Cleo Laine in live performance in 1980.
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Cleo Laine in live performance in 1980.
Keystone/Getty Photos
Dame Cleo Laine has died at age 97. Her dying was introduced by The Stables, the music venue that she and her husband, Sir John Dankworth, based. Critic Bob Mondello — a longtime fan — gives an appreciation.
It was the mid-Seventies when a concert-going buddy advised me he’d simply been to Carnegie Corridor and heard the best pop vocalist alive. “She’s coming to DC,” he mentioned. “Get tickets.”
So I did.
On stage, she wore a diaphanous robe and had an afro that appeared like a sunburst mane because the highlight hit it. And when the applause died away, she sang a capella.
“I do know the place I am goin’…”
In a smoky, breathy voice.
“…and I do know who’s goin’ with me.”
Fairly sufficient. Actually expressive. However best ever?
Smoke, gravel, and a four-octave vary
Then got here the second quantity — Carole King’s “Music,” accompanied by Laine’s saxophonist husband John Dankworth and his band, in an association designed to determine her jazz credentials. In Britain, she and Dankworth had been enjoying golf equipment and live shows because the Nineteen Fifties, however American audiences had been simply assembly her.
This track was additionally designed, I quickly realized, to indicate off her vary, from gravelly low notes, to keening ethereal sounds a full 4 octaves increased. In a single significantly wonderful passage she went from her lowest notice to her highest and again down once more within the area of 44 seconds. On her album Cleo Laine Reside at Carnegie Corridor you’ll be able to hear her do it dwell for an viewers that is clearly as astonished as mine was.
Belief me, you will not play it simply as soon as.
Now, vocal pyrotechnics are enjoyable. However they don’t seem to be every thing for a pop singer. Laine, I found in years of following her, had every thing. She excelled at jazz, pop, and classical stylings — among the many few vocalists to obtain Grammy nominations in all three of these classes — and was so standard in Britain that she was made a Dame in 1997.
Give her a comic book quantity and he or she’d land each joke, a expertise she developed within the theater, the place she started her profession as an actress, and went on to star in musicals on the West Finish, often stopping such exhibits as Showboat, and A Little Night time Music with ballads. Give her the best one and he or she may practically cease your coronary heart.
A thunderclap of applause
I keep in mind her holding the final notice of “Ship within the Clowns” at an out of doors amphitheater a few years after I noticed that first live performance and, I swear, even the crickets stopped for her, the viewers so captivated that nobody wished to interrupt the silence.
As she completed that final notice, I began counting — one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand … and obtained to seven earlier than each hand within the place got here collectively in the one “thunderclap” of applause I’ve ever heard.
Laine continued performing for six a long time — all however the final along with her husband. He died hours earlier than they had been to present a live performance in 2010, and he or she went on with out him, solely telling the viewers on the finish that he’d handed away — as a result of, she mentioned, that is what he’d have wished.
In recent times her voice had dimmed, however not sufficient that there was ever cause to argue with the Sunday Occasions critic who mentioned within the Seventies, that Cleo Laine was “fairly merely the perfect singer on the planet.”
