Gery Scott

Gery Scott (* as Diana Geraldine Whitburn , October 5, 1923 in Bombay ; † December 14, 2005 in Canberra ) was a British singer of swing , the Great American Songbook and other standards of light music and cabaret, including Noël Coward Songs.

She chose her stage name from her middle name and in memory of her Scottish ancestors. Other names under which she appeared are Diana Fischer, Diana Diamond, Diana Whitburn.

She was born in India to British parents and recorded Stormy Weather in 1952 for Columbia in India with Teddy Weatherford's band. She then went to London, where she sang with various BBC bands and dance orchestras such as Vic Lewis . During World War II, she made military maintenance in India and Burma with the American Red Cross.

In the 1950s she toured Europe with Woody Herman , Bud Shank , Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, among others . She lived temporarily in Wiesbaden with her German husband and piano accompanist Igo Fischer and from there toured to gigs all over Europe. This led to a recording deal with the Czech record company Supraphon, and she recorded with the orchestras Gustav Brom , Karel Vlach and Dalibor Brazda in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the mid-1950s she had a hit When the Saints go marching in in Czechoslovakia and appeared at a jazz festival in the GDR in 1955, after which she was persona non grata because of the tumult at the concert . She was the first western jazz singer (from the outside the epitome of the blonde American swing band singer) to tour the Soviet Union, where she sold many records. In 1961 she sang How high the moon at the Kiev Opera House while Yuri Gagarin made the first manned space flight. In 1962 she received a record deal from George Martin with the British Parlaphone. She had a few hits (This is Life, The Dum de de Dum Song, Summer Love, Stay With Me).

In 1957 she went on tour in East Asia, first in Ceylon, then Hong Kong, Bangkok, Malaysia and Japan. She opened a booking agency in Hong Kong serving Hong Kong entertainment stars like Shirley Bassey , Manfred Mann , jazz greats like Louis Armstrong , Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk , as well as British wrestlers who were popular on Hong Kong television. The latter, however, proved to be a fiasco because of a riot at the performances, which ruined them and brought them to prison. She also had a record company (Orbit Records) in Hong Kong and was the head of light music at the Hilton Hotels in the Far East. From 1966 to 1970 she sang in night clubs in Bangkok (such as the Cats Eye), then at the height of the Vietnam War, always full of US soldiers on vacation, in Singapore and other places in Southeast Asia. In 1969 she divorced Igo Fischer and performed in Kula Lumpur. Soon after, she met her third partner, the Australian oil businessman Tony Diamond in Singapore, called herself Diamond and temporarily gave up appearances until they separated again after eleven years. She lived with him in various places around the world, to which her partner's oil deals took her, including three years until the 1979 revolution in Iran. In 1980 she moved to Australia (where her son Christopher lived), where she performed in night clubs and cabarets in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. She also taught there (jazz singing at the Canberra Institute of the Arts since 1985, where she also received a Masters in Music degree in 1998) and appeared on television. She last appeared in public in 2003, at the Sydney Cabaret Convention, and in 2005 at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra (then already in a wheelchair).

She was married twice. Once with the Royal Air Force pilot Pat Lofting (personal pilot of the Nawab von Bhopal , nephew of Hugh Lofting ), in his second marriage from 1961 to the German pianist Igo Fischer (marriage in the British embassy in Moscow). She has a son from her first marriage (born 1949).

literature

• Larissa MacFarquhar The jazz singer. A life on the wild side , The New Yorker , August 18 and 23, 2003 (Biographical sketch by Gery Scott)

Web links

• Your dedicated website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Her significant other abandoned her. He was murdered in his home in 1986 in Norfolk by a drunken pub owner couple when he surprised them as they robbed his apartment