Let Me Sing

About “Let Me Sing”

As a child she sang for Duke Ellington and was praised by him. As a teenager she heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and lived hippily ever affter. Well it wasn’t that simple – or easy, But if show business was in her blood, jazz crept into her bones. She rubbed elbows with Stella Brooks; subbed at the Apollo Theater for Billie Holiday and became a caring friend to Lady Day; was married to Kenny Clarke and recorded with an incipient Modern Jazz Quartet; wrote the lyrics to Wardell Gray’s “Twisted” and Art Farmer’s “Farmer’s Market” and vocally negotiated their serpentine contours with uncanny elan; was a nightclub entrepreneur in London at “Annie’s Room”; appeared with Anthony Newley in Cranks; Vanessa Redgrave in Three Penny Opera; and was directed by Robert Altman in The Player and Short Cuts.

Annie and the band are one. She and the trio, Tardo Hammer, Neal Miner, and Jimmy Wormworth, have been on intimate musical terms over a long period. The way Bucky Pizzarelli and Warren Vache interact with her is pure magic. These are the “head “arrangements. Need I say more?

Ira Gitler, New York,
August 2005