In the autumn of 1989, Sarah Vaughan played a run of shows at the Blue Note in New York. She was 65, and the critic James Gavin later wrote that her voice there “sounded magically untouched.”
During the engagement she learned that she had lung cancer. She was too ill to finish the last day of the booking. She never sang in public again.
Still at the top
Earlier that year she had been named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and given a Grammy for lifetime achievement. She was still touring, still recording, and still singing with the range and control that had made her famous.
For anyone coming to her fresh, that voice is the story. Vaughan could move from a deep, almost baritone low register to a clear soprano in a single phrase, and she bent melodies the way the bebop horn players did, because she had learned alongside them. She was known as “Sassy” and “the Divine One”.
On 3 September 1989 she sang with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, on a day the city’s mayor had proclaimed Sarah Vaughan Day in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times counted almost 12,000 people in the audience.
The diagnosis
By then her health was slipping. She cancelled several concerts that year, including dates in Europe. Then came the Blue Note, the diagnosis, and the final night she couldn’t complete.
She went home to California, to her house in Hidden Hills on the edge of Los Angeles, and began chemotherapy. Over the following months she moved between home and hospital.
Her last recordings
Vaughan’s last studio recordings had already been made, for a friend. Quincy Jones, who had worked with her since the 1950s, recorded her in 1988 and 1989 for Back on the Block, an album that brought together jazz veterans, soul singers and rappers. Released in November 1989, it featured Vaughan on several tracks.
The best known is “Birdland”, Joe Zawinul’s tribute to the New York club, where her voice and Ella Fitzgerald’s sit alongside the trumpets of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. She also sings with Fitzgerald on “Jazz Corner of the World” and adds wordless vocals to “Setembro”.
It closed a circle that had begun 47 years earlier. In the autumn of 1942, an 18-year-old Vaughan won amateur night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater singing “Body and Soul”. Her prize was $10 and a week’s booking, and in that week she opened for Ella Fitzgerald. Soon afterwards, on Billy Eckstine’s recommendation, Earl Hines hired her as his band’s singer and second pianist.
Back on the Block went on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1991. Vaughan didn’t live to see it.
3 April 1990
At the end of March 1990, Vaughan was admitted to Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. She went home on Tuesday 3 April.
That evening she watched a television film, Laker Girls, in which her daughter Paris had a part. Her mother, Ada, and her daughter were with her. Sarah Vaughan died at home that night, a week after her 66th birthday.
Newark
Her funeral was held on 9 April 1990 at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, the church where she had sung as a girl. About 500 people attended, among them Billy Eckstine, the friend who had helped start her career.
“A Newark girl comes home, having gone full circle,” said the minister, the Rev. Granville Seward. Afterwards a carriage drawn by two white horses carried her coffin to Glendale Cemetery in nearby Bloomfield.
Where to start listening
If you’re new to her, start with Sarah Vaughan, recorded in December 1954 and often called Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown. Her phrasing on “Lullaby of Birdland” is relaxed and playful, and the trumpeter’s solos show why musicians rated her as one of their own. Live in Japan, recorded in Tokyo in 1973, catches her stretching out in front of an audience, with long, adventurous versions of the standards.
Crazy and Mixed Up (1982), with Joe Pass on guitar, shows how rich her voice had become in her late fifties. Brazilian Romance (1987), produced by Sérgio Mendes and built largely on songs by Milton Nascimento and the brothers Danilo and Dori Caymmi, was her last album under her own name.
There’s more in our guides to the best Sarah Vaughan albums and Sarah Vaughan songs, and for her lifelong friend and rival, our pick of Ella Fitzgerald songs.
Did you ever see Sarah Vaughan sing live? Share your memories in the comments below.
