We’ve spent five minutes with icons of the avant-garde, big-band heroes and saxophone titans. This time around, we’re putting the spotlight on one of jazz history’s rarest talents, the pianist and vocalist Shirley Horn, who would have turned 90 next month.
Horn was at once magnetically powerful and laid-back, glamorous and understated. A daughter of Washington, D.C.’s Black bourgeoisie, Horn often attired herself in furs and white gloves, but she could outlast even the hardiest barfly as the night wore on. Her claim to fame will always be her way with a ballad — slow, smoothly poetic, not exactly beckoning but fully inviting — but she also had a ferocious knack for swing rhythm. As influenced as her musical language was by the French Romantics, like Ravel and Debussy, the blues was always her mother tongue.
Born, raised and stationed throughout her life in the nation’s capital, educated in classical piano at Howard University, Horn developed a reputation in Washington by her mid-20s, but she had little interest in chasing the spotlight. She remained only a rumor in New York until Miles Davis — after hearing her 1960 debut album for the small Stere-O-Craft label — convinced Horn to bring her trio for an extended run opposite him at the Village Vanguard. The club’s owner had never heard of her, but Davis insisted: “If she don’t play, I ain’t gonna play.” Her showing there led to a contract with Mercury Records, and a solid run of recordings followed, including the Quincy Jones-arranged “Shirley Horn With Horns.”
But Horn prized the comforts of hearth and community, and she had the benefit of plentiful local scene in Washington, where she had become a linchpin. For most of the 1970s she barely recorded. But she kept working, holding together the same trio of expert D.C. musicians for decades, with the bassist Charles Ables and the drummer Steve Williams. The three developed a joyous dynamic, not so much telepathic as alert from moment to moment, so that Horn’s suave but intensely improvised playing always had a plush bed to land in.
Here the fact of her immense slowness — Horn often played at tempos so draggy that, at 30 or 40 seconds in, it felt like the song had barely begun — became an asset: You’ll often hear Ables reroute gamely in response to a rhythmic choice she’s made or a transitional chord she’s adjusted. The famed vocalist Carmen McRae loved the sound of that trio so much, she hired them as her backing group; on McRae’s final album, from 1991, Horn can be heard tossing glittery harmonies on ballads and driving the band on up-tempo tunes. It was around this time that Horn swept back into the spotlight, thanks to a deal with Verve Records, and enjoyed one of the great late-career renaissances in jazz history, in particular with her Grammy-winning 1992 album, the now-canonical “Here’s to Life.”
Below, read a selection of appreciative takes on Horn’s distinctive sound from a mix of musicians, writers and radio personalities, some of whom knew Horn personally by way of the Washington scene. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.
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Gwen Redding, radio D.J.
“The Great City”
Shirley loved D.C. because D.C. was home. It was her husband and her family. She stopped singing for a while so that she could take care of her family. And after everyone was grown, she decided that she would go back to work as a full-time singer. She just wasn’t the kind of person who was going to run to New York to record and perform. She’d rather be home in D.C., performing with Charles Ables and Steve Williams — which was just a perfect trio. “The Great City” is her singing about New York. “Seven million people and each one standing alone” — the lyrics really speak for themselves. When Europe and the rest of the world started calling her, she was very comfortable doing that. But she was never going to stop doing what she was doing, as far as her life went.
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Hannah Grantham, scholar
“Wild Is the Wind”
Listening to Shirley Horn is an intimate experience. The soundscapes she arranged immerse her audiences in different scenes of human life that are compelling and instructive. Her slower song-stylings make room for introspective thinking about our entangled human relationships. This is brilliantly demonstrated in her take on Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s 1957 standard “Wild Is the Wind.” Over the 67 years since Johnny Mathis liltingly premiered the song for the Paramount Pictures film of the same title, many artists have taken a turn at interpreting it, but Horn’s version stands out for its hushed tones that hint at the private sweet nothings exchanged between lovers.
At 26, Horn recorded “Wild Is the Wind” for the small label Stere-O-Craft in 1960. The song was released as a 7” single alongside the tune “Mountain Greenery” to promote Horn’s first album, “Embers and Ashes: Songs of Lost Love Sung by Shirley Horn.” From the start, Horn draws her listeners in with her moody piano, accented by Joe Benjamin’s bass and paired with Herbie Lovelle’s thumping, heartbeat-like drumming to amplify the earnest desire she expresses to escape into love’s embrace. Horn’s stretching of the lyrics envelops listeners in the heady intensity of a developing love’s quite moments. Her captivating performance extends the distinguished slower pace Horn perfected while playing in jazz clubs in Washington’s U Street Corridor during the 1950s.
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Alison Crockett, vocalist
“This Can’t Be Love” (live)
The way I came to Shirley Horn was through the record “Close Enough for Love.” The whole record is a masterpiece of rhythm, time, harmony and her amazing vocal storytelling ability. She was the singer that taught me how to phrase a song where I talked like my grandfather, slowly … with precision … and time … so you understand … exactly … what … she’s trying … to say. Horn is one of the sexiest singers you’ll ever hear. The song “I Wanna Be Loved” epitomizes that. However, the song that really made me love Shirley Horn was “This Can’t Be Love.” She turns this simple Rodgers and Hart song into a bluesy, swinging masterpiece. She has a simplistically complex way of comping and voicing chord changes that sets up the sound of the blues dripping out of her voice. Horn’s plain-spoken way of singing sounds so effortless that the listener is unaware of how deeply in the pocket she is. Take away the melody and she sounds like an African drum. Shirley is known for singing ballads in incredibly slow tempos, but don’t sleep on her ability to swing … HARD.
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Lauren Du Graf, writer
“A Lazy Afternoon”
In 1961, Shirley Horn was on a fast track to stardom, opening for Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard, where she was scouted by Quincy Jones for a deal with Mercury Records. By the following decade, the industry had all but forgotten her. She performed mostly in local venues and turned her attention to her family. Her recording career may have remained dormant had it not been for the drummer Billy Hart, her former bandmate and D.C. neighbor, who, in the late 1970s recommended Shirley to the Danish label Steeplechase.
The resulting work was “A Lazy Afternoon” (1979), her second album in 14 years. The project earned five stars in Downbeat, ushering in a wave of interest in her music that lasted until her death in 2005. Fittingly, the album’s title track is an ode to the absence of work. Originally a show tune, in Shirley’s hands the song is deconstructed, the tempo slackened beyond rubato, loaded with fermatas. Billy and the bassist Buster Williams intuit her every subtle shift and pause, as if to paint around the lyrics: “If you hold my hand and sit real still, you can hear the grass as it grows.” The magic of intimacy, the song suggests, surfaces in languor, as we retreat from the world of sound and motion into stillness.
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Jason King, music critic and scholar
“If I Should Lose You”
I wasn’t always Team Shirley Horn. While the jazz establishment raved about her string-laden 1992 album “Here’s to Life,” my teenage ears heard her starfish-slow singing as ponderous and her no-frills approach to melody as too understated. I’ve since come to appreciate the power of Horn’s approach to softness, silence and languorousness, forged by her classical music studies at Howard University in the 1940s, as well as the years she spent in the 1950s cutting her chops playing for discerning jazz audiences in D.C.-area nightclubs. For her 1960 debut, “Embers and Ashes: Songs of Lost Love,” Horn reimagines the 1930s Tin Pan Alley ballad “If I Should Lose You” as a spare fever dream. She transforms the melodramatic lyric into an emotionally naked essay on the erotics of codependency, simply through the intensity of her quiet singing. Inheritors of her pianissimo gift, ranging from Roberta Flack to Billie Eilish, deploy volume as suspense in similar ways. Shirley Horn’s sublime skill set made Miles Davis take notice — he’d invite her to open for him that year at the Village Vanguard. While they wouldn’t record together until 1991, the pair became kindred spirits in their lifelong pursuit of sultry minimalism.
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Eliane Elias, pianist and vocalist
“This Can’t Be Love”
Although Shirley Horn has often been identified as a supreme balladeer, I personally also enjoy hearing her singing and accompanying herself on the piano on mid-tempo swing tunes. Listen to “This Can’t Be Love” as an example of what I mean. She had great taste in choosing repertoire and in arranging for her trio. Horn could really swing and was an expressive singer with a great feel. She was a master at telling the story at any tempo, and could always hold the listener’s attention. She certainly could hold mine. Horn’s sound and style influenced a whole generation of singer/pianists.
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Giovanni Russonello, jazz critic
“Estate (Summer)”
Shirley Horn is the most elegant and yet perhaps the least ostentatious singer you’ll ever hear. She inherited Billie Holiday’s knack for making atmospheres out of a half-whisper; this is easy enough to notice. But it’s less often observed that she can be seen as a connector between Holiday and a strain of avant-garde vocalists — like Jeanne Lee and Patty Waters and later Fay Victor — who put breath and physical coolness at the center of their sounds. Horn’s 1987 take on “Estate (Summer),” an Italian ballad with a melody that could easily tip into melodrama, showcases the gravity of her calm. Fitting that the song is an ode to the forces of nature: When Horn tells the summer air, “You sweep away my sorrow with your sigh,” she must know she’s describing her effect on us, too.
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Billy Hart, drummer
“Why Did I Choose You?”
One of my favorite records I’ve ever made was “A Lazy Afternoon,” with me and Buster Williams accompanying Shirley. And one of my favorite tracks from it is “Why Did I Choose You?” It’s amazing how she made us feel when we were on the bandstand with her. More than one time, she made me cry. It was embarrassing, in front of the audience, but I was so moved by the music. And her influence shows up everywhere, both as a singer and a pianist. When you hear Herbie Hancock, even, you say: Man, Herbie really heard Shirley Horn! Anybody would say that, but I in particular can say that because I played with Shirley Horn opposite Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard, more than once, and that’s when I met Herbie. A bunch of younger singers, like Diana Krall, really based their way of singing on Shirley. I was talking not long ago to Samara Joy, and she said that “A Lazy Afternoon” is one of her favorite records.
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Andrey Henkin, music critic
“Consequences of a Drug Addict Role”
Like contemporary Nina Simone, the classically trained pianist Shirley Horn started out as a reluctant singer. And, after her first success in the early 1960s, Horn became increasingly dissatisfied with the settings in which she was heard, so much so that she departed the spotlight in 1966. Before her re-emergence in the late 1970s and increasing fame through the end of her life, she made a single album in 1973 for the obscure Perception label, a return to the intimacy of her 1960 debut and again featuring her piano. Closing out the date, a set mixing Great American Songbook standards and recent pop fare, is the audacious divergence in Horn’s discography “Consequences of a Drug Addict Role.”
Over a sparsely sinister musical backdrop — Horn’s sole composer credit — is Harold Wing’s poetry recounting a life of dependency, lines like “a challenge a day/no work or play/nothing to say/but how’s the stuff today.” Horn’s unadorned vocal style is rendered all the more chilling by an added echo effect, especially striking when she repeats “Death” to close out the track. In six minutes, Horn puts you on the cold streets, looking for a fix while looking over your shoulder.
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Fredara Hadley, scholar
“Return to Paradise”
Whenever I find myself in a tropical and lush corner of our planet, “Return to Paradise” is the song that plays in my head. It happens every single time unconsciously. The brilliance of Shirley Horn’s vocal phrasing and sensitive piano playing means that even when I am not in a tropical and lush corner of our planet, listening to “Return to Paradise” creates a moment of sublime respite. I first fell in love with Shirley Horn when I heard Mark de Clive-Lowe’s remix of “Return to Paradise” for the 2002 “Verve Remixed” compilation. Twentysomething me danced and vibed to his version, but I loved her voice so much that I happily fell down the rabbit hole of her discography. I became a devotee of her unrushed melodic storytelling and a delighted eavesdropper on the intimate conversation between her voice and her piano. For me, Shirley Horn is paradise found.
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Rusty Hassan, radio D.J.
“Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now”
Shirley lived a few blocks from me. She was not only a friend, she was a neighbor. And as she got more and more famous and celebrated, with the income she had coming in, rather than move, she kept adding onto her house, building additions onto her home on Lawrence Street. One time I saw her, she said: “I can’t do any more — I can’t get any more permits. But I finally got the room I want that will fit the grand piano.” She was really tight with D.C. — her loyalty to D.C. was such that she always did New Year’s Eve at the One Step Down, on Pennsylvania Avenue. And her album “The Main Ingredient” was recorded at that house on Lawrence Street. The tune “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now” is up-tempo, and something that people could easily be drawn to. The whole atmosphere was really like having a party. When you saw her in concert, she’d be well dressed, to the nines, wearing gloves, and really conscious of who she was in performance. But when she was off the stage, it was: “How you doin’, c’mon, let’s eat, let’s have some fun.” “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now” is an old swinger, a Fats Waller tune, and I think that spirit is in the music.
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Jordannah Elizabeth, music critic
“Here’s to Life”
Jazz vocalists can be considered equivalent to the aging process of all wines, from widely produced California merlots to the rarest Bordeaux; time is of the essence. Shirley Horn’s later work, 1992’s “Here’s to Life” (Verve), became her signature modern standard, as the cooing string section behind her creates a potent sonic realm, flowing like new silk for Horn to deliver an unforgettable performance. Horn’s sensibility — controlled, romantic and intuitive — also feels very intentional, almost as if she knew “Here’s to Life” was to be an emblem of wisdom and survival that is more sweet than bitter. She is regal, classic and simply perfect.
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John Murph, music critic
“You Won’t Forget Me”
Whenever I attempt to explain the erotic power of music, I go to this 1991 masterstroke. The first sound you hear is a muted trumpet stab from one of Shirley Horn’s biggest champions — Miles Davis, who became a fan from her 1960 debut album, “Embers and Ashes.” Three decades later, Miles appeared on the title track from her 1991 album, “You Won’t Forgot Me,” when she was experiencing a late-career renaissance. While Miles’s exquisite playing is noteworthy, make no mistake, this song is quintessential Shirley Horn. Horn excelled at suffusing her music with simmering eroticism — not only by smoky alto and languid yet conversational phrasing, but also from her penchant for prowling tempos and brilliant self-accompaniments on piano. In this song, she mesmerizes as she sings about her sexual prowess over a lover, caressing Kermit Goell and Fred Spielman’s lyrics like a siren. Steve Williams’s gentle, incessant drum rimshots and Charles Ables’s pulsating bass line concoct a groove of sustained ecstasy, while Horn’s sensual vocals shadow dance on top with Miles’s coruscating trumpet.
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