Friday, July 1, 2011

Jon Hendricks at Ninety

This is nice to see:

Jon Hendricks will turn ninety in September (NPR feature here), and even if his voice isn't what it was in his prime, he still sounds pretty good!  Although he and Annie Ross evidently don't get along, they still have managed to reunite once in a while.  Here's a short write-up by David Hajdu.

Hendricks, who's interviewed here, is a brilliant scat singer, as you can see in this clip of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross singing Sonny Rollins's "Airegin" (solo starts at about 0:30).


The vocalese concept can be pretty hilarious, but I have to say that I don't think Hendricks is a great lyricist—maybe it's just that vocalese has never really escaped a kind of corny type of humor that was popular in the 1950s.  But a lot of it would work pretty well as just pure scat—wordless vocals.

Here's more LH & R—Horace Silver's "Doodlin'":

And here's Silver's original recording from 1954:

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