I had first heard Carmen McRae rifling through my parents’ record collection. They were true musical omnivores in their taste in music. My father was a dedicated Louis Armstrong fan, as well as Jack Teagarden, and other jazz artists of that era when he was growing up. He had a large collection of 78’s which unfortunately had been misplaced by the time that I was old enough to enjoy crawling through their cabinet full of vinyl. The vinyl that my parents had collected by that time was composed of a bit of a reconstruction of my dad’s early jazz collection, an eclectic blend of what would be considered to be the great singers of the late fifties; Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Dean Martin, Connie Francis, Kay Starr, an assortment of the great musicals of that era, more contemporary artists of that era like Wes Montgomery, Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass, and an assortment of artists from the burgeoning folk scene; Simon and Garfunkel, The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem and many more, in addition to a respectable cross-section of classical repertoire.
I remember being profoundly affected by the first Carmen albums that I listened to. I thought it odd that I was so deeply affected by her singing, as this was around the time that I first heard the early Beatles albums; albums that really were responsible for me wanting to become a musician. There was something profoundly different about the way that she approached singing standards. She made them deeply personal. In this respect, even though this was a completely different genre, there was a correlation with albums like “Rubber Soul” that I was diving into. Her way of singing the well-worn songs from movies and musicals that became the “standards”, was personal in a completely different way than other great singers, even from HER hero Billie Holiday. Her understanding of the lyrics to these songs was deep in a subtle way that I recall not quite being able to distill until much later. The songs were in her blood. Her singing became part of the very select group of singers that I consistently went to in order to access and articulate the melancholy that accompanied early adolescence for me. She was a completely honest singer.
Years later, in the late seventies, I had started to play with some of my jazz heroes, both in L.A. and on the road. I got a call to come and audition to play with Carmen. As I made my way up to her house in Beverly Hills my stomach was in knots, and I realized how nervous I was. I had listened to this woman’s voice since I was a young kid, and here I was, driving to her house to play with her.
I pulled into her driveway and rang the bell. Her housekeeper answered the door, and guided me to her living room where the rest of the band was setting up. Her “book” was sitting on a music stand in the spot for me to set up. I took my bass out, got set up, then sat down on my stool and picked up her bass book, which was huge, crammed full of charts that dated from the earliest days of her playing with a trio all the way up to the most recent charts of songs that she had just recently started to sing. The arrangements were credited to some of the piano players who might have started out traveling with her, then becoming great film composers or having bands of their own. The songs were uniformly great. Carmen had what I would call great and very selective taste in songs. Nothing trite or simply present because of it having been a hit of some kind or another.
As I was thumbing through the mammoth folder, Carmen came down a hall, and into the living room. She was warm, but with a bit of a gruff undertone that felt like “let’s get this over with so that I can get back to my favorite soap opera”.
She called the first song that we would play, and I nervously looked through the giant book for the song. Things were numbered in the folder, but obviously things had been stuck back into the book after being in a set that she had put together, but stuck back in out of numerical sequence.
After finding the first song, I think that it was “Time After Time”, I spread the chart out on the music stand, and Carmen, who was sitting on the low couch with her elbows on her knees, looked up at me in a tough way, turned to the piano player, and counted it off. As we played the song down, I had the feeling that I was walking through a surreal dream, playing this standard down with someone I had listened to so much for so long. As we got to the last time through the verse, Carmen gruffly stopped the band, raising her hand up and waving it…“okay,… okay…. that’s enough!” My heart sank, as I thought that somehow she had decided in the middle of the tune that I wasn’t right for the gig. She lowered her head, looking down and paused, knowing that I was anxiously anticipating a reason for us stopping. She looked back up at me with a very serious and concerned expression which then turned to a big smile, and said “you got the gig!” She had completely wound me up!
Carmen had a great sense of humor; dark, ironic, whip-smart and sophisticated. The kind of sense of humor that is borne of being well-read and having a very discerning sense of the absurdity of the human condition. She had come up as a young singer, working at Minton’s as a singer, and even as a secretary, but playing with all of the bebop greats of that era; Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke (who she was married to for a period of time) and Oscar Pettiford. She had become a close friend of Billie Holliday, the kind of friend borne of being a protege of sorts. She had paid her dues, both singing in piano lounges, and singing with greats of the stature of Count Basie. She had ascended to become, along with Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, part of what one would consider to jazz vocal royalty.
2.
Playing with Carmen was almost a kind of mystical experience for me. On one level it was a job that any bass player who plays with jazz singers knows well. Play the chart, play in tune, play with with good time, and find the right sense of swing for each song. There is another level though, one that I hadn’t really been cognizant of before the time that I worked with Carmen. Her delivery was always so nuanced and perfectly structured, at the same time as not feeling self-conscious at all, absolutely honest. She would always adhere to the melody in the places that it was essential to what made the song great and memorable in a melodic sense, but would consistently depart from it in the places that made the song her own; making harmonic substitutions in just the right spots and many times grounding the substitutions and melodic departures by coming back to The Blues. She was an exquisite storyteller. With all of these elements being present, it’s essential that the piano voicing, groove, and note choice from the bass be perfect. As a bass player I would naturally listen to every detail of her phrasing and storytelling in order to shape each note in the right way to support what she was singing. At the same time there was a part of me that was just in awe of her singing; that just wanted to take in every line; how it was different from the previous night, how she was choosing to tell that part of the story. At the risk of being overly dramatic, it was a kind of ecstatic state to play with her.
Carmen also demanded perfection from the musicians that she played with. There were abusive instances where the piano player would play a voicing that made it awkward for her to do what she wanted to do melodically, that boxed her in melodically, and at least 3 times this resulted in her stopping the band onstage, with the audience shifting in their seats uncomfortably, and say to the piano player “so what am I supposed to sing over that?!” Part of the reason for her dealing with this kind of situation in such a rude way was that she was such a good piano player herself that she would become easily exasperated with a piano player who wasn’t perfectly aligned with the way that she would approach voicing chords. She wanted the consistency of George Shearing or Dave Grusin, and the rawness of Monk, so needless to say, she was always frustrated in one way or another. This frustration could manifest itself in an extremely rude way. From my vantage point she would test piano players abusively until she reached the limit of what they would tolerate, then when they finally reached the point where they were just about to quit, she would apologize and reel her behavior in. This part of her persona was extremely stressful for me to be around. As time went on, I found that the anxiety of being around this part of her eating away at the pleasure of playing with her. I found myself spending a part of each day practicing, and a good portion of it dreading what might unfold during the show each night.
3.
I seem to remember Santa Fe as the backdrop of me deciding to move on. Walking down one of the small side streets that were lined with shops that sold old Indian artifacts and jewelry, I can remember feeling like I had reached a point where the possibility of Carmen going off the rails in this abusive way had outgrown the pleasure of playing with her. We were playing at La Fonda, which was a cafe at the center of town. As I picked through beautiful old Hopi Kachina dolls in one of the shops, I decided that I had learned what I needed to learn from her. She was a tough woman, and god knows what she had gone through being a black woman in the era that she came up in, but it had fed some demons that resided deep inside of her. But despite her demons, she affected me profoundly as a musician and as a record producer. She helped me distill what it is that touches me the most in a voice. Honesty.