Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in his five-decade career which kept him at the forefront of a number of major stylistic developments in jazz.Born and raised in Illinois, Davis left his studies at The Juilliard School in New York City and made his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker’s bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music while on Prestige Records but did so haphazardly due to a heroin addiction. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records and recorded the 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish music-influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time, having sold over four million copies in the U.S.Davis made several line-up changes while recording Someday My Prince Will Come (1961), his 1961 Blackhawk concerts, and Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), another mainstream success that introduced bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Tony Williams. After adding saxophonist Wayne Shorter to his new quintet in 1964, Davis led them on a series of more abstract recordings often composed by the band members, helping pioneer the post-bop genre with albums such as E.S.P (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967), before transitioning into his electric period. During the 1970s, he radically experimented with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing line-up of musicians, including keyboardist Joe Zawinul, drummer Al Foster, and guitarist John McLaughlin. This period, beginning with Davis’ 1969 studio album In a Silent Way and concluding with the 1975 concert recording Agharta, was the most controversial in his career, alienating and challenging many in jazz. His million-selling 1970 record Bitches Brew helped spark a resurgence in the genre’s commercial popularity with jazz fusion as the decade progressed.After a five-year retirement due to poor health, Davis resumed his career in the 1980s, employing younger musicians and pop music sounds on albums such as The Man with the Horn (1981) and Tutu (1986). Critics were generally unreceptive but the decade garnered the trumpeter his highest level of commercial recognition. He performed sold-out concerts worldwide while branching out into visual arts, film, and television work, before his death in 1991 from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure. In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which recognized him as “one of the key figures in the history of jazz”. Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century,” while Gerald Early called him inarguably one of the most influential and innovative musicians of that period.Born in Alton, IL, Davis was a leading figure in the bebop style of jazz and in combining styles of jazz and rock music. Davis began music lessons after his father gave him a trumpet on his 13th birthday. Two years later, he joined the Musicians’ Union and began playing with a local band on weekends. About this time, he met trumpeter Clark Terry, who helped and encouraged him. In 1944, after graduating from high school, he went to New York City to study classical music at the Julliard School of Music. While there, he also began playing with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and other pioneers of the new jazz style known as bebop.In 1945, at the age of 19, he began playing in a combo led by Parker. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions that had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called “Birth of the Cool.” Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-leading a band with pianist Tadd Dameron in 1949, but the trumpeter’s progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early 1950s.His performances and recordings became more haphazard, but in January 1951, he began a long series of recordings for the Prestige label that became his main recording outlet for the next several years. He managed to kick his habit by the middle of the decade, and he made a strong impression playing “Round Midnight” at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, a performance that led major label Columbia Records to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet that began recording his Columbia debut, “Round About Midnight,” in October. The quintet featured saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones.He had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, however, and over the next year, he was forced to alternate his Columbia sessions with sessions for Prestige to fulfill this previous commitment. The latter resulted in the Prestige albums “The New Miles Davis Quintet,” “Cookin’, Workin’, Relaxin’, and Steamin’,” making Davis’ first quintet one of his better-documented outfits. In 1957, Davis teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, “Miles Ahead.” Miles played flugelhorn, the album, released in 1958, was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959. In December of that year, Davis returned to Paris, where he added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, which recorded the album “Milestones” in 1958.That July, Davis again collaborated with Gil Evans and an orchestra on an album of music from “Porgy and Bess.” Back in the sextet, Davis began to experiment, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes. This led to his next band recording, “Kind of Blue,” in 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular disc of Davis’ career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November of that year and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording “Sketches of Spain,” containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. By the time he returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Coltrane was guest on a couple of tracks of the album, called “Someday My Prince Will Come.” The Davis quintet’s next recording preceded the two-LP set “Miles Davis in Person” (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco).In the spring of 1963, “Seven Steps to Heaven” was recorded with an entirely new lineup. The sessions included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. It was another pop chart entry that earned Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. By 1964, the final member of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s was in place with the addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter to the team of Davis, Carter, Hancock, and Williams. While continuing to play standards in concert, this unit embarked on a series of albums of original compositions: “Sorcerer,” “Nefertiti,” “Miles in the Sky,” and “Filles de Kilimanjaro.”But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin participated on Davis’ next album, “In a Silent Way,” 1969. With his next album, “Bitches Brew,” Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. He followed it with “Miles Davis at Fillmore East,” “Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil,” “On the Corner,” and “In Concert,” all in 1971. In October 1972, Davis broke his ankles in a car accident, and became less active, and in 1975, he gave up recording entirely due to illness, undergoing surgery for hip replacement later in the year. Five years passed before he returned to action by recording “The Man with the Horn” in 1980 and going back to touring in 1981. By now, he was an elder statesman of jazz.Those who supported his eclectic approach had incorporated jazz, and his innovations into the music, at least. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. In 1990, Davis performed a leading role as a jazz musician in the Australian motion picture “Dingo” in 1991. His album “Doo-Bop,” 1999, released the year after his death in 1991, was one of the first to fuse jazz with the hip-hop and rap music styles.

Written by Dianne Washington

Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in his five-decade career which kept him at the forefront of a number of major stylistic developments in jazz.
Born and raised in Illinois, Davis left his studies at The Juilliard School in New York City and made his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker’s bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music while on Prestige Records but did so haphazardly due to a heroin addiction. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records and recorded the 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish music-influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time, having sold over four million copies in the U.S.
Davis made several line-up changes while recording Someday My Prince Will Come (1961), his 1961 Blackhawk concerts, and Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), another mainstream success that introduced bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Tony Williams. After adding saxophonist Wayne Shorter to his new quintet in 1964, Davis led them on a series of more abstract recordings often composed by the band members, helping pioneer the post-bop genre with albums such as E.S.P (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967), before transitioning into his electric period. During the 1970s, he radically experimented with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing line-up of musicians, including keyboardist Joe Zawinul, drummer Al Foster, and guitarist John McLaughlin. This period, beginning with Davis’ 1969 studio album In a Silent Way and concluding with the 1975 concert recording Agharta, was the most controversial in his career, alienating and challenging many in jazz. His million-selling 1970 record Bitches Brew helped spark a resurgence in the genre’s commercial popularity with jazz fusion as the decade progressed.
After a five-year retirement due to poor health, Davis resumed his career in the 1980s, employing younger musicians and pop music sounds on albums such as The Man with the Horn (1981) and Tutu (1986). Critics were generally unreceptive but the decade garnered the trumpeter his highest level of commercial recognition. He performed sold-out concerts worldwide while branching out into visual arts, film, and television work, before his death in 1991 from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure. In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which recognized him as “one of the key figures in the history of jazz”. Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century,” while Gerald Early called him inarguably one of the most influential and innovative musicians of that period.
Born in Alton, IL, Davis was a leading figure in the bebop style of jazz and in combining styles of jazz and rock music. Davis began music lessons after his father gave him a trumpet on his 13th birthday. Two years later, he joined the Musicians’ Union and began playing with a local band on weekends. About this time, he met trumpeter Clark Terry, who helped and encouraged him. In 1944, after graduating from high school, he went to New York City to study classical music at the Julliard School of Music. While there, he also began playing with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and other pioneers of the new jazz style known as bebop.
In 1945, at the age of 19, he began playing in a combo led by Parker. Earning a contract with Capitol Records, the band went into the studio in January 1949 for the first of three sessions that had a profound influence on the development of the cool jazz style on the West Coast. In February 1957, Capitol finally issued the tracks together on an LP called “Birth of the Cool.” Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-leading a band with pianist Tadd Dameron in 1949, but the trumpeter’s progress was impeded by an addiction to heroin that plagued him in the early 1950s.
His performances and recordings became more haphazard, but in January 1951, he began a long series of recordings for the Prestige label that became his main recording outlet for the next several years. He managed to kick his habit by the middle of the decade, and he made a strong impression playing “Round Midnight” at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, a performance that led major label Columbia Records to sign him. The prestigious contract allowed him to put together a permanent band, and he organized a quintet that began recording his Columbia debut, “Round About Midnight,” in October. The quintet featured saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
He had a remaining five albums on his Prestige contract, however, and over the next year, he was forced to alternate his Columbia sessions with sessions for Prestige to fulfill this previous commitment. The latter resulted in the Prestige albums “The New Miles Davis Quintet,” “Cookin’, Workin’, Relaxin’, and Steamin’,” making Davis’ first quintet one of his better-documented outfits. In 1957, Davis teamed with arranger Gil Evans for his second Columbia LP, “Miles Ahead.” Miles played flugelhorn, the album, released in 1958, was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, intended to honor recordings made before the Grammy Awards were instituted in 1959. In December of that year, Davis returned to Paris, where he added saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to his group, creating the Miles Davis Sextet, which recorded the album “Milestones” in 1958.
That July, Davis again collaborated with Gil Evans and an orchestra on an album of music from “Porgy and Bess.” Back in the sextet, Davis began to experiment, basing his improvisations on scales rather than chord changes. This led to his next band recording, “Kind of Blue,” in 1959, an album that became a landmark in modern jazz and the most popular disc of Davis’ career, eventually selling over two million copies, a phenomenal success for a jazz record. In sessions held in November of that year and March 1960, Davis again followed his pattern of alternating band releases and collaborations with Gil Evans, recording “Sketches of Spain,” containing traditional Spanish music and original compositions in that style. By the time he returned to the studio to make his next band album in March 1961, Coltrane was guest on a couple of tracks of the album, called “Someday My Prince Will Come.” The Davis quintet’s next recording preceded the two-LP set “Miles Davis in Person” (Friday & Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, San Francisco).
In the spring of 1963, “Seven Steps to Heaven” was recorded with an entirely new lineup. The sessions included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. It was another pop chart entry that earned Grammy nominations for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group. By 1964, the final member of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s was in place with the addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter to the team of Davis, Carter, Hancock, and Williams. While continuing to play standards in concert, this unit embarked on a series of albums of original compositions: “Sorcerer,” “Nefertiti,” “Miles in the Sky,” and “Filles de Kilimanjaro.”
But Hancock, along with pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin participated on Davis’ next album, “In a Silent Way,” 1969. With his next album, “Bitches Brew,” Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. He followed it with “Miles Davis at Fillmore East,” “Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil,” “On the Corner,” and “In Concert,” all in 1971. In October 1972, Davis broke his ankles in a car accident, and became less active, and in 1975, he gave up recording entirely due to illness, undergoing surgery for hip replacement later in the year. Five years passed before he returned to action by recording “The Man with the Horn” in 1980 and going back to touring in 1981. By now, he was an elder statesman of jazz.
Those who supported his eclectic approach had incorporated jazz, and his innovations into the music, at least. He was also a celebrity whose appeal extended far beyond the basic jazz audience. In 1990, Davis performed a leading role as a jazz musician in the Australian motion picture “Dingo” in 1991. His album “Doo-Bop,” 1999, released the year after his death in 1991, was one of the first to fuse jazz with the hip-hop and rap music styles.

Written by Dianne Washington

Sarah Vaughan

Sarah Lois Vaughan (March 27, 1924 – April 3, 1990) was an American jazz singer, described by Jazz commentator/music critic Scott Yanow as having “one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century.”
Nicknamed “Sassy”, “The Divine One” and “Sailor” (for her salty speech), Sarah Vaughan was a Grammy Award winner. The National Endowment for the Arts bestowed upon her its “highest honor in jazz”, the NEA Jazz Masters Award, in 1989.
Sarah Vaughan’s father, Asbury “Jake” Vaughan, was a carpenter by trade and played guitar and piano. Her mother, Ada Vaughan, was a laundress and sang in the church choir. Jake and Ada Vaughan had migrated to Newark from Virginia during the First World War. Sarah was their only biological child, although in the 1960s they adopted Donna, the child of a woman who traveled on the road with Sarah Vaughan.
The Vaughans lived in a house on Brunswick Street, in Newark, New Jersey, for Sarah’s entire childhood. Jake Vaughan was deeply religious and the family was very active in the New Mount Zion Baptist Church on 186 Thomas Street. Sarah began piano lessons at the age of seven, sang in the church choir and occasionally played piano for rehearsals and services.
Vaughan developed an early love for popular music on records and the radio. In the 1930s, Newark had a very active live music scene and Vaughan frequently saw local and touring bands that played in the city at venues like the Montgomery Street Skating Rink. By her mid-teens, Vaughan began venturing (illegally) into Newark’s night clubs and performing as a pianist and, occasionally, singer, most notably at the Piccadilly Club and the Newark Airport USO.
Vaughan initially attended Newark’s East Side High School, later transferring to Newark Arts High School, which had opened in 1931 as the United States’ first arts “magnet” high school. However, her nocturnal adventures as a performer began to overwhelm her academic pursuits and Vaughan dropped out of high school during her junior year to concentrate more fully on music. Around this time, Vaughan and her friends also began venturing across the Hudson River into New York City to hear big bands at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
Biographies of Vaughan frequently stated that she was immediately thrust into stardom after a winning amateur night performance at Harlem’s Zeus Theater. In fact, the story that biographer Renee relates seems to be a bit more complex. Vaughan was frequently accompanied by a friend, Doris Robinson, on her trips into New York City. Some time in the fall of 1942 (when Sarah was 18 years old), Vaughan suggested that Robinson enter the Apollo Theater Amateur Night contest. Vaughan played piano accompaniment for Robinson, who won second prize. Vaughan later decided to go back and compete herself as a singer. Vaughan sang “Body and Soul” and won, although the exact date of her victorious Apollo performance is uncertain. The prize, as Vaughan recalled later to Marian McPartland, was $10 and the promise of a week’s engagement at the Apollo. After a considerable delay, Vaughan was contacted by the Apollo in the spring of 1943 to open for Ella Fitzgerald.
Some time during her week of performances at the Apollo, Vaughan was introduced to bandleader and pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines, although the exact details of that introduction are disputed. Billy Eckstine, Hines’ singer at the time, has been credited by Vaughan and others with hearing her at the Apollo and recommending her to Hines. Hines also claimed later to have discovered her himself and offered her a job on the spot. Regardless, after a brief tryout at the Apollo, Hines officially replaced his current male singer with Vaughan on April 4, 1943.
Vaughan recorded Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia in 1944, under the title Interlude. From 1949 to 1954, Vaughan became an international star, recording mostly commercial albums, many of them backed by strings, though in 1950, she recorded with an octet that included Miles Davis. In the mid-’50s, she began to record jazz, producing two classic albums, Sarah Vaughan With Clifford Brown, and Swingin’ Easy, with Richard Davis, Roy Haynes and others.
Vaughan spent the remainder of 1943 and part of 1944 touring the country with the Earl Hines big band that also featured baritone Billy Eckstine. Vaughan was hired as a pianist, reputedly so Hines could hire her under the jurisdiction of the musicians’ union (American Federation of Musicians) rather than the singers union (American Guild of Variety Artists), but after Cliff Smalls joined the band as a trombonist and pianist, Sarah’s duties became limited exclusively to singing. This Earl Hines band is best remembered today as an incubator of bebop, as it included trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Charlie Parker (playing tenor saxophone rather than the alto saxophone that he would become famous with later) and trombonist Bennie Green. Gillespie also arranged for the band, although a recording ban by the musicians union prevented the band from recording and preserving its sound and style for posterity.
Eckstine left the Hines band in late 1943 and formed his own big band with Gillespie, leaving Hines to become the new band’s musical director. Parker came along too, and the Eckstine band over the next few years would host a startling cast of jazz talent: Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey, Lucky Thompson, Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon, among others.
Vaughan accepted Eckstine’s invitation to join his new band in 1944, giving her an opportunity to develop her musicianship with the seminal figures in this era of jazz. Eckstine’s band also afforded her first recording opportunity, a December 5, 1944 date that yielded the song “I’ll Wait and Pray” for the Deluxe label. That date led to critic and producer Leonard Feather to ask her to cut four sides under her own name later that month for the Continental label, backed by a septet that included Dizzy Gillespie and Georgie Auld.
Band pianist John Malachi is credited with giving Vaughan the moniker “Sassy”, a nickname that matched her personality. Vaughan liked it and the name (and its shortened variant “Sass”) stuck with colleagues and, eventually, the press. In written communications, Vaughan often spelled it “Sassie”.
Vaughan officially left the Eckstine band in late 1944 to pursue a solo career, although she remained very close to Eckstine personally and recorded with him frequently throughout her life.
Vaughan began her solo career in 1945 by freelancing in clubs on New York’s 52nd Street such as the Three Deuces, the Famous Door, the Downbeat and the Onyx Club. Vaughan also hung around the Braddock Grill, next door to the Apollo Theater in Harlem. On May 11, 1945, Vaughan recorded “Lover Man” for the Guild label with a quintet featuring Gillespie and Parker with Al Haig on piano, Curly Russell on double bass and Sid Catlett on drums. Later that month she went into the studio with a slightly different and larger Gillespie/Parker aggregation and recorded three more sides.
After being invited by violinist Stuff Smith to record the song “Time and Again” in October, Vaughan was offered a contract to record for the Musicraft label by owner Albert Marx, although she would not begin recording as a leader for Musicraft until May 7, 1946. In the intervening time, Vaughan made a handful of recordings for the Crown and Gotham labels and began performing regularly at Café Society Downtown, an integrated club in New York’s Sheridan Square.
While at Café Society, Vaughan became friends with trumpeter George Treadwell. Treadwell became Vaughan’s manager and she ultimately delegated to him most of the musical director responsibilities for her recording sessions, leaving her free to focus almost entirely on singing. Over the next few years, Treadwell also made significant positive changes in Vaughan’s stage appearance. Aside from an improved wardrobe and hair style, Vaughan had her teeth capped, eliminating an unsightly gap between her two front teeth.
Many of Vaughan’s 1946 Musicraft recordings became quite well known among jazz aficionados and critics, including “If You Could See Me Now” (written and arranged by Tadd Dameron), “Don’t Blame Me”, “I’ve Got a Crush on You”, “Everything I Have Is Yours” and “Body and Soul”. With Vaughan and Treadwell’s professional relationship on solid footing, the couple married on September 16, 1946.
Vaughan’s recording success for Musicraft continued through 1947 and 1948. Her recording of “Tenderly” became an unexpected pop hit in late 1947. Her December 27, 1947, recording of “It’s Magic” (from the Doris Day film Romance on the High Seas) found chart success in early 1948. Her recording of “Nature Boy” from April 8, 1948, became a hit around the same time as the release of the famous Nat King Cole recording of the same song. Because of yet another recording ban by the musicians union, “Nature Boy” was recorded with an a cappella choir as the only accompaniment, adding an ethereal air to a song with a vaguely mystical lyric and melody.
During her last period, Vaughan recorded for Pablo, producing two excellent albums of Duke Ellington songs. Her “legit” technique, sophisticated carriage, and sense of the infrastructure of popular songs reflected key values admired by the new breed of jazz musicians. “The Divine One,” as she has been called had operatic range and control and a crooning vibrato that echoed Billy Eckstine’s. Nearly every singer, who followed her, imitated her chops and style. Dozens of her recordings remain in print.
The musicians union ban pushed Musicraft to the brink of bankruptcy and Vaughan used the missed royalty payments as an opportunity to sign with the larger Columbia record label. Following the settling of the legal issues, her chart successes continued with the charting of “Black Coffee” in the summer of 1949. During her tenure at Columbia through 1953, Vaughan was steered almost exclusively to commercial pop ballads, a number of which had chart success: “That Lucky Old Sun”, “Make Believe (You Are Glad When You’re Sorry)”, “I’m Crazy to Love You”, “Our Very Own”, “I Love the Guy”, “Thinking of You” (with pianist Bud Powell), “I Cried for You”, “These Things I Offer You”, “Vanity”, “I Ran All the Way Home”, “Saint or Sinner”, “My Tormented Heart”, and “Time”, among others.
Vaughan also achieved substantial critical acclaim. She won Esquire magazine’s New Star Award for 1947 as well as awards from Down Beat magazine continuously from 1947 through 1952, and from Metronome magazine from 1948 through 1953. A handful of critics disliked her singing as being “over-stylized”, reflecting the heated controversies of the time over the new musical trends of the late 40s. However, the critical reception to the young singer was generally positive.
Recording and critical success led to numerous performing opportunities, packing clubs around the country almost continuously throughout the years of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the summer of 1949, Vaughan made her first appearance with a symphony orchestra in a benefit for the Philadelphia Orchestra entitled “100 Men and a Girl.” Around this time, Chicago disk jockey Dave Garroway coined a second nickname for her, “The Divine One”, that would follow her throughout her career. One of her early television appearances was on DuMont’s variety show Stars on Parade (1953–54), in which she sang “My Funny Valentine” and “Linger Awhile”.
With improving finances, in 1949 Vaughan and Treadwell purchased a three-story house on 21 Avon Avenue in Newark, occupying the top floor during their increasingly rare off-hours at home and relocating Vaughan’s parents to the lower two floors. However, the business pressures and personality conflicts led to a cooling in the personal relationship between Treadwell and Vaughan. Treadwell hired a road manager to handle Vaughan’s touring needs and opened a management office in Manhattan so he could work with clients in addition to Vaughan.
Vaughan’s relationship with Columbia Records also soured as she became dissatisfied with the commercial material she was required to record and lackluster financial success of her records. A set of small group sides recorded in 1950 with Miles Davis and Bennie Green are among the best of her career, but they were atypical of her Columbia output.
In 1953, Treadwell negotiated a unique contract for Vaughan with Mercury Records. She would record commercial material for the Mercury label and more jazz-oriented material for its subsidiary EmArcy. Vaughan was paired with producer Bob Shad and their excellent working relationship yielded strong commercial and artistic success. Her debut Mercury recording session took place in February 1954 and she stayed with the label through 1959. After a stint at Roulette Records (1960 to 1963), Vaughan returned to Mercury from 1964 to 1967.
Vaughan’s commercial success at Mercury began with the 1954 hit, “Make Yourself Comfortable”, recorded in the fall of 1954, and continued with a succession of hits, including: “How Important Can It Be” (with Count Basie), “Whatever Lola Wants”, “The Banana Boat Song”, “You Ought to Have A Wife” and “Misty”. Her commercial success peaked in 1959 with “Broken Hearted Melody”, a song she considered to be “corny”, but, nonetheless, became her first gold record and a regular part of her concert repertoire for years to come. Vaughan was reunited with Billy Eckstine for a series of duet recordings in 1957 that yielded the hit “Passing Strangers”.
Vaughan’s commercial recordings were handled by a number of different arrangers and conductors, primarily Hugo Peretti and Hal Mooney.
The jazz “track” of her recording career also proceeded apace, backed either by her working trio or various combinations of stellar jazz players. One of her own favorite albums was a 1954 sextet date that included Clifford Brown.
In the latter half of the 1950s she followed a schedule of almost non-stop touring, with many famous jazz musicians. She was featured at the first Newport Jazz Festival in the summer of 1954 and starred in subsequent editions of that festival at Newport and in New York City for the remainder of her life. In the fall of 1954, she performed at Carnegie Hall with the Count Basie Orchestra on a bill that also included Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and the Modern Jazz Quartet. That fall, she again toured Europe successfully before embarking on a “Big Show” U.S. tour, a grueling succession of start-studded one-nighters that included Count Basie, George Shearing, Erroll Garner and Jimmy Rushing. At the 1955 New York Jazz Festival on Randalls Island, Vaughan shared the bill with the Dave Brubeck quartet, Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, and the Johnny Richards Orchestra
Although the professional relationship between Vaughan and Treadwell was quite successful through the 1950s, their personal relationship finally reached a breaking point and she filed for a divorce in 1958. Vaughan had entirely delegated financial matters to Treadwell, and despite significant income figures reported through the 1950s, at the settlement Treadwell said that only $16,000 remained. The couple evenly divided the amount and their personal assets, terminating their business relationship.
The exit of Treadwell from Vaughan’s life was also precipitated by the entry of Clyde “C.B.” Atkins, a man of uncertain background whom she had met in Chicago and married on September 4, 1959. Although Atkins had no experience in artist management or music, Vaughan wished to have a mixed professional and personal relationship like the one she had with Treadwell. She made Atkins her personal manager, although she was still feeling the sting of the problems she had with Treadwell and initially kept a slightly closer eye on Atkins. Vaughan and Atkins moved into a house in Englewood, New Jersey.
When Vaughan’s contract with Mercury Records ended in late 1959, she immediately signed on with Roulette Records, a small label owned by Morris Levy, who was one of the backers of New York’s Birdland, where she frequently appeared. Roulette’s roster also included Count Basie, Joe Williams, Dinah Washington, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and Maynard Ferguson.
Vaughan began recording for Roulette in April 1960, making a string of strong large ensemble albums arranged and/or conducted by Billy May, Jimmy Jones, Joe Reisman, Quincy Jones, Benny Carter, Lalo Schifrin, and Gerald Wilson. Surprisingly, she also had some pop chart success in 1960 with “Serenata” on Roulette and a couple of residual tracks from her Mercury contract, “Eternally” and “You’re My Baby”. She also made a pair of intimate vocal/guitar/double bass albums of jazz standards: After Hours (1961) with guitarist Mundell Lowe and double bassist George Duvivier and Sarah + 2 (1962) with guitarist Barney Kessell and double bassist Joe Comfort.
Vaughan was incapable of having children so, in 1961, she and Atkins adopted a daughter, Debra Lois. However, the relationship with Atkins proved difficult and violent so, following a series of strange[clarification needed] incidents, she filed for divorce in November 1963. She turned to two friends to help sort out the financial affairs of the marriage: club owner John “Preacher” Wells, a childhood acquaintance, and Clyde “Pumpkin” Golden, Jr. Wells and Golden found that Atkins’ gambling and profligate spending had put Vaughan around $150,000 in debt. The Englewood house was ultimately seized by the IRS for nonpayment of taxes. Vaughan retained custody of their child and Golden essentially took Atkins place as Vaughan’s manager and lover for the remainder of the decade.
Around the time of her second divorce, she also became disenchanted with Roulette Records. Roulette’ finances were even more deceptive and opaque than usual in the record business and its recording artists often had little to show for their efforts other than some excellent records. When her contract with Roulette ended in 1963, Vaughan returned to the more familiar confines of Mercury Records. In the summer of 1963, Vaughan went to Denmark with producer Quincy Jones to record four days of live performances with her trio, Sassy Swings the Tivoli, an excellent example of her live show from this period. The following year, she made her first appearance at the White House, for President Johnson.
The Tivoli recording would be the brightest moment of her second stint with Mercury. Changing demographics and tastes in the 1960s left jazz artists with shrinking audiences and inappropriate material. While Vaughan retained a following large and loyal enough to maintain her performing career, the quality and quantity of her recorded output dwindled even as her voice darkened and her skill remained undiminished. At the conclusion of her Mercury deal in 1967, she was left without a recording contract for the remainder of the decade.
In 1969, Vaughan terminated her professional relationship with Golden and relocated to the West Coast, settling first into a house near Benedict Canyon in Los Angeles and then into what would end up being her final home in Hidden Hills. In 1989, Vaughan’s health began to decline, although she rarely revealed any hints in her performances. She canceled a series of engagements in Europe in 1989 citing the need to seek treatment for arthritis in the hand, although she was able to complete a later series of performances in Japan. During a run at New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club in 1989, Vaughan received a diagnosis of lung cancer and was too ill to finish the final day of what would turn out to be her final series of public performances.
Vaughan returned to her home in California to begin chemotherapy and spent her final months alternating stays in the hospital and at home. Vaughan grew weary of the struggle and demanded to be taken home, where she died on the evening of April 3, 1990, while watching a television movie featuring her daughter, a week after her 66th birthday.
Vaughan’s funeral was held at Mount Zion Baptist Church at 208 Broadway in Newark, New Jersey, which was the same congregation she grew up in. Following the ceremony, a horse-drawn carriage transported her body to its final resting place in Glendale Cemetery, Bloomfield in New Jersey.

Written by Dianne Washington