Jon Hendricks
Singer with a talent for vocalese – setting words to jazz solos – who later founded his own ‘vocestra’
JON HENDRICKS, who has died aged 96, was a jazz singer, lyricist and supreme master of the difficult art of vocalese – setting words to recorded jazz solos. John Carl Hendricks was born on September 16 1921 in Newark, Ohio. His father was a minister of religion and his mother led the choir in church. Hendricks, who had 14 siblings, sang in the choir from the age of seven. The family moved to Toledo when he was a teenager and it was there that he began singing professionally.
He worked for some time at a nightclub, where his accompanist was Art Tatum, one of the great virtuosi of jazz piano, then at the start of his career.
After serving in the US Army during the war, Hendricks took a degree in English Literature at Toledo University, with hopes of going on to study law. He was still singing around local jazz clubs, and on a night when Charlie Parker appeared as the guest star, Hendricks, with great trepidation, joined him briefly on stage.
Later, after learning of his plans for the future, Parker told him, “You’re not a lawyer; you’re a musician.” Partly as result of Parker’s urging, Hendricks moved to New York. He worked as a clerk during the day, writing songs and singing occasional gigs at night. He sold a few songs but met with little success as a performer.
This was when he first encountered vocalese and was captivated by the challenge it presented. He got together with another singer, Dave Lambert, and they began working up an act.
It was four years before they had a deal for a vocalese album, a set of Count Basie numbers, with piano, bass, drums and a choir. They asked the singer Annie Ross, herself no mean exponent of vocalese, to lead the choir. Unsurprisingly, it proved impossible to get 12 choristers to sound like Count Basie’s band. As a last resort, they decided to do it all themselves, using multi-track recording. The resulting record, Sing a Song of Basie, by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, was the surprise jazz hit of 1958.
The first album was quickly followed by others, two more in 1958 alone, and by the end of that year, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (LH & R to their fans) were appearing regularly on national television, at major concert halls and the smartest nightclubs.
Experienced live, without the aid of recording tricks, they were even more impressive than on record. The vocal gymnastics, the tongue-twisting streams of words, the pinpoint accuracy of delivery, all these were served up with apparently casual ease.
The group arrived at a moment when jazz was going through a rather glum and earnest period, and cheered everyone up – everyone, that is, except the more puritanical members of the jazz press, who disapproved of the group’s cheery demeanour and the “triviality” of Hendricks’s lyrics. They had their answer when Thelonious Monk publicly declared that Jon Hendricks was the only person he would trust to add words to any of his tunes.
Annie Ross left LH & R in 1962, to be replaced by Yolanda Bavan (which made it LH & B) for a further two years, after which they disbanded.
Hendricks was then aged 43. An approachable, affable man, he went about his business for the rest of his long life with such unhurried calm that it is only when his list of later achievements is drawn up that his true stature emerges.
Among other things, he moved to London for several years in 1968 then taught at two American universities, writing jazz reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle and creating a stage show, The Evolution of the Blues. This went on to run for five years at the Broadway Theatre, San Francisco, followed by runs in Los Angeles and New York.
He formed another vocal group, Hendricks and Co, which at one stage included the young Bobby Mcferrin. The vocal quartet Manhattan Transfer, in some ways the successors of LH & R, gained a Grammy award in 1986, with their album, Vocalese, for which Hendricks wrote all the vocalese parts.
In the 1990s he joined the cast of Wynton Marsalis’s oratorio, Blood On The Fields, which toured the world and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
In 2000 he was appointed Professor of Jazz Studies at the University of Toledo, where he founded and led a large vocal group which he called his “Vocestra”.
He was also perhaps the best male jazz singer of his time.
Jon Hendricks was married twice. Both of his wives, and a son and daughter of his first marriage, predeceased him. He is survived by a daughter of his second marriage and a son and daughter of his first marriage.
Jon Hendricks, born September 16 1921, died November 22 2017