Maxine Sullivan

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Maxine Sullivan in the Village Vanguard , around March 1947. Photo: William P. Gottlieb .

Maxine Sullivan (* 13. May 1911 as Marietta Lilian Williams in Homestead , Pennsylvania; † 7. April 1987 in New York City , New York) was an American jazz musician of Swing (singer, trombonist and also Flügelhornistin ).

Live and act

Sullivan had little training as a singer and initially performed with the Red Hot Peppers , her uncle's band, as a singer and instrumentalist. In the mid-1930s she was discovered by the pianist Gladys Mosier at a performance in a literary club in Pittsburgh and recommended to Claude Thornhill , with whose band she made the first recordings in 1937, which were well received. Thornhill contrasted Sullivan's “gentle, cultivated swing” ( Will Friedwald ) with material from Afro-Jewish jazz, Tin Pan Alley and Anglo-European folk sources.

In December 1937 she - accompanied by Thornhill, Charlie Shavers , Buster Bailey and others. a. with the standard " Nice Work If You Can Get It " their first (of three) hits on the Billboard charts. At the same time she had an engagement in the "Onyx Club" in New York, where she was accompanied by bassist John Kirby with his band, whom she married soon after (divorced in 1941). Among the Kirby / Thornhill recordings was the swing adaptation of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond". It was characteristic that Sullivan interpreted this song in a "black and white" way; she did swing, "but unobtrusively and with unusual restraint."

This song became her second hit, but at the same time it put her on similar arrangements in the future. With John Kirby she had her own radio series "Flow gently sweet rhythm" in 1940/41 - as the first female jazz musician of African American origin. Accompanied by his orchestra, she was able to place a third hit in the charts in 1943; the "My Ideal" recorded for Decca rose to number 11 on the American charts for a week. In the mid-1940s she sang with the bands of Teddy Wilson , Jimmie Lunceford and Benny Carter, as well as regularly in clubs. With the commitment to the folk song style, she switched from Scottish songs to "Orchichonia" and "My Yiddishe Mame"; she could not build a career on such short-lived fashions and had no more hit.

From the mid-1950s she recorded several albums a. a. with Charlie Shavers , Russell Procope and Buster Bailey , visited England in 1954 and 1958 and could also be heard on valve trombone and flugelhorn. In 1960 she married the stride pianist Cliff Jackson and worked mainly as a nurse until the mid-1960s, but continued to perform in a Bronx cultural center . From 1966 she sang again at neighborhood parties, in clubs and at traditional jazz festivals, first with her husband. In 1969 she made a comeback; she played u. a. with Doc Cheatham , Bobby Hackett and the World's Greatest Jazz Band and Scott Hamilton . From the mid-1970s she toured several times in Sweden and in 1984 in France. In September 1986 she was heard at the "Concord Jazz Festival" in Tokyo.

Sullivan appeared in the Broadway show "Swinging the Dream" (1939) and in the films "St. Louis Blues" (1939, by Raoul Walsh , with Hoagy Carmichael ) and (alongside Louis Armstrong ) in " Going Places " (directed Ray Enright , 1938) a horse racing comedy starring Dick Powell . In 1998 she was inducted into the “Big Band Hall of Fame”. Her life is traced in the documentary "Love to Be in Love" (1990) by Greta Schiller.

Discographic notes

Maxine Sullivan (1975)

literature

  • Linda Dahl: Stormy Weather. The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. London: Quartet Books, 1984. ISBN 0-7043-2477-6
  • Will Friedwald: Swinging Voices of America - A Compendium of Great Voices . Hannibal, St. Andrä-Wölker 1992. ISBN 3-85445-075-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dahl Stormy Weather , p. 133
  2. ↑ a b c Friedwald, p. 287 f.
  3. ^ Additional recordings with Claude Thornhill at the piano in 1937
  4. ↑ At the famous Benny Goodman concert at Carnegie Hall , Loch Lomond was sung by Martha Tilton .
  5. ↑ See Reclam's Jazz Guide
  6. ^ Scott Yanow The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide , p. 208
personal data
SURNAME Sullivan, Maxine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Williams, Marietta Lilian (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Homestead , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1987
Place of death New York City , New York