LONDON (AP) — Cleo Laine, whose husky contralto was some 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 it was “greatly saddened” by the information that “considered one of its founders and Life President, Dame Cleo Laine has handed away.”
Monica Ferguson, creative director of The Stables, mentioned Laine “can be enormously missed, however her distinctive expertise will at all times 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 sure 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 turned the primary British jazz artist to be made a dame, the feminine equal of a knight.
“It is British jazz that should have received the accolade for its service to me,” she mentioned when the honour was introduced. “It has given me a wonderful life, a successful career and an opportunity to travel the globe doing what I love to do.”
Laine was born Clementina Dinah Campbell in 1927. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was a Jamaican who liked opera and earned cash throughout the Melancholy as a avenue singer. Regardless of onerous occasions, her British mom, Minnie, made certain 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 further in “The Thief of Bagdad.” Leaving college 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 turned Cleo Laine.
“John said that when he heard me, I didn’t sound like anyone else who was singing at the time,” Laine as soon as mentioned. “I guess the reason I didn’t get the other jobs is that they were looking for a singer who did sound like somebody 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 were all sitting there with stony faces, so I asked the Scottish trumpet player Jimmy Deuchar, who was looking very glum and was the hardest nut of all, whether he thought she had something. ‘Something?’ he said, ‘She’s got everything!'”
Supplied 6 kilos per week, Laine demanded — and obtained — 7 kilos.
“They used to call me ‘Scruff’, although I don’t think I was scruffy. It was just that having come from the sticks, I didn’t know how to put things together as well as the other singers of the day,” she advised the Irish Unbiased. “And anyway, I didn’t have the money, because they weren’t paying me enough.”
Recognition got here swiftly. Laine was runner-up in Melody Maker’s “girl singer” class in 1952, and topped the listing in 1956 and 1957.
She married Dankworth — and stop 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 thought, no, I’m not going to just sit on the band and be a singer of songs every now and again when he fancied it. So it was then that I decided I wasn’t going to stay with the band and I was going to go off and try to do something solo-wise,” she mentioned in a BBC documentary.
“When I said I was leaving, he said, ‘Will you marry me?’ That was a good 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 completely satisfied marriage, Laine solid a profession unbiased of Dankworth.
“Whenever anybody starts putting a label on me, I say, ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ and I go and do something different,” Laine advised The Related Press in 1985 when she was showing on stage in New York in “The Mystery 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 Court docket Theatre, and was stunned to seek out herself within the lead position. She received a Moscow Arts Theatre Award for her efficiency.
“Valmouth” adopted in 1959, “The Seven Deadly Sins” in 1961, “The Trojan Women” in 1966 and “Hedda Gabler” in 1970.
The position of Julie in Jerome Kern’s “Show Boat” in 1971 offered Laine with a show-stopping tune, “Bill.”
Laine started profitable 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 Instances gave her a glowing evaluation.
The next yr, she and Dankworth drew a sold-out viewers at Carnegie Corridor, launching a collection of in style appearances. “Cleo at Carnegie” received a Grammy award in 1986, the identical yr she was a Tony nominee for “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
A reviewer for Selection in 2002 discovered her voice going sturdy: “a dark, creamy voice, remarkable range and control from bottomless contralto to a sweet clear soprano. Her perfect pitch and phrasing is always framed with musical imagination and good taste.”
Maybe Laine’s most troublesome 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 here today,” Laine advised the gang on the finish of the present. “But 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 was never a complete belter.”
“There was always a protective side in me, and an inner voice always said, ‘Don’t do that — it’s not good for you and your voice.'”
Laine is survived by her son and daughter.
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Related Press author Jill Lawless contributed. AP journalist Robert Barr, the principal author of the obituary, died in 2018.
