Cleo Laine, whose husky contralto was one of the distinctive voices in jazz and who was regarded by many as Britain’s best contribution to the quintessentially American music, has died. She was 97.
The Stables, a charity and venue Laine based along with her late jazz musician husband John Dankworth, mentioned Friday (July 25) it was “drastically saddened” by the information that “one among its founders and Life President, Dame Cleo Laine has handed away.”
Monica Ferguson, inventive director of The Stables, mentioned Laine “will likely be drastically missed, however her distinctive expertise will all the time be remembered.”
Laine’s profession spanned the Atlantic and crossed genres: She sang the songs of Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Schumann; she acted on stage and on movie, and even performed God in a manufacturing of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde.
Laine’s life and artwork had been intimately certain up with band chief Dankworth, who gave her a job and her stage title in 1951, and married her seven years later. Each had been nonetheless performing after their eightieth birthdays. Dankworth died in 2010 at 82.
In 1997, Laine grew to become the primary British jazz artist to be made a dame, the feminine equal of a knight.
“It’s British jazz that ought to have obtained the accolade for its service to me,” she mentioned when the glory was introduced. “It has given me a beautiful life, a profitable profession and a chance to journey the globe doing what I like to do.”
Laine was born Clementina Dinah Campbell in 1927. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was a Jamaican who liked opera and earned cash through the Despair as a avenue singer. Regardless of onerous occasions, her British mom, Minnie, made positive that her daughter had piano, voice and dance classes.
She started acting at native occasions at age 3, and at age 12 she obtained a job as a film additional in The Thief of Bagdad. Leaving faculty at 14, Laine went to work as a hairdresser and confronted repeated rejection in her efforts to get a job as a singer.
A decade later, in 1951, she tried out for the Johnny Dankworth Seven, and succeeded. “Clementina Campbell” was judged too lengthy for a marquee, so she grew to become Cleo Laine.
“John mentioned that when he heard me, I didn’t sound like anybody else who was singing on the time,” Laine as soon as mentioned. “I suppose the rationale I didn’t get the opposite jobs is that they had been searching for a singer who did sound like anyone else.”
Laine had a exceptional vary, from tenor to contralto, and a sound typically described as “smoky.”
Dankworth, in an interview with the Irish Unbiased, recalled Laine’s audition.
“They had been all sitting there with stony faces, so I requested the Scottish trumpet participant Jimmy Deuchar, who was wanting very glum and was the toughest nut of all, whether or not he thought she had one thing. ‘One thing?’ he mentioned, ‘She’s obtained every part!’”
Provided 6 kilos every week, Laine demanded — and obtained — 7 kilos.
“They used to name me ‘Scruff’, though I don’t suppose I used to be scruffy. It was simply that having come from the sticks, I didn’t know easy methods to put issues collectively in addition to the opposite singers of the day,” she advised the Irish Unbiased. “And anyway, I didn’t have the cash, as a result of they weren’t paying me sufficient.”
Recognition got here swiftly. Laine was runner-up in Melody Maker’s “lady singer” class in 1952, and topped the checklist in 1956 and 1957.
She married Dankworth — and give up his band — in 1958, a yr after her divorce from her first husband, George Langridge. As Dankworth’s band prospered, Laine started to really feel underused.
“I assumed, no, I’m not going to simply sit on the band and be a singer of songs each once in a while when he fancied it. So it was then that I made a decision I wasn’t going to stick with the band and I used to be going to go off and attempt to do one thing solo-wise,” she mentioned in a BBC documentary.
“After I mentioned I used to be leaving, he mentioned, ‘Will you marry me?’ That was a superb ploy, wasn’t it, huh?”
They had been married on March 18, 1958. A son, Alec, was born in 1960, and daughter Jacqueline adopted in 1963.
Regardless of her comfortable marriage, Laine solid a profession unbiased of Dankworth.
“Every time anyone begins placing a label on me, I say, ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ and I’m going and do one thing totally different,” Laine advised The Related Press in 1985 when she was showing on stage in New York in The Thriller of Edwin Drood.
Her stage profession started in 1958 when she was invited to hitch the forged of a West Indian play, Flesh to a Tiger, on the Royal Courtroom Theatre, and was shocked to seek out herself within the lead function. She received a Moscow Arts Theatre Award for her efficiency.
Valmouth adopted in 1959, The Seven Lethal Sins in 1961, The Trojan Ladies in 1966 and Hedda Gabler in 1970.
The function of Julie in Jerome Kern’s Present Boat in 1971 supplied Laine with a show-stopping track, “Invoice.”
Laine started successful a following in the USA in 1972 with a live performance on the Alice Tully Corridor in New York. It wasn’t well-attended, however The New York Occasions gave her a glowing evaluate.
The next yr, she and Dankworth drew a sold-out viewers at Carnegie Corridor, launching a sequence of in style appearances. Cleo at Carnegie received a Grammy award in 1986, the identical yr she was a Tony nominee for The Thriller of Edwin Drood.
A reviewer for Selection in 2002 discovered her voice going robust: “a darkish, creamy voice, exceptional vary and management from bottomless contralto to a candy clear soprano. Her excellent pitch and phrasing is all the time framed with musical creativeness and good style.”
Maybe Laine’s most tough efficiency of all was on Feb. 6, 2010, at a live performance celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the live performance venue she and Dankworth had based at their dwelling, throughout which Laine and each of her kids carried out.
“I’m terribly sorry that Sir John can’t be right here at present,” Laine advised the group on the finish of the present. “However earlier on my husband died in hospital.”
Laine mentioned in an interview with the Boston Globe in 2003 that the key of her longevity was that “I used to be by no means a whole belter.”
“There was all the time a protecting facet in me, and an inside voice all the time mentioned, ‘Don’t try this — it’s not good for you and your voice.’”
Laine is survived by her son and daughter.