[Dixielandjazz] Ernestine Anderson, 80 and still ticking

[Stephen G Barbone]

Not Dixieland, but surely OKOM. And Houston Person backing her up.  
Say, wasn't he with Ed Polcer and John Cocuzzi in Sacramento for a  
concert last month? Damn, wish I'd been there to hear them. <grin>

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

NY TIMES - April 5, 2008 - by Ben Ratliff
Still Shouting (When She Chooses To)

As she meted out her late set at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola on Thursday  
night, sitting in a chair as she sang blues, ballads and jazz  
standards, Ernestine Anderson stayed pretty reserved. There was a  
sense of pacing, of holding something back for herself — except for  
the three times she stretched out a single syllable and turned it  
inside out, went loud and high and remorseless on it.

Ms. Anderson will turn 80 this year, and her career has been as open  
to vicissitudes as any long-running jazz singer’s: she toured with  
Lionel Hampton in the early 1950s, made some late-start records under  
her own name in the late ’50s, relocated to Europe for a few years in  
the ’70s and then re-entered the American market with a low-key but  
consistent career.

She’s one of the few singers we have left from the Dinah Washington  
school and era, and nobody who hears her has to be told why she’s  
special. It’s obvious that she’s working with a disappearing musical  
language: with reserved, curvaceous phrasing that slows down time, and  
passing bits of earthy shouting.

Ms. Anderson is at Dizzy’s this week with a quartet including the  
tenor saxophonist Houston Person, who has miles of experience with  
singers: he performed with Etta Jones for more than 30 years, winding  
his phrases around hers. Ms. Anderson is really a front-and-center  
kind of person, but they worked reasonably well together on Thursday,  
in well-trod paths like “Day by Day” and “I Let a Song Go Out of My  
Heart,” as well as Leon Russell’s “Song for You,” which you tend to  
hear more often from soul and pop singers.

The rest of the band, with Lafayette Harris on piano, Chip Jackson on  
bass and Jerome Jennings on drums, didn’t tiptoe around her, as bands  
often learn to do around singers of her age; they played straight out,  
even in places where a more rustling sensitivity would have been  
right. But maybe it would also have been slightly pretentious, which  
Ms. Anderson never is.