The Songbirds Archives

Warm Cool: The Atlantic Years
32 Jazz (32108, 2 CDs), US, 1999

Chris Connor (Atlantic 1228) / He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
Collectables Jazz Classics (COL-CD-6239), US, 1999

Reviewed by Marcia Baggott; Washington, DC

It’s my life. Jazz is my life… I don’t know what else there is to say about it. – Chris Connor, 1999

Chris Connor was born in Kansas City on November 8, 1927. She studied clarinet in school, memorized Artie Shaw’s Concerto for Clarinet and was given first chair, but she always wanted to sing. Her father, an amateur violinist, encouraged her. As she told Fred Jung in a May, 1999 interview for All About Jazz, "I wasn't old enough to know exactly what was happening, but I had heard of people like Charlie Parker, Count Basie coming through to the major ballrooms and I had my dad take me to a ballroom. All the bands would come through every weekend, name bands. Tony Pastor, Stan Kenton, Charlie Barnet and all those. I got to at least hear them live, thanks to my father indulging me."

After graduating high school, she typed by day and sang four or five nights a week with a band at the University of Columbus in Missouri. "It had French horns, and all the Kenton things were in the book. Kenton was always the band for me. I always wanted to sing with him, but never thought I would," she told Down Beat in 1954. When the leader of the college band graduated, Connor moved back to Kansas City, where she sang with a small group that included a then 19-year-old Bob Brookmeyer.

In the late 1940s, Connor moved to New York. "I starved, but good, for seven weeks," she told Down Beat, before being hired by Claude Thornhill as a member of his vocal group, the Snowflakes. This was followed by a stint with Herbie Fields, a period of singing at clubs in New York and New Jersey, then back with Thornhill for a year-and-a-half of one-nighters. She next got an offer from Jerry Wald. It was on a Wald broadcast from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans that June Christy happened to hear her. Christy recommended her to Kenton, who hired her six months later.

Of Kenton's band, she told Billy Taylor in 1996, "I can’t think of another band that’s that exciting, then or now, and, well, I’m a Stan Kenton fan. Let’s face it." Of the man himself, she told Taylor, "He was a gentleman and a great artist and a great man."

But she stayed with Kenton for less than a year, then landed a solo gig at Birdland, which led to a contract with the newly-launched Bethlehem Records. She moved to Atlantic in 1956, where she made her label debut with Chris Connor (also known simply by its label and catalog number, "Atlantic 1228"), which was quickly followed the same year by He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.

She was quite a star in the 1950s and 1960s, the premier "torch singer," when these wonderful albums were made – the coolest of the "cool singers," if we must label her. In his book Jazz Singing, Will Friedwald says, "the key to their music is subtlety. Cool singers choose to imply rather than directly state. They prefer to understate." Use of little vibrato is said to be another characteristic of the "Cool School."

Rather than the almost obligatory comparison of Connor to Anita O'Day and June Christy, let me simply point out that each woman knew what the other was doing, and that they had a fair amount in common: They were three great singers who had all worked with Stan Kenton, and who lived and worked in approximately the same time-frame on Planet Earth, with similar material, arrangements and personnel.

Additionally, they seem to have had much admiration and respect for one another. Connor told Taylor, "Well, I happen to have loved June Christy, and if it hadn't been for June Christy I wouldn't have been with Stan Kenton… I didn't get a chance to really know June, because she lived on the West Coast and I lived on the East Coast, but she was a doll. I loved her." Connor told Jung that, as a kid, "I used to listen to records as everyone else did, preferably Stan Kenton and Anita O'Day."

In her book, High Times, Hard Times, O'Day talks about her own appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958: "Performing in the afternoon was a bonus, because I could see the audience. I spotted Chris Connor out there. That was good, because I can make my performance the way I want it to be when I know some of the audience digs what I'm doing and I can relate to them." In the well-circulated documentary film of that jazz festival, Jazz on a Summer's Day, as O'Day is performing her wonderful Sweet Georgia Brown, the camera catches a quick shot of Connor obviously enjoying O’Day’s show.

Connor left Atlantic and made two albums with the ill-fated FM label in 1963 and 1964, followed by two for ABC-Paramount in 1965 and 1966, where she performed such uncharacteristic numbers as A Hard Day's Night and Can't Get Over the Bossa Nova. In 1972, she recorded Sketches for Rod McKuen's Stanyan Records with a mixed bag of songs, including some of McKuen's. She returned to the Great American Songbook on Sweet and Swinging in 1988 for Audiophile.

The singer came to terms with a dependency on alcohol in the late 1970s. As she told W. Royal Stokes (The Jazz Scene, 1991), "I haven’t had a drink since and I’ve never been happier, to tell you the truth. It’s a completely different life. In other words, my life is divided into two parts. When I was drinking – it’s like that part happened to a completely different person, it really wasn’t me. I’m so completely different now. I can remember all the bad things and all the experiences and all that – it’s marvelous! Well, if you want to be reborn, I guess that’s the word for it."

In the 1980s, Connor reinvented herself, you might say, and came out with two highly acclaimed albums, Classic, with arrangements by Richard Rodney Bennett, and New Again, with its glamorous cover shot by Nancy Ellison, arranged by Bennett and Michael Abene. "I really feel that an arranger is 50 percent of any piece of music and any record," she told Taylor.

Her most recent album, Blue Moon on the Japanese label Alfa (1995), arranged by Michael Abene, features songs from films.

Back now to this review’s chief focus: Connor’s prolific association with Atlantic Records, 1956-1962, as represented by two 1999 CD releases. From the standpoint of the singing itself, if you don’t like 32 Jazz’s new compilation Warm Cool: The Atlantic Years or the Collectables twofer combining the two 1956 Atlantic albums Chris Connor and He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, let's face it, you don't like Chris Connor. The 2-disc, 40-track Warm Cool contains some of her finest work from the 12-plus albums she recorded for Atlantic (roughly 150 songs), with a group of legendary musicians, and the good news is there's more to come. Due any day now from Collectables is Ballads of the Sad Café (Atlantic, 1959), paired somewhat illogically with an instrumental album by Conte Candoli and Lou Levy.

What makes Warm Cool particularly special is Connor's involvement in the project. In her recent interview with Jung, she said, "I think it is representative of everything, all the best that I did on Atlantic Records. Basically, I picked most of the material and paced them. I think it turned out pretty well."

And I can begin to see now why the CD has caught on the way it has. The sound quality on these albums is absolutely thrilling. You miss nothing – and you can't afford to with this minimalist singer, who speaks to us not just in words, but in the spaces between the words as well. Thank God for the invention of the microphone, which makes it possible to catch every tiny nuance.

Connor is at her most intimate, her most intense, her sultriest, her most husky-voiced, her swingingest on these offerings. On Warm Cool, songs I hadn't paid much attention to in their scratchy LP incarnation suddenly knocked me out. That prolonged ooooh on Something to Live For (also on the Collectables disc) pours right out of my bookcase stereo and envelops the room. I am convinced that she means every word. When she sings she’s going to Kansas City, or Follow Me, I start packing my bags. I get dizzy when I hear Lilac Wine. When she sings Jump for Joy, I ask, "How high?"

Get Out of Town on Chris Connor is a good example of what writer Joel E. Siegel, in his recent Washington City Paper article on Connor, calls her "daredevil sense of time." Nobody can paint a word-picture the way she can, as in I Wonder What Became of Me: "I've had my thrills. They've lit my cigarettes with dollar bills." Both Siegel and Friedwald give special attention to the song Follow Me. The latter says, in his book, "Were we to choose one single performance to represent Connor, it would have to be Follow Me." If you're a Connor fan, this track always bears repeating.

Regrettably, considering all that’s available on those 12-plus Atlantic albums, seven tracks on Warm Cool are also on the new Collectables twofer, and an additional eight of the tracks are also found on Chris Connor Sings the George Gershwin Almanac of Song (1957), a double-album that has been widely available on CD domestically for a full decade. Four more tracks on Warm Cool appear on A Jazz Date with Chris Connor (1958), long available on a twofer CD from Rhino, as do four tracks from the forthcoming Ballads of the Sad Café reissue. In essence, more than half of the 32 Jazz anthology is already available on other CDs in the States. So there is much more to draw from in the Atlantic vaults, and I'm hopeful that future generations won’t have to root around in mildewed bins to rescue Connor’s original LPs from the sweaty hands of dealers at record shows.

On the Collectables disc, the songs Circus and Flying Home (two Atlantic singles that later surfaced on Misty, a 1975 Japanese LP) replace When the Wind Was Green and He Was Too Good to Me from the Atlantic 1228 album, Collectables’ explanation being that the two original LPs couldn’t fit on one CD. The mood and quality of sound and orchestration for these substitutions are noticeably different, interrupting the smooth ambiance of the two, largely compatible 1956 albums. The substituted songs would have best been sequenced at the very end of the twofer as genuine, supplemental "bonus tracks." Fortunately, the omitted When the Wind Was Green makes an appearance on Warm Cool. We know this is one of at least 12 tunes selected by Connor for the anthology, because in the accompanying booklet, Friedwald says, "What really floored me was a tune that Chris had picked which I had somehow overlooked, the little-known When the Wind Was Green."

The Collectables cover art displays both of the original album covers, the very pretty Marcus Blechman photo of her on Atlantic 1228 (although the Collectables artist seems to have gotten a little carried away with his airbrush on her hair), and the interesting color photo by Jay Maisel from He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, a close-up of Connor’s head as she lies on a deep bed of grass, dreamily, eyes closed.

I always appreciate reading the original LP liner notes, and thankfully the Collectables twofer reprints them for both albums. Such notes, sometimes illuminating, sometimes laughable, provide fascinating insight into the zeitgeist of the original recordings. Warm Cool comes with a newly-penned essay by Friedwald, of which there has been some criticism for being too much about Friedwald and not enough about Connor. I personally feel he gets a little carried away with some of his metaphors; e.g., "Like the Pentagon's latest trillion-dollar project, she [Connor] sneaks past the radar of your expectations to drop an emotional bomb on you," and I do wish he had made it possible for Connor to share with us her thoughts on her own work. However, in the Jung interview previously cited, Connor says, "I was very thrilled to have him [Friedwald] write the liner notes, incidentally. He's a great writer." I humbly bow.

Warm Cool has a great Lee Friedlander cover shot of Connor performing live, obviously a relative of the Chris in Person album cover. There’s another black-and-white from this series inside. On the back is a rather unflattering, late-1960s-looking, post-Atlantic photo of her by David Cahr. Several shots in black-and-white from this series are inside the booklet as well, which might illustrate something about which I’ve asked many people who had seen her perform in the 1950s and 1960s. Much was made by critics of the day about her striking facial expressions, her postures and of the emotional intensity of her performances, and these photos give, perhaps, some idea of what a Connor performance was like at that time. The booklet contains other photos I had never seen before, in addition to reproductions of her various Atlantic album covers.

In her 71st year, Connor’s voice still has the ability to thrill audiences, as evidenced by her appearance at the Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC this spring, where she received a much-earned standing ovation.

As to the future, Connor told Taylor, "I'd like to sing as much as I can and get better at it, and keep traveling around the world as much as I can… Well, I'll tell you the truth, I'd like to sing forever, but I don't think audiences would pay to see a hundred-year-old woman with her cane or wheelchair."

I, for one, intend to navigate my walker over to wherever she’s gigging in her hundredth year.

Warm Cool: The Atlantic Years
32 Jazz (32108, 2 CDs), US, 1999
Running time: 1:37:52

Disc One:
1. Strike Up the Band (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin)
2. Good Morning, Heartache (I Higginbotham, E. Drake, D. Fisher)
3. But Not For Me (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin)
4. All The Things You Are (J. Kern, O. Hammerstein)
5. When the Wind Was Green (D. Hunt)
6. Poor Little Rich Girl (N. Coward)
7. Lonely Woman (O. Coleman, M. Guryan)
8. I Miss You So (J. Hendersen, B. Scott, S. Robin)
9. I’m Gonna Go Fishin’ (P. Lee, D. Ellington)
10. It Never Entered My Mind (R. Rodgers, L. Hart)
11. Something to Live For (D. Ellington, B. Strayhorn)
12. Time Out For Tears (A. Schiff, I. Berman)
13. ‘S Wonderful (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin)
14. These Foolish Things (H. Marvell, J. Strachey, H. Link)
15. It Only Happens When I Dance with You (I. Berlin)
16. High on a Windy Hill (J Whitney, A. Cramer)
17. Oh, You Crazy Moon (J. Burke), J. Van Heusen)
18. Kansas City (J. Leiber, M. Stoller)
19. Milano (J. Lewis, M. Guryan)
20. I Got Rhythm (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin)

Disc Two:
1. Summertime (G. Gershwin, D. Heyward)
2. Lonely Town (L. Bernstein, B. Comden, A. Green)
3. I’ve Got a Crush on You (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin)
5. A Foggy Day (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin)
5. Señor Blues (J. Silver)
6. I Wonder What Became of Me (J. Mercer, H. Arlen)
7. Jump for Joy (D. Ellington, S. Kuller)
8. Angel Eyes (M. Dennis, E. Brent)
9. Follow Me (F. Loewe, A. J. Lerner)
10. The Lonesome Road (N. Shilkret, G. Austin)
11. Here’s That Rainy Day (J. Burke, J. Van Heusen)
12. I’m Glad There Is You (P. Madeira, J. Dorsey)
13. My Shining Hour (J. Mercer, H. Arlen)
14. Go ‘Way From My Window (J. Niles)
15. Little Jazz Bird (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin)
16. Lilac Wine (J. Shelton)
17. The End of a Love Affair (E. Redding)
18. (I’m Afraid) The Masquerade is Over (H. Magidson, A. Wrubel)
19. Misty (E. Garner, J. Burke)
20. Flying Home (E. Delange, B. Goodman, L. Hampton)

Chris Connor (Atlantic 1228)He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (Atlantic 1240)
Collectables Jazz Classics (COL-CD-6239), US, 1999
Running time: 78:11

Chris Connor
Tracks:
1. I Get a Kick Out of You (C. Porter)
2. Something to Live For (D. Ellington, B. Strayhorn)
3. Get Out of Town (C. Porter)
4. Where Are You? (J. McHugh, Harold Adamson)
5. Anything Goes (C. Porter)
6. You Make Me Feel So Young (J. Myrow, M. Gordon)
7. Ev’rytime (R. Blane, H. Martin)
8. Way Out There (G. Wallington, B. Goodman)
9. My April Heart (G. Wallington, B. Goodman)
10. Almost Like Being in Love (F. Loewe, A. Lerner)

"Substitute" tracks:
11. Circus (Alter, Russell)12. Flying Home (Hampton, Goodman, Robin)

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
Tracks:
13. High On a Windy Hill (J. Whitney, A. Cramer)
14. Round About (V. Duke, O. Nash)
15. Angel Eyes (M. Dennis, E. Brent)
16. You Stepped Out of a Dream (G. Kahn, N. Herb Brown)
17. Why Can’t I? (R. Rodgers, L. Hart)
18. Suddenly It’s Spring (J. Burke, J. Van Heusen)
19. About the Blues (A. Hamilton)
20. Oh! You Crazy Moon (J. Burke, J. Van Heusen)
21. But Not For Me (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin)
22. I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry (J. Styne, S. Cahn)
23. I Wonder What Became of Me (J. Mercer, H. Arlen)
24. Thursday’s Child (E. Boyd, M. Grand)

32 Jazz website

Collectables website

1999 All About Jazz interview with Connor (enter keywords: Chris Connor):