Shirley Horn was barely a cult figure the first time I saw her perform May 8, 1989, at her Kuumbwa Jazz Center debut. The experience was transformative, and even as a relative newcomer I knew that Horn was an artist of the highest order.
It wasn’t just the way that her ballads seemed to defy the flow of time, each beat suspended on her drummer’s feathery brush strokes. Or her telegraphic piano work, which enfolded her burnished, coppery vocals with piquantly ringing harmonies. Horn remade each song in that Santa Cruz performance with her inimitable sound, a bracing blend of vulnerability, aching sensuality, and imperious command.
The mystery was why, in her mid-50s, she’d yet to break through. Horn had released a handful of albums in the first half of the 1960s, then spent almost a decade without recording and rarely performing outside of Washington, D.C., while raising her daughter. Releasing four excellent albums for the respected Danish label Steeplechase from 1979-85 didn’t do much to raise her profile in the U.S., but Horn, who died in 2005 at the age of 71, wasn’t destined for obscurity.
Richard Seidel signed her to Verve in 1987 as part of the vaunted label’s revitalization, and after a couple of well-received albums they hit upon an ideal recipe to showcase Horn’s singular talent. With a bevy of guest artists, including longtime fans Toots Thielemans and Miles Davis, Horn’s prophetically titled album “You Won’t Forget Me” came out 30 years ago on Feb. 12, 1991, transforming her from a hidden treasure into one of jazz’s biggest stars.
The album topped the jazz charts for seven weeks and garnered Horn her first Grammy nomination. All eight releases that followed also earned Grammy nominations for best jazz vocal album (an award she won for 1998’s “I Remember Miles”). Where her first two Verve releases sold several thousand copies, “You Won’t Forget Me” sold more than 200,000 worldwide.
“We were able to get full-page stories on Shirley in ‘Time’ and ‘Newsweek,’ and she appeared on ‘The Tonight Show,’” said Seidel, a Noe Valley resident for the past decade. “She went from playing small clubs to filling concert halls and playing major festivals, like Newport.” She also performed the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1994, recording a stellar set released years by Concord Jazz.
Seidel was vaguely familiar with Horn when he first saw her perform in the early 1980s at an International Association of Jazz Educators convention in Washington, D.C. She made a wee hours appearance at a jam session “and I was spellbound,” he recalled. “I vowed to record her someday.”
He got the chance seven years later when Verve geared up to release new jazz projects again after some two decades of relying on its vast catalog of albums by storied artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Oscar Peterson. Looking to reconnect with Horn, Seidel dropped by her second show at a short-lived Greenwich Village club called Carlos 1, “and I was the only person in the club,” he said.
Finding an audience would take some work, but Seidel had faith in talent. His first move in returning Verve to its powerhouse status as a jazz label was signing Horn and former Count Basie vocal star Joe Williams.
Her Verve debut, 1987’s “I Thought About You,” captured her live at the Hollywood jazzspot Vine Street Bar & Grill with bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams, her working trio for more than two decades. Seidel took the helm as producer for her second Verve release, the 1989 masterpiece “Close Enough for Love,” which featured D.C. tenor sax great Buck Hill.
For “You Won’t Forget Me” Horn requested a much higher profile cast of special guests, including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Thielemans, and most importantly, Miles Davis. The legendary trumpeter had championed her early in her career, insisting that she open for him at the Village Vanguard in 1961.
Much like he’d absorbed repertoire and concepts in spacing and dynamics from pianist Ahmad Jamal in the mid-1950s, Davis paid close attention to Horn’s ballad work. He eventually adopted five songs from her Vanguard repertoire on his underappreciated early ‘60s albums “Someday My Prince Will Come” and “Seven Steps to Heaven,” including “Old Folks,” “I Fall In Love Too Easily” and “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home.”
Seidel suggested she record several pieces with an all-star rhythm section featuring bassist Buster Williams and drummer Billy Hart, a Washington, D.C., native who got his start playing with Horn and had recommended her to Steeplechase. But it was Davis, in what was his final performance as a sideman, who helped make the album a sensation.
Accompanying Horn on the title track, a forgotten song previously recorded only once, in 1955 by Helen Merrill, the trumpeter provided a brooding counter melody that accentuated the tune’s haunting theme. Their performance turned “You Won’t Forget Me” into a standard, inspiring recordings by everyone from Abbey Lincoln, Keith Jarrett and Dena DeRose to Joe Locke, Melody Gardot, “and even Carly Simon,” Seidel said.
“I don’t know where Shirley found the tune, but she watched a lot of late-night old movies and daily soap operas, which she called her ‘stories,’ and she often discovered songs that way,” says Seidel. “That’s how she found the title song from an old Gary Cooper film, Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s ‘Return to Paradise.’”
She recorded that piece on her next album, “Here’s to Life,” a classic session with orchestrations by Johnny Mandel, but that’s another story.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
5 ESSENTIAL SHIRLEY HORN ALBUMS
All releases available for streaming on various digital sites.
1. “You Won’t Forget Me,” 1991
2. “Here’s To Life,” 1992
3. “Close Enough For Love,” 1989
4. “The Main Ingredient” 1995
5. “Live at the 1994 Monterey Jazz Festival,” 2008
