audition in the spring of 1938 for Bill Oetzel and his society dance band, which played weddings and social functions in nearby Decatur. She stayed with this outfit for nearly four years, and was later quoted singing its praises in a Capitol publicity handout: "They were a real fine group of fellows. Though we leaned to the sweet side of music when playing engagements, in our free time they introduced me to the recordings of the classics as well as of the great jazz artists of the day. I’ve always been very grateful to them."
After her high school graduation, the young Miss Luster struck out for Chicago and landed a job with Boyd Raeburn, who was starting to develop the progressive style of jazz usually associated with his name. Unfortunately, after only a couple of months with the band she was stricken with scarlet fever, and when Raeburn left town he also left behind his downhearted new vocalist - in quarantine. Shirley recovered and cast around Chicago’s club scene for work. In her 1981 autobiography "High Time, Hard Times", Anita O’Day, who in 1945 was the female vocalist for Stan Kenton, recalls coming to the Chicago Theater with the Kenton Band and discovering Shirley Luster working up the street with Boyd Raeburn in a Chinese restaurant called the Shangri-La. O’Day wanted to leave Kenton, and thought Shirley would make a ideal replacement than Stan insisted she find before giving notice. At least that’s one version of the story. Kenton’s recollections differed somewhat, and Christy herself later claimed to have made a beeline to the offices of Kenton’s booking agent, with an audition record that won her the job, after learning of O’Day’s impending departure.
Whatever the true circumstances, Kenton changed her name from Shirley Luster to June Christy and had her performing with the band a week later in Evansville, Indiana. Shortly thereafter came two more newcomers into the Kenton organization who were to have profound effects on both Christy’s professional and personal life. The first was a gifted 29 year old arranger/composer named Pete Rugolo who formed a symbiotic partnership with Stan (much like that which existed between Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington) that played a dominant role in crafting the band’s approach to progressive jazz. In later years, Rugolo would arrange and conduct the majority of June’s solo work for Capitol. During an engagement in Pittsburgh, tenorist Bob Cooper also joined the ranks when he stepped in to replace an ailing member of the Kenton sax section. "The tall lanky one arrived with his horn under his arm and that was it!", Christy later recalled. "He got the job, and by the time we hit Washington, D.C., I had a husband." The couple married in 1946, and their happy partnership endured until Christy’s death more than four decades later.
Kenton recorded for Capitol Records, and he arranged for June to sign her own personal contract with the label on December 13, 1945. From the beginning, Kenton was interested in building Christy into an attraction in her own right, thereby making here a more valuable asset to the band. They got off to a great start when their first record together, Tampico, became a top ten smash. Kenton and Christy enjoyed continued success with a string of typical mainstream pop tunes like It’s Been A Long, Long Time and Across The Alley From The Alamo, but both artists had more progressive inclinations that were sometimes held in check by commercial necessity. "Stan wanted to sell records," recalled Pete Rugolo in a recent conversation. "A good commercial hit helped the band, helped everybody. That’s why we did things like Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy. Those records were meant to be hits. " There were interludes of jazz-tinged glory, however, notably Kenton-Christy recordings of How High The Moon?, Willow Weep For Me, and a moody treatment of Benny Carter’s Lonely Woman. In March of 1947 June recorded Skip-Rope, her first single as a solo artist for Capitol. It was a pop tune, and she was repeatedly cast in this mold with little chart success (enjoying a minor hit in ’53 with My Heart Belongs To Only You) until the advent of her classic recording of Something Cool in 1953. All of this raises the long-standing debate over June Christy’s status as a jazz artist.
Was she in fact a jazz singer in the classic mold, or instead a popular singer with an empathy for mannerisms from the vocal jazz repertoire? Christy herself once tackled this issue in a 1965 interview with journalist Don Freeman "’Jazz singer’ is one of those mis-used and misleading terms. Who knows what it means today? They used to call Jolson a ‘jazz singer’ and he certainly wasn’t. I know I’m not a jazz vocal musician, to use a fancy phrase, like Ella or Sarah. When Ella Fitzgerald sings or Sarah Vaughn sings, I mean you know it’s jazz. I’m not really a pop singer either." Perhaps critic Leonard Feather came closest to the mark when he described her style as "a personal one involving extensive rhythmic and melodic alteration of themes." Christy had occasional difficulties with intonation and pitch throughout her career, making her less of a technician than the names cited above, but she never allowed minor flaws to intrude upon her imaginative and idiosyncratic approach to improvisation. In my book that’s a jazz singer.
After Christy left Kenton to concentrate on her solo career (and was replaced by Chris Connor, who was criticized for sounding like June Christy just as Christy had been carped at earlier in her career for a vocal resemblance to Anita O’Day), she and Rugolo sat down and made a plea to producer Bill Miller for a chance to try something a little more off beat and artistically satisfying than standard pop fare. What they had in mind was a masterpiece by pianist -composer Billy Barnes entitled Something Cool. It was almost more surrealist mini-drama than a song. "No one believed in that tune except me," remembered June. "Even I didn’t think it would sell, but I believed in it artistically. In fact, we were so sure it wouldn’t be a commercial success, we decided we might as well do a whole album of far-out tunes. Pete Rugolo wrote as freely as he wished. Something Cool was just going to be our little thing fun thing, something for our old age." "Fortunately, it sold well," Bob Cooper later recalled, "and after that June was accepted as a jazz artist and given the chance to record pretty much what she wanted."
Christy went on to make a string of brilliant LPs for Capitol, all of them very well thought out. I’ve never worked with anybody so particular about what she sings and the lyrical content of a song," Bill Miller later recalled. "Sometimes we went through 50 to 80 songs just to get 12." In a recent conversation, Pete Rugolo recalled: "She was wonderful. Sometimes I’d listen to the playbacks and wonder ‘My God how did she ever do it?’ I’d write all these crazy introductions, insert modulations, write wild endings and nothing ever bothered her. She was fast too. We used to get four recordings done in three hours, and sometimes we made albums together we did them in three sessions. She was amazing, and very lovable. For all of us working together in the studio it was like one great big, happy family." |
