Cleo Laine in live performance in 1980.
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Keystone/Getty Photographs
Cleo Laine in live performance in 1980.
Keystone/Getty Photographs
Dame Cleo Laine has died at age 97. Her loss of life was introduced by The Stables, the music venue that she and her husband, Sir John Dankworth, based. Critic Bob Mondello — a longtime fan — affords an appreciation.
It was the mid-Nineteen Seventies when a concert-going pal advised me he’d simply been to Carnegie Corridor and heard the best pop vocalist alive. “She’s coming to DC,” he stated. “Get tickets.”
So I did.
On stage, she wore a diaphanous robe and had an afro that seemed like a sunburst mane because the highlight hit it. And when the applause died away, she sang a capella.
“I do know the place I am goin’…”
In a smoky, breathy voice.
“…and I do know who’s goin’ with me.”
Fairly sufficient. Definitely expressive. However best ever?
Smoke, gravel, and a four-octave vary
Then got here the second quantity — Carole King’s “Music,” accompanied by Laine’s saxophonist husband John Dankworth and his band, in an association designed to determine her jazz credentials. In Britain, she and Dankworth had been taking part in golf equipment and concert events for the reason that Fifties, however American audiences have been simply assembly her.
This track was additionally designed, I quickly discovered, to point out off her vary, from gravelly low notes, to keening ethereal sounds a full 4 octaves larger. In a single significantly wonderful passage she went from her lowest notice to her highest and again down once more within the house of 44 seconds. On her album Cleo Laine Dwell at Carnegie Corridor you possibly can hear her do it dwell for an viewers that is clearly as astonished as mine was.
Belief me, you will not play it simply as soon as.
Now, vocal pyrotechnics are enjoyable. However they are not every thing for a pop singer. Laine, I found in years of following her, had every thing. She excelled at jazz, pop, and classical stylings — among the many few vocalists to obtain Grammy nominations in all three of these classes — and was so fashionable in Britain that she was made a Dame in 1997.
Give her a comic book quantity and she or he’d land each joke, a expertise she developed within the theater, the place she started her profession as an actress, and went on to star in musicals on the West Finish, commonly stopping such reveals as Showboat, and A Little Evening Music with ballads. Give her the suitable one and she or he might practically cease your coronary heart.
A thunderclap of applause
I bear in mind her holding the final notice of “Ship within the Clowns” at an outside amphitheater a few years after I noticed that first live performance and, I swear, even the crickets stopped for her, the viewers so captivated that nobody needed to interrupt the silence.
As she completed that final notice, I began counting — one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand … and obtained to seven earlier than each hand within the place got here collectively in the one “thunderclap” of applause I’ve ever heard.
Laine continued performing for six a long time — all however the final together with her husband. He died hours earlier than they have been to offer a live performance in 2010, and she or he went on with out him, solely telling the viewers on the finish that he’d handed away — as a result of, she stated, that is what he’d have needed.
Lately her voice had dimmed, however not sufficient that there was ever purpose to argue with the Sunday Instances critic who stated within the Nineteen Seventies, that Cleo Laine was “fairly merely the most effective singer on the earth.”