ONE LP PORTRAITS: ARTS | MEDIA | VENUES: H - Z: JAMES GAVIN: James Gavin: Author/Journalist

Cleo Laine: Wordsongs - The Poetry of William Shakespeare{quote}In 1978, on one of my countless boyhood treasure hunts for out-of-print LPs by cult jazz goddesses from the past—June Christy, Chris Connor, Julie London, Morgana King, Anita O’Day—I came upon a shop in New York that stocked hard-to-find imports. Smiling at me seductively from the cover of a new British double-album was one of my obsessions, Cleo Laine. Wordsongs looked like caviar for the general. In it, England’s opulent First Lady of Jazz sang poetry by Shakespeare and others, most of it set to music by her husband and maestro, John Dankworth, the U.K.’s father of modern jazz.     Everything about Laine fascinated me, from her exotic beauty, crowned by an afro-like mop of brown ringlets, to her dusky foghorn contralto, with its ear-popping, birdlike high notes. It was an instrument of limitless color and pyrotechnical wizardry, wielded by a dramatic chameleon. Laine sang Bessie Smith and Schoenberg, Ellington and Sondheim; she was glamorous, funny, witchy, a heart-tugging actress, and a lusty show-woman. On TV she stood by Dankworth’s side, flopping her curls as she tootled in rapid-fire unison with his clarinet or alto.Hard as I’d tried to embrace him, Shakespeare had flown over my adolescent head. Wordsongs showed me that poetry could be fun and could speak to me, especially through Laine’s bewitching voice and the musical third dimension that John provided. “There seems little doubt that making poetry into song can increase its accessibility no end,” he explained. But he wasn’t interested in the austere, through-composed style of most lieder. His specialty was tuneful and swinging jazz, although his accompaniments were notated almost as meticulously as Schubert’s. John gave art-song purists plenty to object to—even in the darker selections, where he strove for more classical forms. His goal was to invite people in, not intimidate them further. His role model in the setting of Shakespeare here was Arthur Young, a 1930s British composer and bandleader. Young’s jazzy scoring of Shakespeare had filled Laine’s four-song EP from 1959, Cleo Sings Elizabethan. John had only “a little bit of knowledge of school Shakespeare,” he told me; still, he explained, “the fact that this had been done by someone else made me in the back of my mind want to try it.”He and Laine had spent a lot of time listening to the album of Such Sweet Thunder, a Shakespeare-inspired orchestral suite by John’s idol Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. It included the bullet-fire instrumental “Sonnet for Hank Cinq.” Laine sang along with it an octave higher—an experiment that would bear unexpected fruit. Her inspiration was Sing Along with Basie, the milestone teaming of Count Basie’s orchestra, Joe Williams, and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Annie Ross’s octave-leaping had made Laine bristle with envy. “I thought, if she can do it I can do it!”Dankworth learned that “Sonnet for Hank Cinq” was actually written in sonnet form. He scoured Shakespeare’s oeuvre until he found “Take All My Loves,” which fit it precisely. “It’s pretty easy to pick out the sonnets,” he explained, “because the typography changes.”Laine premiered the song, with its stratospheric jumps, on That Was the Week That Was, the British satirical variety series on which she appeared twice. In 1964, Fontana Records released Shakespeare and All That Jazz, timed for the country-wide celebration of the bard’s 400th birthday. It lifted two jazz stars into the high arts. John went on to write settings of other poets: T.S. Eliot, John Donne, Spike Milligan, e.e. cummings, Ralph Hodgson, W.H. Auden. “Most of them I presented to Cleo as a sort of fait accompli,” he told me. “I don’t think she’d got to the stage when she was very argumentative!”In this endeavor, the couple were to-the-manner-born. With her perfect diction, theatricalized Englishness, and masterful line readings, Laine could rival almost any Shakespearean actress. She made me shiver when I first heard her sing, with stoic somberness, these words from Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” Elsewhere on Wordsongs she becomes one of Titania’s fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, hypnotically warning “you spotted snakes with double tongue” to leave her queen alone. In “Winter—When Icicles Hang by the Wall” (Love’s Labours Lost), Dankworth gives a rollicking setting, complete with yuletide bells and a jaunty sax solo, to Shakespeare’s portrait of the months “when birds sit brooding in the snow/And Marion’s nose looks red and raw.” The rest of Wordsongs reveals more of the Dankworths’ range. Spike Milligan’s “English Teeth” becomes a military march in goose-stepping tempo, with Laine declaring: “Three cheers for the brown, gray, and black!” John had set W.H. Auden’s “O Tell Me the Truth Above Love” for Annie Ross to sing in an outdoor poetry program in London’s Regent’s Park; afterward Ross abandoned it, which left Laine free to turn it into her own comedic tour de force about romantic confusion. She takes on about twenty character voices, howls like a dog—“and still I do not know,” she sings, “what kind of creature it can be that bothers people so!”John had been scoring the British natural-history TV series Survival; one episode explored how animals survive in the winter. The director asked John to set the poem “In Tenebris: I,” written by Thomas Hardy in the depths of grief over his fading marriage and career. Laine sang it behind a montage of robins hunting for food in the snow. She reprised it on Wordsongs. Against the stark piano of Paul Hart, she sings in numbed resignation: “Leaves freeze to dun … flower petals flee … birds faint in dread …  wintertime nighs.”    Sir John Betjeman’s “Sun and Fun—Song of a Night-Club Proprietress” becomes a three-act playlet. Hart’s fingers tiptoe across the piano keys as the curtain rises: I walked into the nightclub in the morningThere was kümmel on the handle of the doorThe ashtrays were unemptied, the cleaning unattemptedAnd a squashed tomato sandwich on the floor …From there Laine bursts into a cinematic flashback of carefree youth, when “Boris used to call in his Sedanca/When Teddy took me down to his estate!” Then she’s plunged into a chilling purgatory: “But I’m dying now, and done for/What on earth was all the fun for?/For I’m old, and ill, and terrified.” Laine gasps that word with a finality that makes the scene turn to black.“Thieving Boy” is the only piece that was originally conceived as a song. The Welsh poet Alun Owen had written it with Dankworth for the Joseph Losey crime drama The Criminal (1960); there, for the first time, Laine was heard singing, with orchestra, this haunting lament of a woman doomed to love the wrong man:They prison’d him, for it is trueThat if you steal they come for youSo watch, you ladies, while I waitRight outside the prison gateBy the time of Wordsongs, Dankworth had pared the arrangement down solely to his clarinet, which winds around her voice like a snake.Wordsongs ends with Percy French’s “Sing Me No Song,” a spoof of tone-deaf salon singing. What Cleo and John do with it could only have been accomplished by musicians of their supreme caliber and wit. John’s accompaniment ranges from fussy primness to drunken-sounding disarray; Laine, as the victim of a loved one’s off-key caterwauling, hilariously reenacts his every vocal sin.The Dankworths signed my copy of Wordsongs on the night I met them, when I crashed the green room of Carnegie Hall after their tenth-anniversary concert there. That was my first of dozens of delightful meetings with the couple, who loved to laugh and tell stories.Wordsongs has made it hard for me to listen to any other Shakespeare settings; to my ears they all sound stodgy by comparison. Laine was proud of the fact that these recordings had shown so many youngsters—I was one of them—the glory of Shakespeare; teachers, she said, were even using them in class—“which is marvelous, isn’t it? A lot of children have been put off Shakespeare by having his work bashed into them from an early age, and evidently these songs mean something to them, so that’s something to have achieved in one lifetime.”James Gavin: Central Park, New York, 14th September 2022Cleo Laine: Wordsongs, The Poetry of William Shakespeare released 1978James Gavin
James Gavin: Author/Journalist

 

 

Cleo Laine: Wordsongs - The Poetry of William Shakespeare 

 

"In 1978, on one of my countless boyhood treasure hunts for out-of-print LPs by cult jazz goddesses from the past—June Christy, Chris Connor, Julie London, Morgana King, Anita O’Day—I came upon a shop in New York that stocked hard-to-find imports. Smiling at me seductively from the cover of a new British double-album was one of my obsessions, Cleo Laine. Wordsongs looked like caviar for the general. In it, England’s opulent First Lady of Jazz sang poetry by Shakespeare and others, most of it set to music by her husband and maestro, John Dankworth, the U.K.’s father of modern jazz.  

    Everything about Laine fascinated me, from her exotic beauty, crowned by an afro-like mop of brown ringlets, to her dusky foghorn contralto, with its ear-popping, birdlike high notes. It was an instrument of limitless color and pyrotechnical wizardry, wielded by a dramatic chameleon. Laine sang Bessie Smith and Schoenberg, Ellington and Sondheim; she was glamorous, funny, witchy, a heart-tugging actress, and a lusty show-woman. On TV she stood by Dankworth’s side, flopping her curls as she tootled in rapid-fire unison with his clarinet or alto. 

Hard as I’d tried to embrace him, Shakespeare had flown over my adolescent head. Wordsongs showed me that poetry could be fun and could speak to me, especially through Laine’s bewitching voice and the musical third dimension that John provided. “There seems little doubt that making poetry into song can increase its accessibility no end,” he explained. But he wasn’t interested in the austere, through-composed style of most lieder. His specialty was tuneful and swinging jazz, although his accompaniments were notated almost as meticulously as Schubert’s. John gave art-song purists plenty to object to—even in the darker selections, where he strove for more classical forms. His goal was to invite people in, not intimidate them further.  

His role model in the setting of Shakespeare here was Arthur Young, a 1930s British composer and bandleader. Young’s jazzy scoring of Shakespeare had filled Laine’s four-song EP from 1959, Cleo Sings Elizabethan. John had only “a little bit of knowledge of school Shakespeare,” he told me; still, he explained, “the fact that this had been done by someone else made me in the back of my mind want to try it.” 

He and Laine had spent a lot of time listening to the album of Such Sweet Thunder, a Shakespeare-inspired orchestral suite by John’s idol Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. It included the bullet-fire instrumental “Sonnet for Hank Cinq.” Laine sang along with it an octave higher—an experiment that would bear unexpected fruit. Her inspiration was Sing Along with Basie, the milestone teaming of Count Basie’s orchestra, Joe Williams, and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Annie Ross’s octave-leaping had made Laine bristle with envy. “I thought, if she can do it I can do it!” 

Dankworth learned that “Sonnet for Hank Cinq” was actually written in sonnet form. He scoured Shakespeare’s oeuvre until he found “Take All My Loves,” which fit it precisely. “It’s pretty easy to pick out the sonnets,” he explained, “because the typography changes.” 

Laine premiered the song, with its stratospheric jumps, on That Was the Week That Was, the British satirical variety series on which she appeared twice. In 1964, Fontana Records released Shakespeare and All That Jazz, timed for the country-wide celebration of the bard’s 400th birthday. It lifted two jazz stars into the high arts. John went on to write settings of other poets: T.S. Eliot, John Donne, Spike Milligan, e.e. cummings, Ralph Hodgson, W.H. Auden. “Most of them I presented to Cleo as a sort of fait accompli,” he told me. “I don’t think she’d got to the stage when she was very argumentative!” 

In this endeavor, the couple were to-the-manner-born. With her perfect diction, theatricalized Englishness, and masterful line readings, Laine could rival almost any Shakespearean actress. She made me shiver when I first heard her sing, with stoic somberness, these words from Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” Elsewhere on Wordsongs she becomes one of Titania’s fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, hypnotically warning “you spotted snakes with double tongue” to leave her queen alone. In “Winter—When Icicles Hang by the Wall” (Love’s Labours Lost), Dankworth gives a rollicking setting, complete with yuletide bells and a jaunty sax solo, to Shakespeare’s portrait of the months “when birds sit brooding in the snow/And Marion’s nose looks red and raw.”  

The rest of Wordsongs reveals more of the Dankworths’ range. Spike Milligan’s “English Teeth” becomes a military march in goose-stepping tempo, with Laine declaring: “Three cheers for the brown, gray, and black!” John had set W.H. Auden’s “O Tell Me the Truth Above Love” for Annie Ross to sing in an outdoor poetry program in London’s Regent’s Park; afterward Ross abandoned it, which left Laine free to turn it into her own comedic tour de force about romantic confusion. She takes on about twenty character voices, howls like a dog—“and still I do not know,” she sings, “what kind of creature it can be that bothers people so!” 

John had been scoring the British natural-history TV series Survival; one episode explored how animals survive in the winter. The director asked John to set the poem “In Tenebris: I,” written by Thomas Hardy in the depths of grief over his fading marriage and career. Laine sang it behind a montage of robins hunting for food in the snow. She reprised it on Wordsongs. Against the stark piano of Paul Hart, she sings in numbed resignation: “Leaves freeze to dun … flower petals flee … birds faint in dread …  wintertime nighs.” 

    Sir John Betjeman’s “Sun and Fun—Song of a Night-Club Proprietress” becomes a three-act playlet. Hart’s fingers tiptoe across the piano keys as the curtain rises:  

I walked into the nightclub in the morning 

There was kümmel on the handle of the door 

The ashtrays were unemptied, the cleaning unattempted 

And a squashed tomato sandwich on the floor … 

From there Laine bursts into a cinematic flashback of carefree youth, when “Boris used to call in his Sedanca/When Teddy took me down to his estate!” Then she’s plunged into a chilling purgatory: “But I’m dying now, and done for/What on earth was all the fun for?/For I’m old, and ill, and terrified.” Laine gasps that word with a finality that makes the scene turn to black. 

“Thieving Boy” is the only piece that was originally conceived as a song. The Welsh poet Alun Owen had written it with Dankworth for the Joseph Losey crime drama The Criminal (1960); there, for the first time, Laine was heard singing, with orchestra, this haunting lament of a woman doomed to love the wrong man: 

They prison’d him, for it is true 

That if you steal they come for you 

So watch, you ladies, while I wait 

Right outside the prison gate 

By the time of Wordsongs, Dankworth had pared the arrangement down solely to his clarinet, which winds around her voice like a snake. 

Wordsongs ends with Percy French’s “Sing Me No Song,” a spoof of tone-deaf salon singing. What Cleo and John do with it could only have been accomplished by musicians of their supreme caliber and wit. John’s accompaniment ranges from fussy primness to drunken-sounding disarray; Laine, as the victim of a loved one’s off-key caterwauling, hilariously reenacts his every vocal sin. 

The Dankworths signed my copy of Wordsongs on the night I met them, when I crashed the green room of Carnegie Hall after their tenth-anniversary concert there. That was my first of dozens of delightful meetings with the couple, who loved to laugh and tell stories. 

Wordsongs has made it hard for me to listen to any other Shakespeare settings; to my ears they all sound stodgy by comparison. Laine was proud of the fact that these recordings had shown so many youngsters—I was one of them—the glory of Shakespeare; teachers, she said, were even using them in class—“which is marvelous, isn’t it? A lot of children have been put off Shakespeare by having his work bashed into them from an early age, and evidently these songs mean something to them, so that’s something to have achieved in one lifetime.” 

James Gavin: Central Park, New York, 14th September 2022 

Cleo Laine: Wordsongs, The Poetry of William Shakespeare released 1978 

James Gavin