Blossom Dearie, Cult Chanteuse, Dies at 84
By STEPHEN HOLDEN FEB. 8, 2009
Blossom Dearie, the jazz pixie with a little-girl voice and pageboy haircut who was a fixture in New York and London nightclubs for decades, died on Saturday at her apartment in Greenwich Village. She was 84.
She died in her sleep of natural causes, said her manager and representative, Donald Schaffer. Her last public appearances, in 2006, were at her regular Midtown Manhattan stomping ground, the now defunct Danny’s Skylight Room.
A singer, pianist and songwriter with an independent spirit who zealously guarded her privacy, Ms. Dearie pursued a singular career that blurred the line between jazz and cabaret. An interpretive minimalist with caviar taste in songs and musicians, she was a genre unto herself. Rarely raising her sly, kittenish voice, Ms. Dearie confided song lyrics in a playful style below whose surface layers of insinuation lurked. Her cheery style influenced many younger jazz and cabaret singers, most notably Stacey Kent and the singer and pianist Daryl Sherman.
But just under her fey camouflage lay a needling wit. If you listened closely, you could hear the scathing contempt she brought to one of her signature songs, “I’m Hip,” the Dave Frishberg-Bob Dorough demolition of a namedropping bohemian poseur. Ms. Dearie was for years closely associated with Mr. Frishberg and Mr. Dorough. It was Mr. Frishberg who wrote another of her perennials, “Peel Me a Grape.”
Ms. Dearie didn’t suffer fools gladly and was unafraid to voice her disdain for music she didn’t like; the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber were a particular pet peeve.
The other side of her sensibility was a wistful romanticism most discernible in her interpretations of Brazilian bossa nova songs, material ideally suited to her delicate approach. Her final album, “Blossom’s Planet” (Daffodil), released in 2000, includes what may be the definitive interpretation of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave” Her dreamy attenuated rendition finds her voice floating away as though to sea, or to heaven, on lapping waves of tastefully synthesized strings.
Blossom Dearie, the eclectic jazz singer, performing in 2004 at Danny’s Skylight Room, her regular spot for years. Credit Rahav Segev for The New York Times
Born Blossom Margrete Dearie in East Durham, N.Y., on April 28, 1924, she was a classically trained pianist who switched to jazz after joining a high school band. Moving to New York City in the mid-1940s, she sang with the Blue Flames, a vocal group attached to the Woody Herman band, and with Alvino Rey’s band before embarking on a solo career.
Traveling to Paris in 1952, she joined the Blue Stars, a vocal octet that recorded a hit version of “Lullaby of Birdland.” While there she shared quarters with the jazz singer Annie Ross and met the Belgian flutist and saxophonist Bobby Jaspar, to whom she was briefly married.
She also met Norman Granz, the owner of Verve Records, who signed her to a six-album contract. All six Verve albums — “Blossom Dearie” (1956), “Give Him the Ooh-La-La” (1957), “Once Upon a Summertime” (1958), “Sings Comden and Green” (1959), “My Gentleman Friend” (1959) and “Soubrette Sings Broadway Hit Songs”(1960) — are today regarded as cult classics.
In the early 1960s a radio commercial she made for Hires Root Beer became so popular it spawned an album, “Blossom Dearie Sings Rootin’ Songs” (DIW). Her 1964 album, “May I Come In?” (Capitol), a straightforward pop collection, was her first to employ a full orchestra, but on subsequent albums she veered back into jazz and supper-club fare, mixing standards, jazz songs and witty novelties.
Beginning in 1966 she traveled regularly to London to play Ronnie Scott’s, a popular nightclub, and while in England recorded four albums for the Fontana label. Back in the United States she established her own label, Daffodil Records, in 1974. Its first album, “Blossom Dearie Sings,” released at the height of the singer-songwriter movement, contained all original songs, including “Hey John,” a tribute to John Lennon (with lyrics by Jim Council), and “I’m Shadowing You,” a collaboration with Johnny Mercer.
Although Ms. Dearie never had a hit as a songwriter (she usually wrote the melodies, not the lyrics), a number of her songs have enjoyed fairly wide circulation in nightclubs, most notably “Bye-Bye Country Boy” (written with Jack Segal), a pop star’s rueful farewell to a farm boy she meets on the road.
The last record Ms. Dearie recorded was a single, “It’s All Right to Be Afraid,” a comforting ballad dedicated to the victims and survivors of 9/11. She is survived by an older brother, Barney, and a nephew and niece.
She was born on April 28, 1924, and was 84,
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