Aretha Franklin was about a month shy of her 20th birthday when she appeared for a week at The Village Gate in late February of 1962. She shared a bill there with pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, who like her was an indescribable talent — a genius, in the fullest sense of the word — recently signed to the roster of Columbia Records.
Her Columbia output leaned into jazz as a signal of adult-pop sophistication, but also as an unforced affinity, less formative than the black church but just as inextricable, and maybe almost as deep. Jazz was central to her musicianship, however far she rambled. Without it we’d be remembering a different artist now, and celebrating a different body of work.
It’s no slight at all to Franklin’s incandescent work on Atlantic in the late ’60s and early ’70s — one of the all-time hot streaks in recorded music history — to recognize the glorious work she did earlier in her career. As Ann Powers put it in her eloquent tribute: “The beginning of Franklin’s journey toward stardom, under the tutelage of John Hammond at Columbia Records, offers another set of lessons, this time in adaptability, elegance and craft.”
On an even more basic level, Franklin was in some sense a jazz singer, even though that label captures neither the essence of her artistry nor the scope of her significance. In 1961 she was anointed “New-Star Female Vocalist” in the DownBeat critics poll, a measure of consensus for the jazz press. (She’d received 30 votes to Abbey Lincoln’s 25.) “The dimly lit, smoke-filled jazz club was taking on the aspect of a revival tent,” wrote Pete Welding in the accompanying profile, describing a Franklin performance almost as a kind of transubstantiation.
Her older brother Cecil, who was close friends with Smokey Robinson, ran a barbershop out of the first-floor bathroom of their house. He took pride in the music he played in the shop: all the hip modern jazz of the day, from Mingus to Miles to Monk. Aretha would absorb it all.
As Cecil told Ritz, she also hunkered down alone with the hi-fi, for hours at a stretch. “That’s where she first heard Sarah Vaughan,” Cecil said. “But she didn’t stop with Sarah. She studied Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day, June Christy, Dakota Staton — anyone I had on the box. She got to a point where she could imitate these singers, lick for lick.”
Hammond, who had famously worked with Holiday, saw this potential when he signed Franklin to Columbia. It was no accident that her first album for the label, released in ’61, was Aretha: With The Ray Bryant Combo — Bryant being an exceptional jazz pianist from Philadelphia, and the son of an ordained minister. Throughout that album, especially on a churchified track like “Won’t Be Long,” you can clearly hear the spark that would later be so celebrated.
There’s some incredible footage of Franklin performing “Skylark” and other songbook fare, like “Lover Come Back to Me,” on The Steve Allen Show in 1964. She’s ostensibly there to promote her latest album, Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, but she doesn’t do any of that material. What she does is riveting, bordering on sublime.
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