Sarah Vaughan possessed a magnificent instrument, a voice that on a normal night ranged from the C below middle C to D above middle C.  On a good night, according to former accompanist Bob James, she could go up to A flat or A and, on occasion, even higher.  In Newark, where Sarah was born on March 27, 1924, she studied piano and sang in the Mount Zion Baptist Church.  She was encouraged by trumpet legend 'Jabbo Smith'. In 1943, like Ella Fitzgerald before her, she entered the amateur contest at Harlem’s "Apollo Theatre" and won with a  rendition of ‘Body and Soul’.

   A man who was to be one of her greatest supporters, Billy Eckstine, heard her and brought Sarah to the attention of his then boss, Earl Fatha Hines. Hines listened and hired her as the female counterpart to "Mr. B" in his band and as second pianist. When Eckstine formed his own band in 1944, Sarah was a founding member. There she worked with all the heavies of the bop evolution Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons and Art Blakey among them. Unfortunately an A.F.M. recording ban caused this important period in the history of jazz to go undocumented aurally.
   The end of that ban voices of Eckstine and Vaughan were as much a of bebop as the instrumentalists. Sarah’s 1940s recordings, "Mean To Me," "Interlude", "Lover Man" with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and the first recording of Tadd Dameron’s "If You Could See Me Now," with Freddie Webster and Bud Powell, are among the treasures of that period.           
   Then came a wealth of material in what was a prolific recording career the 1950 Columbia session with Miles Davis, the EnArcy sides with Clifford Brown four years later, the many trio recordings and the marvellous reading of the Gershwin Songbook with Michael Tilson Thomas and the L.A. Philharmonic which included an unsurpassable version of ‘The Man I Love’.