Singer Cleo Laine has died at 97 : NPR

Dame Cleo Laine has died at age 97. Her dying was announced by The Stables, the music venue that she and her husband, Sir John Dankworth, based. Critic Bob Mondello — a longtime fan — provides an appreciation.

It was the mid-Seventies when a concert-going pal informed me he’d simply been to Carnegie Hall and heard the best pop vocalist alive. “She’s coming to DC,” he mentioned. “Get tickets.”

So I did.

On stage, she wore a diaphanous robe and had an afro that regarded like a sunburst mane because the highlight hit it. And when the applause died away, she sang a capella.

“I know where I’m goin’…”

In a smoky, breathy voice.

“…and I know who’s goin’ with me.”

Pretty sufficient. Certainly expressive. But best ever?

Smoke, gravel, and a four-octave vary

Then got here the second quantity — Carole King’s “Music,” accompanied by Laine’s saxophonist husband John Dankworth and his band, in an association designed to determine her jazz credentials. In Britain, she and Dankworth had been taking part in golf equipment and concert events because the Nineteen Fifties, however American audiences have been simply assembly her.

This music was additionally designed, I quickly discovered, to indicate off her vary, from gravelly low notes, to keening ethereal sounds a full 4 octaves larger. In one significantly wonderful passage she went from her lowest be aware to her highest and again down once more within the house of 44 seconds. On her album Cleo Laine Live at Carnegie Hall you’ll be able to hear her do it stay for an viewers that is clearly as astonished as mine was.

Trust me, you will not play it simply as soon as.

Now, vocal pyrotechnics are enjoyable. But they don’t seem to be every little thing for a pop singer. Laine, I found in years of following her, had every little thing. She excelled at jazz, pop, and classical stylings — among the many few vocalists to obtain Grammy nominations in all three of these classes — and was so fashionable in Britain that she was made a Dame in 1997.

Give her a comic book quantity and she or he’d land each joke, a expertise she developed within the theater, the place she started her profession as an actress, and went on to star in musicals on the West End, repeatedly stopping such exhibits as Showboat, and A Little Night Music with ballads. Give her the appropriate one and she or he may practically cease your coronary heart.

A thunderclap of applause

I bear in mind her holding the final be aware of “Send in the Clowns” at an out of doors amphitheater a few years after I noticed that first live performance and, I swear, even the crickets stopped for her, the viewers so captivated that nobody wished to interrupt the silence.

As she completed that final be aware, I began counting — one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand … and bought to seven earlier than each hand within the place got here collectively in the one “thunderclap” of applause I’ve ever heard.

Laine continued performing for six many years — all however the final along with her husband. He died hours earlier than they have been to offer a live performance in 2010, and she or he went on with out him, solely telling the viewers on the finish that he’d handed away — as a result of, she mentioned, that is what he’d have wished.

In current years her voice had dimmed, however not sufficient that there was ever cause to argue with the Sunday Times critic who mentioned within the Seventies, that Cleo Laine was “quite simply the best singer in the world.”