On 24 February 1982, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, The Manhattan Transfer won two Grammys for two songs from the same album. One was a doo-wop hit from 1965. The other was a Count Basie band number with words fitted to the parts the horns used to play.
“Boy from New York City” took Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. “Until I Met You (Corner Pocket)” took Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Duo or Group, in the first year that award was given. Both came from Mecca for Moderns, released by Atlantic in June 1981.
The group’s own history calls them the first vocal group to win Grammys in the pop and jazz categories in one year. A third Grammy from the same record went to the arranger Gene Puerling, for his vocal setting of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”.
They weren’t the only singers to cross that line that night, though. That story is near the end.
A 1965 doo-wop hit became their first US Top 10
“The Boy from New York City” was written by George Davis and John T. Taylor and first recorded by the Ad Libs. Their single came out in December 1964 on the Blue Cat label and reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1965. In Britain, the revival band Darts took it to No. 2 in 1978.
The Transfer’s version was produced by Jay Graydon, who wrote the horn and rhythm arrangements, while Alan Paul arranged the voices. The session players were Los Angeles studio regulars, among them David Foster on piano and Jerry Hey on trumpet.
It reached No. 7 on the Hot 100 in August 1981, the group’s first Top 10 hit in America, and No. 4 on the adult contemporary chart. Not every jazz listener approved. Alan Paul told The Syncopated Times in 2019 that jazz fans would stop them and ask, “Why are you guys singing ‘Boy From New York City?'”
Count Basie’s guitarist wrote the jazz winner
“Corner Pocket” was written by Freddie Green, the guitarist who kept time in Count Basie’s rhythm section for decades. The Basie band recorded it as an instrumental for the 1950s album April in Paris, and it’s worth hearing first: a relaxed medium tempo, with the brass and saxophones trading short riffs over Green’s steady four-to-the-bar chords. Don Wolf later added a lyric under the title “Until I Met You”, and Sarah Vaughan sang it with Basie in 1961.
On Mecca for Moderns, Janis Siegel wrote the vocal arrangement with Graydon. Instead of one singer and a band, the four voices take over the big-band sections themselves, with Steve Gadd on drums and Abraham Laboriel on bass underneath.
“It was incredible, listening to the original, hearing all the horns, and then putting them into voices,” Cheryl Bentyne said in the album notes on the group’s website. Siegel called it the best part of the sessions: “The most fun we had was cutting ‘Corner Pocket,’ because we sing that type of big band vocals very naturally.”
On Mecca for Moderns, play the two winners back to back. “Boy from New York City” is tight, bright pop with a handclap beat; “Corner Pocket” swings for over five minutes with the voices moving as a section, just as Basie’s saxophones did.
Jon Hendricks taught them the trick
Singing horn parts and solos with words is called vocalese, and Jon Hendricks was one of its originators. On Sing a Song of Basie (recorded 1957, released 1958), Lambert, Hendricks & Ross turned the Basie band’s arrangements into parts for three voices.
The Transfer had already worked with him. On their 1979 album Extensions, they recorded Weather Report’s “Birdland” with lyrics by Hendricks and a vocal arrangement by Siegel, who described it on the group’s site as “the beginning of our close relationship”. Alan Paul put it more simply in 2019: “He was really our mentor.”
Hendricks also introduced them to Bernard Kafka, whose unfinished tune Graydon completed as the track “Kafka” on Mecca for Moderns. A few years later, Hendricks wrote the words for eight songs on the group’s 1985 album Vocalese, where the line-up of guests includes Dizzy Gillespie and the Count Basie Orchestra. Start with “Another Night in Tunisia”, sung with Bobby McFerrin.
The album title came from a Duke Ellington record sleeve
Tim Hauser, who founded the group, found the phrase on the cover of a Duke Ellington album recorded at the Blue Note in 1952, which described the club as “the real mecca for moderns”. The record mixed styles on purpose: the Ad Libs cover, the Basie tune, Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” and “Spies in the Night”, which works in the James Bond theme. It reached No. 22 on the Billboard album chart, their highest placing up to then.
Siegel was open about the pull between the two sides. Speaking to Don Shewey of the Soho News in September 1981, a few months before the Grammys, she said: “Eventually I think I will make the commitment entirely to jazz. But now there are too many things I like to do.”
Al Jarreau did the same thing that night
In the new jazz group category, the Transfer beat the Hi-Lo’s, Jackie & Roy, Mel Tormé with Janis Ian, and Clare Fischer’s 2 + 2. Fischer would win the award himself in 1987, with his Latin Jazz Sextet.
At the same ceremony, Al Jarreau won Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, for “Breakin’ Away” and Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Male, for “(Round, Round, Round) Blue Rondo à la Turk”, his vocal version of Dave Brubeck’s tune. So the Transfer were the vocal group to win both that night, and Jarreau the solo singer.
The Manhattan Transfer’s four jazz Grammys in five years
The Manhattan Transfer won pop and jazz Grammys at the 24th awards in February 1982, with “Boy from New York City”, a 1965 Ad Libs hit that took the Transfer to No. 7, and “Until I Met You (Corner Pocket)”, Freddie Green’s Basie tune sung in vocalese. Gene Puerling won a third Grammy from the album for arranging “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”.
They won the jazz duo or group award again for “Route 66” in 1983 and “Why Not!” in 1984. Vocalese picked up 12 nominations and won two in 1986, including the group award. The category was dropped after 1990. Of the seven times it was presented, The Manhattan Transfer won four.
For more on the music behind this story, see our 10 classic Count Basie songs, Sing a Song of Basie in our 50 best vocal jazz albums, and Jon Hendricks in our best male jazz singers countdown. There’s more on the Transfer’s fellow double winner in our guide to Al Jarreau songs, on their Vocalese partner Bobby McFerrin, and on the arranger they beat that night in the story of Clare Fischer and Prince.
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Which of the two winners do you go back to more often: “Boy from New York City” or “Corner Pocket”?
