‘When she sang “More than You Know”, I understood the words for the first time.’
That tenderly swinging performance is here, along with such Bailey classics as ‘Where are You?’, ‘Thanks for the Memory’ and ‘Willow Tree’. This catalogue of delights makes you regret all the more that, while her art was happy, her life was not. Chronically overweight throughout her career and given to violent mood swings, she died in her forties from diabetes and heart trouble. But her art retained its purity and poise to the end.