Blossom Dearie, A Songwriter's Singer, Dead at 84

Blossom Dearie, a small woman with a remarkable little girl voice heard in New York and European cabarets for over fifty years, died in her Greenwich Village home on February 7, 2009. According to her manager, Donald Schaffer, she had been in failing health for several years.

Although her music roots were in jazz as well as popular song, her sound and style were uniquely hers – “…chic, sleek, and squeaky clean, and a voice in a million,” – said Leonard Feather in the Los Angeles Times.

While mostly known as a jazz vocalist, she found that description incomplete. “I don’t want to be called a jazz singer,” she told Feather. “I’m not a cult singer either, and after being called a legend, that sounds too much like an epitaph. I think of myself as a songwriter’s singer.”

Ms.Dearie was a perfectionist who would work on her accompaniments and presentation for months before going on tour. She sang one of the best renditions of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” ever heard, and said it took her ten years to learn. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead said that she had “a nose for witty and neglected material…and tends to lyricism and understatement. While paying proper respect to the songs, she sounds both vulnerable and wise.”

She was an artist with an uncommon ability to translate well-worn standards into new material. In 2001 Variety remarked that “her phrasing is distinctively supple, and the directness of her performance is always refreshing. She remains a genuinely pure and warming rarity in the club circuit.” Pianist Marian McPartland once asked how she managed to sing such perfect chords. Ms. Dearie responded: “By listening to everyone,” giving credit to Bill Evans as an influence; singers such as Frank Sinatra for harmonies; and Count Basie and Oscar Peterson for the rhythms.

Blossom Margrete Dearie was born in the hamlet of East Durham, N.Y., on April 28, 1924. Her father was of Scottish and Irish descent; her mother emigrated from Norway. She reportedly got her first name, Blossom, after a neighbor brought the Dearie family peach-tree blossoms to celebrate her birth. Ms. Dearie began taking piano lessons when she was five, and studied classical music into her teens. She started to listen to jazz when she played in her high school dance band. Early influences included Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, and Martha Tilton, who sang with the Benny Goodman band.

She moved down to New York City in the mid 1940’s to pursue a music career. Within a few years, she had become part of the jazz scene, hanging out with Miles Davis, his arranger Gil Evans, saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and singer Dave Lambert. “I learned a lot from those fellows, really,” she said. “They were a very important part of my early musical education.” Ms. Dearie joined Woody Herman’s close harmony group the Blue Flames, who appeared with his big band. Soon afterwards she sang with Alvino Rey’s orchestra as a member of his vocal group, the Blue Reys. In 1952, while working at the Chantilly Club in Greenwich Village, Dearie met Nicole Barclay, who with her husband owned a record company. The Barclays suggested that it might be a good time to go to Paris as American jazz was the rage. She moved to France and after learning French at Berlitz, formed her own vocal group, the Blue Stars. It was there that she met the Belgian flautist and saxophonist Bobby Jaspar to whom she was briefly married.

Ms. Dearie wrote many of the Blue Stars’ arrangements, including a version of George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland” with a French lyric added. It scored a considerable hit in France and brought her to the attention of jazz impresario Norman Granz, who signed her to his Verve record label. She returned to the United States and with her six Verve albums, recorded between 1956 and 1960 the characteristic Blossom Dearie style emerged.

In the studio Dearie was brisk and precise, aiming to make an entire album of twelve songs in six hours, helped by the engineering talents of Tom Nola, who was particularly successful in making the most of her delicate voice. She remembered: “We would talk about tempos and the arrangements for a few minutes, then I would count to four and away we would go.” Ms. Dearie once told Tony Vellela of the Christian Science Monitor, “I choose the material that I like. The music has to be of a certain standard. If the music is no good, I’m not interested in the song.”

During her long career, she made more than twenty albums, recording over three hundred songs, some of which she wrote. Her best known and most loved recordings are songs by Dave Frishberg, Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Cole Porter and Michel Legrand. It was Legrand’s “Once Upon a Summertime” for which she commissioned Johnny Mercer’s timeless lyrics to go with the memorable melody. Mercer also supplied the words for two of Dearie’s own compositions “I’m Shadowing You” and “My New Celebrity Is You,” the last piece he wrote before his death in 1976.

Beginning with her performances opposite Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard in the 1950’s, she played numerous nightclubs in New York including Trudy Heller’s, the Versailles, the Blue Angel, and Michael’s Pub. In the 1960’s she appeared regularly in London at Ronnie Scott’s. A decade later she performed at Carnegie Hall with Joe Williams and Anita O’Day. The Ballroom, Danny’s Skylight Room, and Pizza on the Park in London, were her regular venues over the past twenty years.

Ms.Dearie walked among giants in the early days of her career – Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, and Sarah Vaughan among them, and held her own. She was best known for qualities not valued in pop singers anymore. Blossom Dearie conveyed more feeling in just a few lines than all the high volume winners on American Idol and the Grammy’s combined.