These are, in many ways, good times for the venerable Washington singer and pianist Shirley Horn. Last month, the National Endowment for the Arts named Horn, 70, a Jazz Master, recognizing her lifelong contributions to the form, alongside Artie Shaw, Kenny Burrell, Jimmy Smith and George Wein. The $25,000 fellowship was a very sweet bonus.
Tonight, the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater hosts "A Tribute to Shirley Horn," featuring vocalists Sheila Jordan, Kevin Mahogany and Lizz Wright, pianist Kenny Barron, longtime pal and tenor saxophonist Buck Hill and other musical guests. There will be a brief closing set by Horn and her trio, in one of her increasingly rare local performances.
Washington jazz great Shirley Horn will top off a tribute to her tonight by performing with her trio. The singer-pianist, who lost a foot to diabetes, says, "I'm a fighter."
(Dudley M. Brooks -- The Washington Post)
|
|
These last few years have also, however, been rough ones for Horn. In 2001, complications from diabetes led to the amputation of her right foot, the one that she used on the piano's expression pedal for sustain or quiet, elements crucial to the mood of Horn's glacially paced ballads. Subsequently, Horn lost much of her right leg, forcing her to abandon the piano bench for the first time in more than six decades, and altering the unique balance of singing and playing that many consider the best self-contained sound in jazz.
"She has something that transcends genres and times and all the rules and definitions of music, and that's her ability to be so tender and patient with a lyric," says Wright, one of many young singers influenced by Horn's understated approach. "There's very few people who can make music out of not playing for a moment. Shirley makes the music come alive because she lets it breathe."
Horn has been fitted with a prosthesis, and there are efforts underway to create a flexible foot that will allow her to return to the keyboard. In the interim, Horn has kept working, performing one or two concerts a month, backed by pianist George Mesterhazy. But she had to rethink her approach: For the first time, Horn held a microphone rather than singing into one planted at the piano. Where once she could become lost in her reveries, Horn now had to focus outward, facing the audience, not just the music.
"I don't believe in 'I can't do it,' " Horn says, seated in what she calls her "Cadillac" (a motorized wheelchair) in the one-level red-brick house in Upper Marlboro that she and Shep Deering, her husband of 49 years, moved into recently when the steps of her longtime home in Northeast Washington proved too challenging. A fancier "Jaguar," the chair Horn uses in concert, is parked nearby, but it's been acting up and may need repairs. Her own repairs, Horn suggests, have already been made, and they're only partly physical.
"I'm not a quitter, I'm a fighter," she says quietly. Actually she does everything quietly, deliberately; there's no separation between her art and life. "I've tried to keep things as level as possible through this whole thing -- I'm cool. I know what I have to do: I'm never going to give up the piano, I'm never going to stop singing till God says, 'I called your number.' I didn't panic, because I have so much love for what I do."
So do others, of course: Trophies and plaques of official recognition crowd several shelves by the front door. And the legion of Shirley Horn fans includes jazz musicians and pop singers alike. Not long ago, Barbra Streisand praised Horn to Oprah Winfrey as "a wonderful musician who understands the power of intimacy and how to convey the deepest meaning in a song. When Shirley whispers a lyric, she speaks volumes."
Says pianist Marian McPartland, whose NPR show, "Piano Jazz," has featured Horn several times: "Everything she does, she does with such great taste and romance. To sit back and listen to something as serene as Shirley is really a joy. It's amazing that after all she's been through, she'll come through just as well, maybe even better, because of it."
It wasn't just the foot problem, which had caused Horn great pain for many years. She's also had to deal with arthritis and undergo chemotherapy for breast cancer. In 2001, cancer claimed Charles Ables, Horn's bassist for 33 years and the rock-solid foundation of her trio, along with Steve Williams, her drummer for 25 years.
"When I lost the foot and the leg, I didn't cry about it. I cried because Charles died," Horn says. "Charles and Steve -- the three of us, it's almost like sometimes it was really one."
All those losses and tribulations inform Horn's most recent album, "May the Music Never End," the first in 25 years on which she is not playing piano, and the first time in three decades where she isn't playing with Ables (Ed Howard is her current bassist). Mesterhazy is heard on nine of the album's 11 selections. One of Horn's own idols and influences, Ahmad Jamal, accompanies her on the other two, a measure of the respect Horn has among musicians: It's the only time in Jamal's lengthy career he has ever accompanied a vocalist.
Horn has resumed performing since the CD was released last year and hopes to do a fair amount of it when she records a live album next month at New York's Au Bar.
"I have to do it," she declares. "I think when I was born, it's like God said, 'Music!' and that was it. All my life, that's all I knew. It's in me, it's jammed up and it's got to come out."
At age 3, growing up in Northeast Washington, Horn began picking out melodies on her grandmother's upright piano, and she started classical lessons just a year later. From 12 to 18, she studied piano and composition at Howard University's School of Music -- a child among adults -- with the idea of becoming America's first black classical pianist. The Juilliard School of Music had offered an academic scholarship, but the family couldn't afford her living in New York.
By the time she was working her way through Howard as an undergraduate, Horn's repertoire had begun shifting to jazz, the locales from recital halls and churches to the myriad small jazz clubs along the fabled U Street corridor, where she was particularly inspired by the keyboard mastery of Jamal, Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson and Wynton Kelly.
When she chooses to, Horn can swing as energetically as any of those giants, though it's Jamal's innovative use of space and silence that has most influenced her. Her own gift has always been the economical use of notes. In the Biographical Dictionary of Jazz & Pop Singers, to be published next year, critic Will Friedwald notes that Horn "plays and sings as little as possible, never playing two notes or holding a note vocally for two beats when one will do. . . . [She] gets as much music as possible out of every precious note."
There have been moments when fame teased. In 1960, Horn recorded "Embers and Ashes" for a small label that didn't seem to understand the concept of distribution; few people ever heard the album. But one of them was trumpeter Miles Davis, who played it around the house so much his young kids could sing along to it. Davis invited Horn to open for him at the Village Vanguard. One night, Davis accompanied Horn from behind a pillar as she essayed "My Funny Valentine," a melancholy ballad closely associated with him.
The opening-night audience was stellar -- Lena Horne, Sidney Poitier, Charles Mingus and Quincy Jones among them. Jones would produce two Horn albums in the early '60s, though unwisely casting her as a stand-up singer, not allowing Horn to accompany herself in the trio format she'd been using since 1954.
By mid-decade, she rejected further opportunities in order to stay at home here raising her only daughter, Rainy, playing just enough to reinforce her reputation but not enough to benefit from it. Horn's fan base finally began to grow again in the early '80s, when she was invited to Holland's prestigious North Sea Jazz Festival. By then, Rainy was grown up and married and Horn began to work more, though her struggles with small jazz labels didn't end until 1986, when she signed with the legendary Verve. Beginning with "I Thought About You," Horn earned Grammy nominations for nine straight Verve albums, finally winning in 1998 for "I Remember Miles."
The Davis connection always remained strong. When the ailing legend accompanied Horn on the ruminative title track of 1990's "You Won't Forget Me," it was the first time he had recorded with a vocalist in four decades and also marked a rare return to the classic lyrical style Davis had refined in the '50s.
"I was always after him," Horn laughs quietly, "and he was always complaining: 'You made my lip hurt, I can't play like that no more!' " This last is said in surprisingly accurate mimicry of Davis's raspy growl. Horn and Davis were talking about collaborating on an all-ballad album when he died in 1991.
There are some continuing frustrations for Horn, notably the acclaim and support afforded a coterie of young singers such as Norah Jones and Diana Krall, who have cashed in on Horn's hushed, introspective style but seldom acknowledge her influence. And because of Horn's laid-back approach to both life and art, she's seldom mentioned in the company of such legendary singers as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan or Carmen McRae (who once drafted Horn as her piano accompanist on a Vaughan tribute album).
"Shirley's like a good wine: She'll just age and age and age," says pianist McPartland. "As we go down through the years, people are going to know and really feel who she was and what she had to offer because she's the best. Ella, Sarah, Carmen -- they were so strong and hit you over the head. You have to have an open heart and open ears to come to Shirley Horn, but once you get there, then she's got you."
Artie Butler concurs. The Los Angeles-based composer, arranger and producer, whose career stretches over three decades and dozens of hits, recalls the first time he met Horn. It was in 1991, when she was in the studio backed by a full string orchestra, singing what has since become her signature song, the gloriously melancholic affirmation "Here's to Life" (with which she will close tonight's concert).
"They had to pick me up off the floor -- I was in tears," says Butler. "When someone sings your song with a performance of that magnitude, it levels you."
Another Butler song, the title tune of Horn's CD "May the Music Never End," is a poignant meditation on appreciating everyday life and holding onto possibilities as one grows older:
Tomorrow is here
What happens to your dreams
When time has slipped away
And you still have songs to sing and words you need to say. . .
Let each new day bring one new song to sing
Just a perfect thing for me to share with you, my friend
Let the melody deep inside of me be my symphony
And may the music never end.
"I'm not ready to close the door," says Horn, with a mischievous, defiant twinkle in her eyes. "I'm not retired, I'm not giving up. I'm still going to do like I always did. In fact, I'm doing more. I'll conquer that piano-playing foot. It's kicking my ass and I'm kicking right back."
