McRae, Carmen Mercedes

(b. 8 April 1920 in New York City; d. 10 November 1994 in Beverly Hills, California), jazz singer known for her impeccable phrasing, melodic invention, and dramatic interpretation of lyrics.

McRae was the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Osmond “Oscar” McRae, a health club manager, and Evadne McRae, a homemaker. She was their only child, although she had three half-siblings. McRae grew up in the Bronx and Manhattan, where she attended Julia Richman High School. Her parents hoped she would become a concert pianist and gave her five years of classical piano lessons. She later said: “That experience of studying music is what put me where I am today.”

But McRae preferred popular music and jazz. She idolized Billie Holiday, whom she had heard on recordings and at Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater. As a teenager McRae won a talent contest at the Apollo, which attracted the attention of songwriter Irene Kitchings, then married to the jazz pianist Teddy Wilson. Billie Holiday often sang with Wilson’s band, and Kitchings introduced McRae to Holiday. They became friends, and in 1939 Holiday recorded McRae’s song “Dream of Life.” McRae later told the New York Times reporter John S. Wilson, “If Billie Holiday had never existed, I probably wouldn’t have, either.”

McRae’s musical ambition did not win immediate success. So, at her parents’ urging, she took a secretarial course and worked for two years as a secretary in Washington, D.C., during World War II. Between 1940 and 1946 she did brief stints as a singer with bands led by Benny Carter, Count Basie, and Earl “Fatha” Hines. During this period she married and divorced the bebop drummer Kenny Clarke. From 1946 to 1947 she sang with Mercer Ellington’s band for eighteen months, recording with them as Carmen Clarke.

For a time in 1948 she lived with the comedian George Kirby in Chicago. After the relationship ended, she found work in a Chicago nightclub as intermission pianist-singer. She later told Arthur Taylor, “I realized that my piano playing was very limited … [so] I hired a piano and rehearsed every day until my repertoire grew bigger.” Her three and a half years in Chicago convinced her that she could earn a living by playing and singing.

In 1952 she returned to New York City as an intermission pianist at Minton’s Playhouse, the legendary Harlem club where jazz musicians honed their craft. This led to her first job as a standup singer with Tony Scott’s quartet, which drew national attention in a Down Beat magazine review in 1953. That year she cut two singles with the Larry Elgart Orchestra and recorded with the jazz accordionist Mat Mathews.

In 1954 she cut her first albums, Easy to Love and Carmen McRae, and a Down Beat poll named her as the best new female singer of that year. In 1955, having tied Ella Fitzgerald for Best Female Vocalist in a Metronome magazine poll, she signed with Decca and recorded seven albums on that label between 1955 and 1958. Will Friedland cites Torchy (1955), Blue Moon (1956), and Afterglow (1957) as jazz classics. It was around this time that McRae married the bassist Ike Isaacs, but they soon divorced.

The year 1961 was particularly productive. McRae recorded “Take Five” with Dave Brubeck, whose wife, lona, wrote the lyrics, and an album with the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Louis Armstrong, The Real Ambassadors. That year also marked the beginning of a fruitful eight-year musical partnership with pianist Norman Simmons, who wrote the arrangements for her landmark album Lover Man (recorded in 1961 and released in 1962), a tribute to Billie Holiday. Simmons admired McRae’s artistry, describing her as down-to-earth but musically demanding with a strong personality. “She’s a great storyteller,” he said, “[and] the key to it is her romance with words and syllables and her understanding of lyrics.”

In 1967 McRae moved to Beverly Hills, California. In 1968 the jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason featured McRae on his Jazz Casual television series. Gleason admired her ability to mesmerize an audience and termed her public performances “a one-woman exercise in dramatic art [with] a quality of intimacy [such that] the lyrics become a story, they literally come to life.” McRae rarely accompanied herself on piano, saying, “It’s hell to concentrate on two things at a time,” but in 1973 she recorded a live solo album in Tokyo, As Time Goes By. On 28 March 1980 she and her trio performed at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in a concert featuring Mel Tormé and other jazz masters.

In a project that grew out of her friendship with Thelonious Monk during the 1960s, she sought and received permission from Monk’s family to record the lyrics to his melodies. Due to the complexity of Monk’s music, McRae considered Carmen Sings Monk, recorded in 1988 in San Francisco, one of her most challenging projects, and critics deemed it her best work in a decade. Her final album was Sarah —Dedicated to You (1991), a tribute to her friend and fellow jazz singer Sarah Vaughan. Between 1960 and 1990 McRae performed at elite jazz clubs throughout the United States, appeared at international jazz festivals, and toured Europe and Japan. She recorded more than forty albums as leader and appeared on others with such artists as Betty Carter, George Shearing, and Duke Ellington.

Her film appearances include The Square Jungle (1955), The Subterraneans (1960), Hotel (1967), and Jojo Dancer, Your Life is Calling (1986), as well as one episode of the television series Roots (1978) and the documentaries Tribute to Billie Holiday (1979), Thelonious Monk: Music in Monk’s Time (1985), and Carmen McRae—Live (1986).

Even while based in California, McRae appeared regularly at the Blue Note in New York City. A lifelong smoker who refused to quit, she suffered a respiratory failure after performing there in 1991 and never sang in public again. In 1994 she received a Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which cited “her instinctive feeling for rhythm, her skillful vocal technique, her innovative scat singing.”

McRae died in Beverly Hills from complications of a stroke suffered a month earlier. Her remains were cremated. She had no children.

Although Carmen McRae never attained the heights of popularity achieved by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday, many regarded her as their artistic equal. She was nominated for a Grammy Award six times but never won. Nonetheless, she inspired many young jazz singers, and musicians and critics alike recognized her superb musicianship and evocative interpretation of lyrics.

Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones (1982), contains a lengthy interview with McRae. Valuable coverage is in Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke: And Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy, and Other Heroes (1975); Leslie Gourse, Louis’ Children: American Jazz Singers (1984); and Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (1990). Several magazine articles are helpful: James T. Jones IV, “Carmen McRae: Cut the Crap,” Down Beat (June 1991); Frank Alkyer, “Jazz On Campus: Jazz Educators Invade Boston,” Down Beat (April 1994); Dave Helland, “The End of Three Vocal Eras: Farewell to Cab Calloway, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Carmen McRae,” Down Beat (Mar. 1995); and “McRae and Jamal Named Masters of Jazz by NEA,” Jet (17 Jan. 1994). See also John S. Wilson, “Carmen McRae Salutes Billie Holiday,” New York Times (14 Dec. 1979), and Stephen Holden, “Carmen McRae Gives Voice to the Melodies of Thelonious Monk,” New York Times (2 May 1990). Numerous McRae recordings have been reissued on compact disk. An obituary is in the New York Times (12 Nov. 1994),

Susan Fleet