American jazz and blues singer with a voice like ‘honey at dusk’The jazz and blues vocalist Ernestine Anderson,who has died aged 87, had all the credentials for enduring success. She could handle earthy blues and sophisticated ballads with equal facility, and could improvise like a jazz musician,and her honeyed sound with its churchy overtones was always a compelling listen. In a six-decade career, she made more than 30 albums, and was nominated four times for Grammys,and was garlanded with accolades and awards from her home town of Seattle, whose mayor called her “Seattle’s ambassador to the world”.
Her gargantuan breakthrough came in 1958 with the release in the US of the album Hot Cargo, and with the bandleader Harry Arnold. It was so popular that she was featured on the cover of Time magazine,appeared at the initial Monterey jazz festival in 1958, won the current Star award in Down Beat magazine’s Critics Poll of 1959, and signed up with Mercury Records,with whom she released half a dozen albums.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com