A Whole Lot of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (and LH & Bavan): Saturday Music Club

The two versions of the trio that were the greatest US exponents of jazz vocalese...the first episode of the third season of Fargo features their recording of "Moanin'" prominently...the first album stack features that recording, from LH&R's first CBS LP:


Jumping back a year or so, to their first album:

And a collection that includes the second album, from Pacific Jazz, The Swingers!, and other sessions:


And then their third album, with Joe Williams, Sing Along with Basie:


Live video tracks and fellow travelers:

The second album with CBS: LH&R Sing Ellington (and it continues to include the third CBS album High Flying, which begins with "Come on Home" and ends with "Mr. PC", and a few other tracks--which will follow, though you might have to hit the "Watch on YouTube" button when and if it pops up below):

The post-High Flying tracks are 
"Walkin'"
"This Here" aka "Dis Hyuh"
"Swingin' Till the Girls Come Home"
"Twist City"
"Just a Little Bit of Twist"
"A Night in Tunisia"
and an alternate take of "A Night in Tunisia"









The Real Ambassadors (with the Brubeck Trio, Carmen McRae and Louis Armstrong):


A Walt Kelly Xmas-Season last (I think) recording by the first trio:

Thanks to Jim Cameron for the reminder of this one...from

Ross leaves, and Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan go forward; 
Live At Newport '63:


LH&B's second album, Basin Street East:


And their third and last...they break up, and in 1966, Lambert killed by a truck while fixing someone's tire for them on a roadside:


Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan on Jazz Casual (NET/National Educational Television 1963)


And a stack of video recordings, led off by a 1975 Soundstage episode featuring Ross and Hendricks:

Abbey (Lincoln) and Annie (Ross): singers, composers, and sometimes actors: Saturday Music Club on Monday

Born within a fortnight of each other in 1930, Ross as Annabelle Allan Short on 25 July, Lincoln as Anna Marie Wooldridge on 6 August (34 years to the day before I was}, they both came softly but impressively into the jazz scene in the early 1950s, and did great solo work and were also important components of major bands/choruses of their era: Ross in Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and Lincoln in the Max Roach Quintet. They also had interesting side careers in drama, not solely playing musicians, but also that. Ross's first career was as a child actor; Lincoln also moved to California at not quite so young an age, and got a bit of a boost from recording for the film The Girl Can't Help It...

Annie Ross discography; drama and more
Abbey Lincoln discography; drama and more

Annie Ross: "The Way You Look Tonight"

Milt Jackson (vibes) Blossom Dearie (piano) Percy Heath (bass) Kenny Clarke (drums) Annie Ross (vocals) NYC, April 1, 1952

Annie Ross: "Cry Me a River"

Les Condon, Jimmy Deuchar (trumpet) Ken Wray (trombone) Derek Humble (alto sax) Al Cornish, Don Rendell (tenor sax) Ronnie Ross (baritone sax) Damian Robinson (piano) Lennie Bush (bass) Tony Crombie (drums) Annie Ross (vocals) London 1955

Annie Ross (with Lambert and Hendricks): "Twisted" and L, H & R with Joe William: "Every Day I Have the Blues"  with Count Basie (piano), Freddie Green (guitar), Ed Jones (bass), and Sonny Payne (drums) (with a scrap of Judy Garland appended) 

Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, with the Les McCann Trio: "Four"

Annie Ross: "Annie's Lament"

George Wallington (piano) Roger Ram Ramirez (organ) Percy Heath (bass) Art Blakey (drums) Annie Ross (vocals) NYC, October 9, 1952

Annie Ross: "Skylark"

Annie Ross: "Prisoner of Life" from Short Cuts

Nothing but a Man with Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln: "Do Nothing 'Til You Hear from Me"

Abbey Lincoln: "Lonely House"

Abbey Lincoln: "Left Alone"

Abbey Lincoln with the Max Roach Chorus and Orchestra: "Lonesome Lover"

Abbey Lincoln: "Blue Monk"

Abbey Lincoln:  "First Song"

Abbey Lincoln:  "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise"

Annie Ross: "All the Things You Are"

Two tributaries to our overlooked cultural flow, or Toshiko Akiyoshi, Cyd Charisse and Ann Landers walk into a studio to eulogize Fred Allen, and Mimi Perrin writes and performs noirish jazz lyrics in French with her sextet before turning to translating Le Carre, Erdrich and Sheckley...

The Fred Allen Show: 1945-1949  #23, "King for a Day" with Jack Benny (essentially the end of their looong-term "feud" running joke), was the first episode I heard as a kid, on a library cassette ca. 1974...at that point, I wasn't aware that the insurgent Stop the Music game show had pulled Allen's CBS radio show from the #1 rated national series to cancellation (by the sponsor) by the end of the next season (Edgar Bergen's series on NBC also suffered enormously in timeslot competition with the ABC radio hit).

Ad-libbing in the sketch: Jack Benny, to Allen, while trying to retain his trousers from the stooges pulling them from him: "You haven't seen the end of me!"

Fred Allen: "Well, it can't be long now..."

1. The What's My Line? taped the day after the death of panelist Fred Allen, a giant of network radio comedy, among much else...oddly enough, as the cast of regulars, at Allen's widow Portland Hoffa's request, proceed to do a regular episode, as much as possible, with a single famous "Mystery Guest"(actor/dancer Cyd Charisse this week), the three other guests were all public figures as well, two of whom, at least, have become over the years at least as famous as Charisse: newspaper advice columnist Eppie Lederer, aka Ann Landers, only some months into her career; and jazz pianist and composer Toshiko Akiyoshi, newly matriculated at the Berklee School of Music (Steve Allen invites her to be on his The Tonight Show when the panel learns of her budding career). The first guest is Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante, at that time probably better known, if not to the panel, than all the women except Charisse.

2. Jeannine "Mimi" Perrin, 1926-2010. Having studied jazz piano and the English language in her youth, her first public career was as accompanist and backup singer for the likes of Blossom Dearie when the latter played in France...in 1959, Perrin put together the first version of her vocalese choral sextet Les Double Six, inspired by King Pleasure and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross among others. This ran though about 1966, recording frequently with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones and on their own (the Swingle Singers was an offshoot of Les Six); she loved to write noirish lyrics for the jazz arrangements she and the Six recorded, noting that French "doesn't swing", or at least it doesn't have the same sort of bounce in that context English does ...and a recurring tuberculosis led to her giving up public singing. So, she turned to translation of literature as her primary career by 1972. Among those whose work she translated into French were Robert Sheckley, Roger Zelazny, James Blish, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Nicola Barker, Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, Ha Jin; in the 1990s, she was the default translator of John Le Carre. She also was particularly inclined toward translating the biographies of performing artists (Nina Simone's among the less surprising examples) and related folk. 

Les Double Six: "Four Brothers"; "Moanin'"

Not solely spoken words: strands joined in/by rap and since: Saturday Music Club on Wednesday

from art-song recitative through gospel singing speech and on through other spoken rhythms to music explorations and traditions, a slice through some of the strands that were drawn upon when rap began to take its own shape in the latest 1960s/earliest 1970s in the work of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets...and then beyond.






Marti Newland (with Artis Wodehouse): Rain Song (composed by Will Marion Cook, 1912)


Rev. W. A. Donaldson and Congregation: "Baptizing Scene"
Marion Williams: "Didn't It Rain"


The Memphis Jug Band: "On the Road Again"


Chris Bouchillon: "Talking Blues"
Woody Guthrie: "Talking Blues"

Pete Seeger (of the Almanac Singers): "Talking Union"

King Pleasure (with Blossom Dearie and James Moody et al.): "Moody's Mood for Love"
Langston Hughes: "The Weary Blues"

Lord Buckley: "The Nazz"
Ken Nordine: "White"

Champion Jack Dupree: "[Going Down to] Big Leg Emma's"
Willie Dixon: "Walking the Blues"


Halim El-Dabh: "Leiyla and the Poet" (1959)

Steve Reich: "It's Gonna Rain" (1965)

The Last Poets: Made in Amerikkka (excerpt) (NSFW language at points)


Gil Scott-Heron: "Brother"

Gil Scott-Heron Band: "Johannesburg" (live, British tv, 1976)

Gil Scott-Heron: "Comment #1 (Who Will Survive in America?)"  (NSFW language at points)

Gil Scott-Heron Band: 1984 German concert

U Roy: "Natty Rebel"


Salt N Pepa: "You Showed Me"


Public Enemy: "She Watch Channel Zero"


Beatnigs (later Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy): "Fight Fire with Fire"

The Go! Team: "Keys to the City" and more

Ana Tijoux and Shadia Mansour: "Somos Sur"


Zedbazi: "Zamin Safe"