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R.I.P. Dame Cleo Laine
Jul. 26th, 2025 11:29 pmThe Guardian obituary
We didn't have any Cleo Laine albums when I grew up. Most of Dad's jazz was instrumental, though he loved Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald.
We arrived in Brussels in 1978. We were staying at the Hotel Arcade Stephanie off the Avenue Louise. We had comfortable rooms and our weird route to Belgium (via York and Horsham) meant we were still awake even though our sponsors thought we needed to sleep off jet lag. So, like all self-respecting Americans we flipped through channels. Dad stopped when he realized there was a Cleo Laine concert on. I was fascinated by the range of her voice and the lyrics of the song being about Shakespeare's Scottish Play. I later found out it was one of a series written by her husband, Johnny Dankworth.
The whole concert was great. Bearing in mind that I was 17, I was shocked that there were mixed race British people.
Legend has it that after she had been singing with the Johnny Dankworth group (not sure if it was a trio, quartet, or quintet in the late 1940s/early 1950s) for about six months, Dankworth realized that she was hesitant about her top range. He called the group together, sans Cleo, and told them to raise the pitch of each song a half step every night. She was up by a fifth before she realized what was happening and Dankworth basically said, "Told you, you had a top range." Laine worked on it, and her voice became an amazingly versatile instrument. She's the only woman ever nominated for a Grammy in the pop, jazz, and classical categories.
In the mid-1950s, the pianist in Dankworth's group was Dudley Moore. He was an organ exhibitioner (scholarship student with an extra requirement) at Magdalen College, Oxford. He fell in love with jazz and earned his pin money with Dankworth. Years later, he did an album with Cleo Laine called "Smilin' Through" which was one of the few albums I bought while I was at University.
This is my favorite song from the album, but the whole thing is really good.
And just to prove she was a woman of great culture:
We didn't have any Cleo Laine albums when I grew up. Most of Dad's jazz was instrumental, though he loved Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald.
We arrived in Brussels in 1978. We were staying at the Hotel Arcade Stephanie off the Avenue Louise. We had comfortable rooms and our weird route to Belgium (via York and Horsham) meant we were still awake even though our sponsors thought we needed to sleep off jet lag. So, like all self-respecting Americans we flipped through channels. Dad stopped when he realized there was a Cleo Laine concert on. I was fascinated by the range of her voice and the lyrics of the song being about Shakespeare's Scottish Play. I later found out it was one of a series written by her husband, Johnny Dankworth.
The whole concert was great. Bearing in mind that I was 17, I was shocked that there were mixed race British people.
Legend has it that after she had been singing with the Johnny Dankworth group (not sure if it was a trio, quartet, or quintet in the late 1940s/early 1950s) for about six months, Dankworth realized that she was hesitant about her top range. He called the group together, sans Cleo, and told them to raise the pitch of each song a half step every night. She was up by a fifth before she realized what was happening and Dankworth basically said, "Told you, you had a top range." Laine worked on it, and her voice became an amazingly versatile instrument. She's the only woman ever nominated for a Grammy in the pop, jazz, and classical categories.
In the mid-1950s, the pianist in Dankworth's group was Dudley Moore. He was an organ exhibitioner (scholarship student with an extra requirement) at Magdalen College, Oxford. He fell in love with jazz and earned his pin money with Dankworth. Years later, he did an album with Cleo Laine called "Smilin' Through" which was one of the few albums I bought while I was at University.
This is my favorite song from the album, but the whole thing is really good.
And just to prove she was a woman of great culture:
