Annie Ross: Obituary (1930-2020)

Garlanded by awards and an NEA Jazz Master, the gifted UK-born jazz singer and actress Annie Ross, who died in New York on 21 July, four days short of her 90th birthday, lived the jazz life to the full, both on and off the bandstand.

From a family of Scottish show business professionals, she was born in Surrey while her mother, a vaudevillian was on tour. With her family, she moved to New York in 1934 and then to Los Angeles at her actress aunt Ella Logan’s instigation and appeared in films as a juvenile actor, before returning to England in 1947 to work as a band vocalist.

In Paris to sing, the nineteen-year old Annabelle Macaulay Allen Short became Annie Ross and began to mix musically with the expatriate African-American jazz musicians then thronging the city. Her year-and-a-half affair with drummer Kenny Clarke produced a son Kenny Clarke Jr, later taken under the wing of Clarke’s family in Philadelphia. Enthused by Billie Holiday’s vocal style – the two became life-long friends – she returned to the US in 1950 and achieved enduring fame when she wrote lyrics to Wardell Gray’s tune ‘Twisted’ and recorded them in lung-busting, up-tempo fashion, with Art Blakey on drums, this witty vocal tour-de-force still on offer whenever one saw her perform.

In a crazily peripatetic period, she returned to Europe, toured the continent with Lionel Hampton’s orchestra in 1953, performed in Parisian clubs and was back in London in 1954 where she recorded with Ronnie Scott and Tony Crombie and then appeared in John Cranko’s Cranks revue in 1955, which transferred, cast intact, to New York a year later.

Her greatest jazz visibility came when she joined Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks to form ‘Lambert, Hendricks and Ross’, whose intricate vocalizing capitalized on her wide vocal range, enabling Leonard Feather to state, ‘Technically, she is the most remarkable female vocalist since Ella Fitzgerald’. The trio were a sensation, their 1957 ABC-Paramount album Sing-A-Song-of-Basie leading to European and US tours, bookings at major festivals and many more recordings. However, Ross’s addiction to heroin derailed her and she stayed on after a London club date in 1962 to beat it. And did.

Here she briefly ran her own club, Annie’s Room in Covent Garden, where she booked top US stars like jazz violinist Stuff Smith and Nina Simone. Even so, the club failed and by 1975 she was bankrupt. With singing jobs scarce, she moved successfully into musical theatre, starring in The Threepenny Opera. Back in the US from 1985, she appeared in Robert Altman’s 1993 Short Cuts movie to considerable acclaim and resumed her club and festival appearances, her residencies around Manhattan in the 2000s deploying her innate stagecraft even as they revealed her harsh vocal erosion.

With a substantial discography that included recordings with Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong, Ross’s final album To Lady With Love, her 2013 tribute to Billie Holiday, was part heartfelt memoir, and part poignant jazz swansong. Reflecting on their twenty-year association, pianist Tardo Hammer said. “I guess her time had come. Sometimes I thought she could survive anything because she did, unexpectedly, for so long.” Until now. RIP Annie.