June Christy: The Cool School
Image: Library of Congress
June Christy (1925-1990) was one of many female vocalists, like Peggy Lee and Doris Day, who emerged from the rigors of the Big Band era of the 1930s and ‘40s to become major recording artists in their own right. Today, Christy is best known as an innovator in the Cool Jazz genre of the 1950s; her voice—a smoky, slow vibrato, originating deep in the chest—will forever be an important part of The Great American Songbook.
What makes biography compelling are revelations of the subject’s emotional life, relationships, motivations, thoughts, and opinions. These insights give shape and substance to a life story. All we have, with regard to Christy, are some impressions given by contemporaries, most of whom are now gone, the facts of her career, and the body of work she left behind.
Her nephew, Scott Luster, wrote, "June was well versed in religion and philosophy… She read extensively on Eastern religions. Her attitudes were at least somewhat shaped by Buddhist teachings." He went on to address the lack of personal information available to June Christy fans: "This was the result of my aunt’s basically resolute desire to avoid publicity, and from about 1968 onward, to avoid work except when she wanted to buy something… She was largely unimpressed with her work. She thought she was recording ‘standards to be’ at the time she recorded them and then watched the business turn away from jazz to rock and roll... June is enigmatic to many of us. She cared little for fame, but liked to live well. Didn’t take herself very seriously, but chose songs to record with the same level of care one would take when selecting the name for a child… She was one of those personalities that changes the dynamics of a room just by walking into it. She exuded class and elegance."
May Diggs, a family friend of 30 years, shared a few more details: June was a "great down-home cook, fiercely loyal, and absolutely intolerant of intolerance… a very talented painter… a self-described ‘homebody’… She loved her Siamese (usually two or three at a time) cats… She was happiest just sitting on the floor by the fireside and talking (always with some cool jazz in the background), or working a jigzaw puzzle, or reading (She was an avid reader.), or watching old movies on TV (these were pre-VCR days)—Roz Russell's ‘Auntie Mame’ was a favorite—as she waited for Coop to get home. He played for many years with The Tonight Show band on Johnny Carson's show…. She never appreciated how great a vocalist she was."
Born Shirley Luster, she began her career at age 13, in Decatur Illinois, singing and touring with Bill Oetzel’s, Ben Bradley’s, Bill Madden’s, and Dick Cisne’s society bands. After high school she changed her name to Sharon Leslie, moved to Chicago, and sang with a group led by Boyd Raeburn, then with Benny Strong’s band. When they moved to New York in 1944, she was quarantined with scarlet fever, and, heartbroken, had to return home. On March 22, 1945, she stepped into Anita O’Day’s newly vacant spot as lead vocalist for the Stan Kenton Orchestra; Kenton came to Illinois himself to reassure her mother that he would take good care of her. She changed her name one last time, to June Christy. The rest, as they say, is history.
Christy’s first recording with Stan Kenton was "Tampico;" the song hit #3 on the Billboard charts and was Kenton’s biggest-selling record. Other hits included "Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy," "I'm Gonna Love That Guy" and "It’s Been a Long Long Time." She was named Down Beat Magazine’s Best Female vocalist with a Big Band in 1946, ‘47, ‘48 and ‘50. Kenton’s orchestra did not work in late 1948 and ‘49; during this time, Christy took night club engagements, and recorded a solo album for Capitol Records with her husband, Kenton tenor saxophonist Bob Cooper. She reunited with Kenton and his Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra in 1950. While working with Kenton, she met jazz composer, arranger, and producer Pete Rugolo, who was to prove vital to her later solo success.
Wrote jazz expert Will Friedwald, "Up until that time, few modern jazz arrangers had written anything for singers... Christy-Rugolo recordings amount to the first full-scale explorations of possibilities for the human voice in this modern world." Christy’s work with Rugolo produced the iconic solo albums that propelled her to even greater popular acclaim.
Something Cool (Capitol, 1955)
This, Christy’s most famous album, and the only one she felt completely satisfied with, launched the cool jazz vocal movement. The title track, by Bill Barnes, became Christy’s signature song. First released in 1954, in 10” mono, Capitol Records realized that this format was soon likely to be eclipsed by the 12”, so in 1955, sent Christy back into the studio to cut four more tracks. The feeling of the original release was one of melancholy; the addition of four up-tempo tracks created a richer and far more nuanced overall effect. In 1960, Christy and Rugolo re-recorded all 11 songs, and released the album in stereo. Both the 1955 mono and 1960 stereo versions are available today. (I prefer the mono version.) In no sense is this an album of "standards"; each song tells a story. It is worth noting that "Lonely House" is an aria from Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, with haunting lyrics by Langston Hughes.
The Misty Miss Christy (Capitol, 1956)
It was disc jockey and Christy fan Daddy-O Daylie who coined the term "The Misty Miss Christy" on his Chicago-based radio show. The follow-up to Something Cool, this album exhibits a wealth of subtle and sophisticated orchestral charts. Christy's moody version of "Round Midnight" is the second recording of Thelonious Monk’s tune with Bernie Hanighen's lyrics. (The first was Teddi King accompanied by Beryl Booker in 1953.) Already an instrumental standard, Christy's rendition launched it firmly into classic torch song territory. Jerry Gladstone added lyrics to Russ Freeman’s somber "The Wind" (originally recorded as an instrumental by Chet Baker in 1953) just in time for Christy to premiere them here.
June—Fair and Warmer!(Capitol, 1957)
The liner notes on Christy’s third venture with Rugolo describe the "light-hearted warmth" and "innate radiance" of her voice. This could be viewed as a not entirely successful attempt to counter the melancholy image Christy created over the course of her first two albums. She sang as both a dramaticist and a musician, her ballads set within dream-like arrangements, her up-tempo pieces smart and swinging. Here, she perks up Irving Berlin’s "Better Luck Next Time" and Frank Loesser’s "I’ve Never Been In Love Before," but is at her best and most honest when she allows her innate wistfulness to shine through on ballads such as Jack Segal and Marvin Fisher’s "When Sunny Gets Blue" and Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen’s "Imagination."
Gone for the Day (Capitol, 1957)
A selection of nature-themed songs released six months after Fair and Warmer!, this was Rugolo’s favorite of his albums with Christy. Here, he supports her with a full string section, a trombone quintet, woodwinds, vibes, and a superb rhythm section of piano, bass, guitar, and drums. Many of the songs on this album were obscure, like "It’s So Peaceful in the Country," an Alec Wilder song that was last recorded by Mildred Bailey, and then Bob Chester and his Orchestra in 1941, and Rugolo’s tune "Interlude," which began as an instrumental break in Kenton’s performances ten years earlier. Christy always wanted to sing it, so Bob Russell wrote lyrics just for this album. The lush "Lazy Afternoon" by John LaTouche and Jerome Moross evokes a feeling of summer like no other song I am aware of.
This Is June Christy! (Capitol, 1958)
The opening song, Frank Daniels and Dorothy Daniels’ "My Heart Belongs to Only You," sets the tone and style of this album firmly in the late 1950s. Both Christy and Bette McLaurin recorded bestselling versions of this song six years earlier; the most famous was Bobby Vinton’s 1964 release. Up-tempo songs such as Mildred Kirham’s "Great Scot" and Sholom Secunda, Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin’s "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" demonstrate a new maturity and greater range, and here Christy is successful where she had, on previous albums, been mostly tentative. The liner notes state, "Rugolo should take a bow for the swing and ballad arrangements backing June… [He] takes most of the tunes at dance tempo, but his orchestrations break away from the ‘dance band sound’... The result: a free swinging impetus that never lets down."
Recalls Those Kenton Days (Capitol, 1959)
Of these re-interpretations of her greatest hits with The Stan Kenton Orchestra, Christy said that she and Rugolo tried "to be faithful to the spirit of the original while being true to what we all feel and do and like today. It’s a tribute to Stan’s early arrangements that so many of the original ideas in his scores could be retained… This has been absorbing as well as sentimental for all concerned. The originals were, and still are, all top efforts, and it was a real challenge to try to re-do such well-established concepts. I think we succeeded in doing right by them." If ever a perfect song existed for her tone and styling, it was Ann Ronell’s poignant "Willow Weep for Me," a lament written in 1932, first notably recorded by Christy and Kenton in 1946.
The Song is June! (Capitol, 1959)
This, the penultimate Christy-Rugolo album, is a mixture of lush, dreamy ballads and swinging, up-tempo tracks; here Christy is mostly backed by strings and occasional woodwinds. Throughout their long collaboration, Rugolo enjoyed crafting "tone poems" for Christy, and two here stand out: Connie Pearce and Arnold Miller’s moody "Night Time Was My Mother" and the hypnotic, melancholy "Saturday's Children" by Andre Previn and Bob Russell. The string work on this album was especially good because, as Rugolo explained, "I used all the best guys in the string sections. You’d go in to the session and you’d see ten concertmasters! They all... made more money than in the symphonies. So you’d see the first violinist from the Los Angeles symphony, and the people that used to play with Toscanini..."
This, Christy and Rugolo's final collaboration, is a quirky, non-commercial album of "off beat" songs. Most interesting is the exploration of tempo change in Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s "Out of This World" and on the title track, "Off Beat" by Leon Pober. Of Christy and Rugolo’s joint ventures, Friedwald wrote, "Over the 15 years of their association, singer and orchestrator grew into each other. The background breathes when she breathes, rests when she rests, and they hit every exquisite dynamic and sustain every dotted note together… As in the Ellington universe (a key influence on Rugolo), foreground and background blend into and out of each other, like water and sky on the horizon."