Blossom Dearie     1926 – 2009

February 9, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam, Music 

Blossom Dearie, the consummate composer, pianist, singer, cabaret chanteuse, and beebop hipster, died yesterday at home in Greenwich Village.  She was 82.

With her pixielike looks and her breathy, childlike voice, many supposed that her otherwise improbable name was the creation of some impressario or press agent.  But, like most things about her, it was legit.  (It’s true, her first name was Marguerite — but “Daisy Dearie” would have raised the same question.)

That distinctive voice was the newcomer’s inevitable first impression.   The New Yorker’s venerable jazz critic Whitney Balliett observed that it was so small that “without a microphone it would not reach the second floor of a doll’s house.”  For Leonard Feather, the LA Times‘ legendary jazz man, it was “chic, sleek and squeeky-clean, a voice in a million.”   Both were right.

But that was only the first impression.  Anyone who stayed to listen would soon be hooked on the uncanny way she had of burrowing into the words and music of a song and then singing them from the inside out.  That’s probably what Miles Davis meant when he said that she was “the only white woman who ever had soul.”

In fact, her fragile name and persona camouflaged a proud and headstrong woman with a whim of iron.  Her hipster credentials were impeccable, but she paid the bills —and put herself on the pop music map— making a commercial for Hires Root Beer.  Over the years her album tracks provided background for many ads.  One of the most recent was a Banana Republic in store promotion that paired her with Lyle Lovett on a remake of her signature song “Peel Me A Grape.”

When she didn’t feel that established labels were giving her enough attention or allowing her to choose suitable material or forcing her to sing with an orchestra, she founded her own record company.  Its name —Daffodil— sent a consistently ambivalent message.

Her extensive catalog is mostly in print and easily available (as on Amazon).

The YouTube selection of her songs is disappointingly thin and far from representative.  Faute de mieux, here’s the way she handled the 1932 Harold Arlen-Ted Koehler standard “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”:

She said that one of the things most lacking in modern popular songs was a sense of humor — something that was in abundant supply in many of her own compositions.  Dave Frishberg’s “My Attorney Bernie” was a mainstay of her repertoire.  And she wasn’t afraid to bite —or at least nibble on— the hand that fed her by poking fun at the early ’60s middle class weekend hipsters who formed no small part of her paying patrons.

I read Playboy magazine cause I’m hip.
I dig, I’m in step,
When it was hip to be hep I was hep….

Every Saturday night with my suit buttoned tight and my suedes on
I’m getting my kicks watching arty French flicks with my shades on.

I’m too much, I’m a gas,
I am anything but middle class.
I’m hip, but not weird.
Like you noticed, I don’t wear a beard.
Beards were in, but now they’re out —
They had their day, now they’re passe.
Just ask me if you’re in doubt,
Cause I’m hip.

Now I’m deep into zen meditation and macrobiotics.
And as soon as I can I intend to get into narcotics.

Cause I”m cool as a cuke.
I’m a cat, I’m a card, I’m a kook.

On her MySpace page, she adopted the third person and noted that “Blossom Dearie feels biographical information from encyclopedias and histories is old hat, outdated, and counter productive and would rather talk about her present and future plans.”  Nonetheless, she provided some background (which, except for the two years she shaved off her birthdate, is pretty accurate):

Born 28 April 1928, East Durham, New York, USA. A singer, pianist and songwriter, with a “wispy, little-girlish” voice, Dearie is regarded as one of the great supper club singers. Her father was of Scottish and Irish descent; her mother emigrated from Oslo, Norway. Dearie is said to have been given her unusual first name after a neighbor brought peach blossoms to her house on the day she was born.

She began taking piano lessons when she was five, and studied classical music until she was in her teens, when she played in her high school dance band and began to listen to jazz. Early influences included Art Tatum, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Martha Tilton, who sang with the Benny Goodman band. Dearie graduated from high school in the mid-40s and moved to New York City to pursue a music career. She joined the Blue Flames, a vocal group within the Woody Herman big band, and then sang with the Blue Reys, a similar formation in the Alvino Rey band.

In 1952, while working at the Chantilly Club in Greenwich Village, Dearie met Nicole Barclay who, with her husband, owned Barclay Records. At her suggestion she went to Paris and formed a vocal group, the Blue Stars. The group consisted of four male singers/instrumentalists, and four female singers; Dearie contributed many of the arrangements. They had a hit in France and the USA with one of their first recordings, a French version of “Lullaby Of Birdland”. While in Paris, Dearie met impresario and record producer Norman Granz, who signed her to Verve Records, for whom she eventually made six solo albums, including the highly regarded My Gentleman Friend.

Unable to take the Blue Stars to the USA because of passport problems (they later evolved into the Swingle Singers), she returned to New York and resumed her solo career, singing to her own piano accompaniment at New York nightclubs such as the Versailles, the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard. She also appeared on US television with Jack Paar, Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson.

In 1966 she made the first of what were to become annual appearances at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London, receiving excellent reviews as “a singer’s singer”, whose most important asset was her power to bring a personal interpretation to a song, while showing the utmost respect for a composer’s intentions. In the ’60s she also made some albums for Capitol Records, including May I Come In?, a set of standards arranged and conducted by Jack Marshall.

In the early ’70s, disillusioned by the major record companies’ lack of interest in her kind of music, she started her own company, Daffodil Records, in 1974. Her first album for the label, Blossom Dearie Sings, was followed by a two-record set entitled My New Celebrity Is You, which contained eight of her own compositions. The album’s title song was especially written for her by Johnny Mercer, and is said to be the last piece he wrote before his death in 1976.

During the ’70s Dearie performed at Carnegie Hall with former Count Basie blues singer Joe Williams and jazz vocalist Anita O’Day in a show called The Jazz Singers. In 1981 she appeared with Dave Frishberg for three weeks at Michael’s Pub in Manhattan. Frishberg, besides being a songwriter, also sang and played the piano, and Dearie frequently performed his songs, such as “Peel Me A Grape”, “I’m Hip” and “My Attorney Bernie”. Her own compositions include “I Like You, You’re Nice”, “I’m Shadowing You” and “Hey John”. From 1983, she performed regularly for six months a year at the Ballroom, a nightclub in Manhattan, and in 1985 was the first recipient of the Mabel Mercer Foundation Award, which is presented annually to an outstanding supper-club performer.

In the early 1990s I picked up the New York Times one day and read a glowing review of her performance at a downtown club where she was going to be resident for the next several Thursday nights.  Had I given any thought to it, I probably would have assumed that she was already long-retired or even passed on.  So I went to a couple of those shows, and they were truly memorable.

Still thin and blonde, she looked ageless — which was no small accomplishment for a sixty-plus year old wearing a jeweled cloche and sitting under several spotlights.  The repertoire was different each week, and the audience —much of which, having been drawn by the Times review, was demographically very different from her prior supper club or later Theater Row fans— was (there’s no other word for it) rapt.

Here’s her song —after today even  more poignant— “Don’t Wait Too Long.”

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