Betty Bennett
Betty Bennett (born October 23, 1921 in Lincoln , Nebraska , † April 7, 2020 ) was an American jazz singer .
Betty Bennett grew up in Hamburg (Iowa) and initially took piano lessons from her mother, a trained pianist. She later studied piano and singing at Drake University and initially aimed for a career as an opera singer. She then sang in Georgie Auld's orchestra in 1943 , then in a number of bands, until in 1945 she had her own radio show in USO troop support ( WAVES on Parade ). After the end of the Second World War she sang in the orchestras of Claude Thornhill in 1946, Alvino Rey 1947–1949 and Charlie Ventura in 1949/50. She performed as a soloist in San Francisco in 1950/51 and then sang with Woody Herman (1950), Charlie Barnet (1952) and Stan Kenton (1949) in the first half of the 1950s . She then married the pianist André Previn , who (alongside Shorty Rogers ) worked as arranger on her first albums under his own name ( Nobody Else But me , published on Atlantic , 1955). After an engagement with Benny Goodman , she largely retired from the music business in 1958; In 1959 another album was released for United Artists Records , I Love to Sing . In the 1960s, she divorced Previn; In 1963 she moved to London and from 1964 to 1966 she made regular guest appearances at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club . In 1967 she worked in the office of a remote production company. She then married the guitarist Mundell Lowe and performed with him in the US and Europe, a. a. at Wolsey's Club in London. In 1990 she made a comeback with the Fresh Sound album The Song Is You .
She reported on her experiences in her autobiography, The Ladies Who Sing With the Band , published by Scarecrow Press in 2000. Her photo archive, along with other memorabilia, is in the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University . In 2018 she made a brief guest appearance in the NAMM Oral History Program.
literature
- Leonard Feather , Ira Gitler : The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. Oxford University Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-532000-X .
Web links
- Works by Betty Bennett in the catalog of the German National Library
- Betty Bennett at Allmusic (English)
Remarks
- ↑ Marc Myers: Nacruf. Jazzwax, April 16, 2020, accessed on April 16, 2020 .
- ↑ Your debut album was released by Trend in 1953
- ↑ Bruce Crowther: Betty Bennett: the chick singer carries on. Jazz Journal, December 10, 2019, accessed December 10, 2019 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bennett, Betty |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American jazz singer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 23, 1921 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lincoln (Nebraska) |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 7, 2020 |