A N D Y B E Y

Biography


Before singer-pianist Andy Bey teamed up with producer Herb Jordan 11 years back to begin recording a series of critically acclaimed CDs—of which Ain't Necessarily So is the fifth and latest—Bey's musically adventurous, emotionally riveting art was known only to a select few. They included such vocalists as Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Carmen McRae, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin, as well as instrumentalists who've hired him as a singer and/or pianist over the years, Max Roach, Horace Silver, Gary Bartz, Stanley Clarke, Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, and Cecil Taylor, among them.

Jordan had heard Bey's powerful voice on Clarke's 1973 album Children of Forever and on Bey's own 1974 LP Experience and Judgment, but he was unprepared for the much more mature, astonishingly refined stylist he witnessed in person during a 1996 solo recital at New York's Whitney Museum.

"I was experimenting with my voice at the time," Bey says of the high/low, light/dark sounds Jordan heard at the concert. "I was cultivating this intimacy. I said, 'I'm not belting for a while.' That's how the soft-palate thing came about."

"What struck me," the producer recalls, "was that he is a consummate musician as a vocalist. He approaches chord changes and rhythm in a way that many others just do not. He finds harmonic subtleties that escape many singers. That impressed me enough to want to make a record."

The result of their encounter was 1996's Ballads Blues & Bey, the first album released under Bey's name in the United States in more than two decades. Featuring just his voice and piano in an intimate program of popular standards from the pens of Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, and others, the disc was greeted with a spate of rave reviews and brought Bey much long-overdue recognition.

Ben Ratliff, writing in the New York Times, observed, "[T]he way Mr. Bey integrates the head and chest voices into curious combinations and his virtuosic blues sensibility are what make him one of the most distinctive singers in jazz. And one of the slowest. When he enters a song, he makes it deluxe, decking it out with cushions and tapestries, arranging all the hangings; he isn't just making a quick visit."

The newfound attention also led to Bey's first headlining engagement ever at a major New York nightclub—May 13 through 15, 1997, at Birdland—sandwiched on the club's calendar between Kurt Elling and Jimmy Scott. Ain't Necessarily So presents eight selections from that gig, on which Bey was supported by bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington. In addition to reprising "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart" and "Someone to Watch Over Me" from Ballads Blues & Bey, the set finds Bey vocally and pianistically reinventing the Gershwins' "It Ain't Necessarily So," Mary Rodgers and Martin Chamin's "Hey, Love," Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's "All the Things You Are," Cy Coleman and Carol Leigh's "On Second Thought," and the Yip Harburg-Jay Gorney Depression-era anthem "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

Most are ballads, but Bey swings out on "All the Things You Are" and the scat-filled "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" "The ballads have some softness to them, but I began to use some power later on," he says. And there's the swinging "If I Should Lose You," penned by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger. It's Bey's first non-vocal recording in a piano-trio setting—a showcase for formidable instrumental skills that once led jazz giants like Rollins, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Joe Henderson to employ him as a pianist.

Ain't Necessarily So is the first album on Jordan's 12th Street Records to be issued through a licensing arrangement with the innovative Nashville company Thirty Tigers. A very different treatment by Bey of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" can be heard on Thirty Tigers' three-disc Song of America, a 50-song set that traces the history of the United States through its folk and popular music traditions. Conceived by former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, Song of America also features performances by John Mellencamp, the Black Crows, Devendra Banhart, Andrew Bird, Bettye LaVette, Janis Ian, Martha Wainwright, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Kim Richey, and numerous others.

Ballads Blues & Bey, Bey's first recording with Jordan, appeared in 1996 on the Evidence label. The subsequent three appeared with Jordan's 12th Street Records imprint: 1998's Shades of Bey through an arrangement with Evidence, 2001's Tuesdays in Chinatown through a licensing deal with N-Coded Music, and 2004's Grammy-nominated American Song through one with Savoy Jazz.

"We believe very strongly in creating our own product," Jordan says. "We finance the recordings and license them to various record companies for release. We have complete creative control."

Jordan, who has composed for Count Basie and Bey, and produced several Geri Allen recordings, has developed a strong musical empathy with the singing pianist over the past 11 years. "I've suggested things to him that may at first have seemed odd, like songs by Nick Drake, Sting, or even Big Bill Broonzy. But, he has been open and receptive to my ideas and we've found a way of working together. Andy is such a strong personality that, of course, everything you hear is Andy Bey."

The unique musical art of Andy Bey was greatly affected by the sounds he heard while growing up in Newark, New Jersey, where he was born Andrew Wideman Bey, Jr., on October 28, 1939, the youngest of nine children. A piano prodigy, he was playing boogie-woogie in Newark clubs by the time he was 5 and later fell under the spells of modern jazz greats Hank Jones, Horace Silver, Bud Powell, and Erroll Garner. His early tastes in vocalists were especially eclectic: the jazz and pop of Billy Eckstine, Nat "King" Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Al Hibbler, and Frank Sinatra; the gospel of the Golden Gate Quartet and the Ward Singers, as well as various singers he heard at local sanctified churches; the blues of Louis Jordan ("I tried to imitate 'Caldonia,'" he recalls), Andrew Tibbs, and Wynonie Harris; even opera, particularly that of Enrico Caruso. All of these stylistic strains are apparent in the distinctive approach to singing that Bey would develop over the years.

By the time he was 12, Bey was something of a child celebrity in New York City and surrounding areas. He appeared at the Apollo Theater on a bill with Louis Jordan and for a year and a half was featured on the weekly television variety show on the local NBC affiliate called Startime Kids, on which a young Connie Francis was also a regular. As Andrew Wideman, he recorded four sides in 1952 for Jubilee Records, including "Mama's Little Boy Got the Blues," a jumping rhythm-and-blues number delivered by Bey in a pubescent, though quite powerful tenor. A few years later he recorded Bobby Troup's "The Meaning of the Blues" for Decca, with backing by Sy Oliver's orchestra. "He liked my playing so much that he used some of my piano voicings," Bey says of Oliver's arrangement.

In 1956, he and his sisters Salome and Geraldine formed Andy and the Bey Sisters. By the late Fifties, the vocal trio's high-energy mix of jazz, pop, and gospel had created a sensation overseas. In England, where they made their recording debut, the London Daily Herald called them "the world's most exciting vocal group." In Paris, they recorded with a band that included Kenny Clarke and Kenny Dorham and were captured in a nightclub performance that would turn up years later in Let's Get Lost, filmmaker Bruce Weber's Academy Award–nominated documentary about Chet Baker. Back in the States, Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein signed them to a management contract, which led to the 1961 RCA Victor album Andy and the Bey Sisters, produced in Nashville by Chet Atkins. The trio cut two further albums—1964's Now! Hear! and the following year's 'Round Midnight, both on Prestige—before disbanding in 1966.

The late Sixties and early Seventies were a busy time for Bey. He was featured as a vocalist on a number of albums by jazz instrumentalists, and in 1974 he saw the release by Atlantic Records of his own first album, Experience and Judgment, consisting mostly of original songs by Bey and producer William S. Fischer. Until the release 22 years later of Ballads Blues & Bey, there would be no more Andy Bey albums released in the U.S., although he did record a couple obscure CDs in the early Nineties while he was working as a jazz vocal teacher in Austria.

As a teacher, Bey imparted to his students some of the knowledge he'd learned during years of private study and practice, particularly in how integrating head and chest tones helped him develop his present four-octave range, as well as how to move between belting and softer, breathier tones.

"I tried to tell them you have to have options," he explains. "You have to learn to sing soft. It's one thing to be able to belt all night, but you have to level off into something else in order to get some intimacy. You can suppress the sound and make it soft, but it's not like singing in a soft palate. You've got to find that pocket that allows you to use the air, the breath. When you can develop that, you can switch a little bit, even though it's hard."

Today, at home in Manhattan and in nightclubs and concert halls around the world, Andy Bey continues to work on expanding and perfecting his already highly developed approach to singing. But he doesn't force it.

"I'm just trying to let things be what they want to be," he explains. "The main thing I'm trying to keep intact is the spirit. If it's cool, it'll take you through." •



Andy Bey: Ain't Necessarily So
(12th Street Records, dist. by Thirty Tigers, www.thirtytigers.com)
Street Date: October 30, 2007


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