Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney (24 page)

Rosemary already had several TV dates and live appearances planned for the spring of 1977, although the most significant—and unlikeliest—door to open was that of a recording studio. In June 1975, she had recorded her first full album since the
Travelin’ Two-Beat
collaboration with Crosby in 1964. The project was the brainchild of Nashville country music producer Scotty Turner and Rosemary’s manager Bill Loeb. Turner had known Rosemary from his days as musical director for Guy Mitchell, before he had
moved into production with A&M Records. Now, he was in Nashville, heading up the Country Division of Liberty/Imperial/United Artists records. Established labels such as these, however, showed little interest in a Clooney project. To fund the recording of the album, Turner looked to a newly formed company, APCO Records, created by Kentucky businessman, T. P. Alexander as both a record production and artist management venture.

For the sessions at the RCA Victor studios in Nashville, Turner assembled 11 of Nashville’s best session players, plus vocal backing from the Jordanaires. Rosemary had responded positively to Turner’s suggestion of a “pure country album,” he not realizing that this had been the music she had grown up with in Maysville. “When she came into Nashville with Bill Loeb and her then boyfriend Dante, I had a stack of songs chosen for her to go through and she seemed to love them all,” Turner said later. “So we had to narrow it down to 10. The first two she chose were songs written by Waylon Jennings’s wife Jessi Colter—“I’m Not Lisa” and “Storms Never Last.” Another song she wanted to do was Paul Simon’s “’Twas a Sunny Day” which fitted the concept perfectly.”
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Other titles included a remake of Rosemary’s million-seller “Half as Much.” For the instrumental break in the album’s title track, “Look My Way,” Turner prevailed on Dante to do a soft-shoe shuffle that the mikes captured. “It took some urging, but he finally conceded so I sprinkled some salt on the studio floor and he danced in tempo, to Rosie’s delight,” Turner said.

Rosemary sang well on the sessions, adopting a more overt, clipped style to her phrasing that accentuated the album’s authentic country feel. Sounding good and selling records, however, were two different things. APCO was not interested in publishing the album under its name but equally was unable to sell it to another US label. For a time, it looked as though the recordings might remain unreleased until Turner brought it to the attention of Alan Warner, head of United Artists Records in the United Kingdom. Warner had recently fronted the deal in 1974 that had taken Bing Crosby back into the recording studios, an initiative that had led indirectly to Crosby’s return to the live stage. With Rosemary gaining attention at Crosby’s side through the summer of 1976, Warner took a chance and bought the output of the sessions. The album appeared in British record shops in time for Rosemary’s appearances with Bing at the Palladium. The sleeve captured an unglamorous and unfamiliar Rosemary, sans makeup, with medium-length blonde hair tousled by a breeze. It was anything but the image of a reinvigorated star and the album came and went virtually unnoticed.

Nevertheless, with Clooney in England and enjoying a good press, Warner decided to try again. Warner’s original plan was to combine Rosemary with the Ken Barnes/Pete Moore team with whom Crosby was now
working, but scheduling proved impossible. United Artists therefore hired contemporary arranger/producer Del Newman to handle the project. Newman enjoyed an established reputation in the business from his work with such names as Elton John and former Beatles Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Recorded over several sessions in London during the summer of 1976, the result was
Nice to Be Around
, an album of contemporary pop songs. Rosemary handled them well, but without ever managing to come up with a definitive treatment of any of the 10 titles. Her voice lacked much of its trademark earthiness and, as with her Broadway appearance, she struggled to hold some of the endnotes. Music critic William Ruhlmann saw the album as a throwback to the half-hearted attempts that many pre-rock vocalists had made to cope with contemporary material in the 1960s. Rosemary’s cover versions of songs from the likes of Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Eric Carmen were, he wrote, “misguided.” “The world did not need to hear Clooney sing Simon’s articulate if sour lyrics to ‘My Little Town’ or copy Carmen’s self-pitying opus ‘All By Myself.’ This is not a comeback statement for her and is actually just as misbegotten in its way as the country album that preceded it.”
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Once again, there were no takers for the album in the states, but it saw release in England early in 1977, where
The Gramophone
long-windedly welcomed it as “another shining example of how talent and experience can project with maximum effect, contemporary material written by gentlemen mostly unborn when the executant artist began her career.”
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The cover this time showed Rosemary in a more elegant mode, although a strangely retouched photograph made her appear silver-haired, an image that served to only highlight her generational difference from the songs on the disc.

The two United Artists albums were little more than opportunistic ventures, their country and western and soft rock themes never likely to create a new recording platform for Rosemary. Few would have expected a small, jazz-focused label to be the answer either, and yet it was. Carl Jefferson was a businessman and civic dignitary in the northern California town of Concord. He was also a music fan, particularly of jazz, and was frustrated by the lack of outlets for the kind of music that he loved. His first step in rectifying the situation was to organize a jazz festival in Concord in the late ’60s.
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By 1976, what had started as a makeshift event built around a handful of performers was attracting crowds of over 30,000. During the 1973 gathering, guitarists Herb Ellis and Joe Pass approached Jefferson with an idea for a record album. “I was making a profit at my car dealership,” he said later. “I thought, ‘Hell, what can it cost?’”
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One album led to a second and then a third and before he knew it, Jefferson had “accidentally” created a record label. By the middle of the decade, Concord’s catalog had expanded
to 32 albums retailing at $6.98, one dollar below the going rate for the more mainstream releases. Jefferson had growth ambitions for his fledgling label, looking to double its turnover during each three-year trading cycle, although it retained its informality and mom and pop style of operation well into the 1980s.

Jefferson’s early focus was on jazz instrumentals. There was little sign in the early days that Concord Jazz might develop into a platform for jazz singing; even more unlikely was the idea that the first vocalist to sign for the label would be the seemingly washed-up star of the ’50s, Rosemary Clooney. The catalyst behind both such developments was drummer Jake Hanna. A Bostonian, Hanna had a solid jazz pedigree from spells with Marian McPartland and Woody Herman before taking on a resident musician’s job on
The Merv Griffin Show
in 1962. When Rosemary began appearing regularly on Griffin’s show during the early years of her recovery, she and Hanna became good friends. When Hanna picked up the drumsticks in the jazz quartet that Joe Bushkin put together to support Crosby’s stage show, the friendship was reinforced by the time they spent together on the road.

Hanna was also a close friend of Carl Jefferson, and in 1976 he came up with the idea of a tribute album to Duke Ellington, with proceeds going to the Ellington cancer charity.
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Concord’s limited budgets meant that Hanna was restricted to a quintet rather than a full-blown big band, although he did have a trio of stellar vocalists lined up. Tony Bennett, now freelancing after severing his career-long links with Columbia earlier in the decade, had agreed to do two songs, and when Hanna floated the project across both Rosemary and Bing Crosby during their Broadway tenure at the Uris Theater, both were enthusiastic. Crosby would cover “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” with Rosemary taking two titles, each of them songs that she had included in her
Blue Rose
album with Ellington from 1956, “I’m Checkin’ Out—Goombye” and “Sophisticated Lady.”

A Tribute to Duke
was also the Concord debut album for tenor sax player Scott Hamilton, who along with Hanna, Nat Pierce (piano), Bill Berry (trumpet), and Monty Budwig (bass) made up the quintet that backed the three vocalists. Hamilton remembered the sessions for the album as casual, informal affairs. Because of Crosby’s accident in Pasadena, the quintet was forced to record a backing track to which he would later add his vocal, but Rosemary, said Hamilton, was adamant that her titles should be done live. Hamilton had no perception of Rosemary as a jazz vocalist, nor indeed did she, but he could tell that she enjoyed the challenge of working with a jazz group. “She knew what she could do,” he said.
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Both of Rosemary’s contributions to the Ellington album reflected the recording style that would become the norm for her early years with Concord. Pianist Nat Pierce would
work up lead sheets for the musicians—essentially the melody and the chord structures—but no formal musical arrangement. That came from the musicians themselves when they got together in the studio. “Stimulating is one way to describe it,” said trumpeter Warren Vaché, who replaced Bill Berry on Rosemary’s subsequent albums. “Frightening is another.”
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When the Ellington album appeared later in the year, reviewer Peter Reilly singled out the two Clooney tracks for particular comment. They showed, he said, “that she has aged and mellowed like some rare private-stock California brandy only a few have been lucky enough to get their hands on yet” and adding presciently that “the vibes here suggest that Clooney just may be on the verge of a second career, one even more dazzling than her first.”
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Carl Jefferson thought the same and had heard enough in Rosemary’s contribution to the Ellington project to ask her if she was interested in making a solo album for his new label. Jake Hanna was once more the architect of the project, and he and Jefferson were happy to give Rosemary carte blanche to sing whatever she liked. Backed by a similar quintet to the Ellington album, Rosemary began work on her debut album for Concord Jazz in the Sunwest Recording Studios in Hollywood on July 7, 1977. Eight vocals and two instrumental pieces were laid out for the sessions, with the “arrangements” again being put together when the musicians assembled in the studio. Rosemary led on three Gershwin classics, plus other standards such as “As Time Goes By” and the Vincent Youmans/Billy Rose song, “More Than You Know.” The one concession to Rosemary’s former life was a lightly swinging treatment of her 1954
Pajama Game
hit, “Hey There.” While never recapturing the authority that she had shown on the two vocals for the Ellington album, there was enough in
Everything’s Coming Up Rosie
to demonstrate that Rosemary had found a new home. Not seeking to scat or improvise in the manner of Ella Fitzgerald or Anita O’Day, Rosemary delivered a set of perfectly timed vocals, allowing the jazz around her to influence and dictate the overall sound of the album. It left her free to concentrate on the subtlety of her phrasing and the delivery of the lyric.
Billboard
’s review said “This excellent 1977 recording has Clooney in the comfortable role of a band vocalist as she sings live, without overdubs, in front of a dynamic jazz quintet.”
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For Scott Hamilton and Warren Vaché, the sessions were the beginning of a relationship that would endure through the next 15 years. Looking back, Vaché said that
Everything’s Coming Up Rosie
was his first real exposure to working with a “significant singer.” It required some adaptation to his normal style on his solo spots, ensuring that “he waited until she stopped” before coming in and then making sure that what he played in his own spot would not confuse the singer’s ears and compromise her vocal
reentry. Nevertheless, Rosemary’s skills meant that she was probably the easiest singer for him to cut his teeth with. “Instinctively,” he said, “she was better than any singer I worked with. She had perfect pitch.”
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It was a talent that Carl Jefferson also recognized immediately. At the end of the final session, he approached Rosemary and asked if she would be interested in making an album a year for Concord. It was no mega-deal, but one that would pay good dividends to both parties.

No one anticipated that her next outing on Concord Jazz would be a eulogy to Bing Crosby. After a summer of rest and recovery, Crosby took to the stage at the newly opened Concord Pavilion on August 16. Despite his accident, he remained keen to return to the live stage, and with Bill Loeb now handling Crosby’s stage bookings, the world tour plans that had been blighted by his fall began to take shape once again. First, Crosby needed to test his fitness—and his confidence—before heading for England and another two-week season at the London Palladium. Rosemary was absent from the comeback show but at Crosby’s side when he arrived in Britain. The tour kicked off with two provincial outings in the north of England before opening at the Palladium on September 26, 1977. This time, the show featured less of Crosby’s family and more of Clooney, a move that was well received on both counts. For their duet, Bing and Rosemary raided the
Travelin’ Two-Beat
repertoire for “New Vienna Woods.” Another new spot, put together for the English audiences, was a medley of Noel Coward songs, performed by Bing, his wife Kathryn, and Rosemary. Her rendition of “Mad About the Boy” was the highlight. Once more, the show played to sellout audiences throughout its two-week season, before the cast headed to Brighton on England’s south coast for a final concert on Monday, October 10.

Crosby had come through the fortnight well, although the damaged disc in his back clearly inhibited his movement and left him a noticeably frailer, less certain figure than before his fall. When the Brighton performance ended, Rosemary was amazed to see Crosby, with bouquet of flowers in hand, hold out his arms to the audience and mouth the words “I love you.” Such an emotional statement was a mile out of character. The spontaneous hugging that went on between members of the cast as they left the stage also surprised her. It was, she said, as though they had come to the end of a road. BBC Radio had hoped to reunite Rosemary and Bing the following day for a Christmas special that would feature much of the Palladium material, but with Rosemary booked to appear in San Antonio, Texas, as soon as the tour ended, she had recorded her input the previous week. She was due to fly back to the states the day after the show in Brighton. As she headed for her dressing room in the Brighton Center, she shared an elevator with
Bing. She knew that he would be heading straight for a waiting car as he always left the theater before crowds could gather at the stage door. “I guess I won’t see you again,” she had said to him, not knowing the import of her words. “No, you won’t,” Crosby replied, “I’m going to Spain for some serious golf. When I’m home, we’ll go to dinner and I’ll pay!” Four days later, during the afternoon of Friday, October 14, she took a call from brother Nick. The feed had just come through to the news station where he worked in Cincinnati. Bing was dead, collapsing from a massive heart attack as he left the final hole of a golf course in Madrid.