Some artists, to put a different spin on an old saying, are born gilt, some become gilt, and some have gilt thrust upon them - and it's a minor puzzlement which applies the most to Helen Merrill. She was certainly born with a gilt-edged talent, and polished it as much - and more - as her sometimes intermittent career opportunities allowed. And, early in that career, she was thrust into company which, if there had been a jazz equivalent to Debrett's Peerage, would have been among the eme de la creme creme de la creme of the entries in the book.
For a singer with comparatively little professional experience - occasional band tours, club dates, a few months with pianist Earl Hines, a couple of record sessions, some chances to sit in with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis - it must have felt extraordinary to find herself, in 1954, sharing a recording studio with some of the finest jazz musicians around. In a small group under the direction of Quincy Jones, she cut an album, called simply Helen Merrill, with the great and doomed trumpeter, Clifford Brown, which was quickly recognised by critics and musicians as a classic.
She followed it in 1956 with another acclaimed masterpiece of the jazz vocal art, Dream Of You, this time with the remarkable composer and arranger, Gil Evans, who was soon to make the great collaborations with Miles Davis: Miles Ahead, Sketches of Spain, and Porgy and Bess. It seemed she was destined for the kind of recognition achieved by women such as Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee, both of whom, like her, began as band singers. A class act, with an intimate style which created the illusion that she was communicating directly to each listener, she was - and is - the kind of singer for whom the words and the emotions they evoke remain crucially important.
It should have meant the big time, but it didn't work out quite like that. In the intervening decades, she has had spells abroad - in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong - where there was enough appreciation of her talent to offer more work than she could find at home.
There's little to suggest she is greatly troubled by this, and nothing to hint that her development as a singer has been hindered by it. In fact, her reminiscences for the CD reissue of Dream Of You show someone concerned only with quality and unwilling to compromise about it. When her producer, Bob Shad, asked her who she wanted to work with for the album, she had said, simply: "Gil Evans".
Initially, Shad wouldn't hear of it. "When Gil is in a studio," he responded, "he has no sense of time and he is notorious for running over the allotted budget." Although Merrill wasn't a big seller, she stuck to her guns. "I really didn't think much of anything but music in those days," she recalled, "and the idea of budget or whether the record would sell was not in my thoughts."
As far as career advancement goes, it's a high-risk attitude, more likely to garner artistic kudos than to fill the pockets with the food of mammon. But she got Evans, and made an album which, unlike most others recorded that year, has remained in the catalogue, while most of the bigger sellers have been forgotten. A clue to where this commitment to music comes from is in her ethnic background. Both her parents are Croatian, born on Krk, an island off the Adriatic coast. Her mother was a gifted singer of the island's folk music, a 12-tone idiom which, like all such music, is difficult to vocalise comfortably. And she was a major influence on her daughter, born Jelena Ana Milcetic in New York in 1930.
"My mother had an extraordinary ability to communicate feelings through music," she reminisced. "I remember listening with awe to the sounds my mother would bring forth. My mother had no interest in music as a commercial form, and therefore remained pure. I have never heard a voice that could move me so deeply." She must have been the source of Merrill's acute ear, for altering a melodic line with a rare sensitivity for both words and the underlying harmony - and of her studious lack of interest in taking commercial nous on board.
Despite the music at home, her parents were less than impressed by her desire to be a singer. But she was determined, and struggled on for some years until she got a break singing at a Bronx night spot called the 8.45 Club, whose promoter, Johnny Johnson, had extra-sensory perception where talent was concerned. Regulars there included trumpeters Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bud Powell and bassist Oscar Pettiford, all in the vanguard of jazz's bop revolution of the 1940s.
With Clifford Brown in tow, what she does with the intelligent lyrics and constantly modulating line of What's New, for example, is still remarkable, as affecting as Sinatra's version, but without the self-pity; and she takes on Billie Holiday's Don't Ex- plain - while the formidable Lady Day was still around - with a confidence and sense of style which make it one of the few that can stand comparison with Holiday's version. Jazz ballad singing doesn't get much better than this.
But she also wrought the same alchemy with Gil Evans, turning I've Never Seen, a little-known doo-wop type pop piece - her description - into a gorgeously delineated art song. And she put her inimitable cool mark on another ballad, Alone Together, on the same album.
What all these have in common is that word - cool. With her preference for slower tempos and concern with melody and meaning, she was the ideal the for the kind of music epitomised by the ballad playing of Stan Getz. And she has worked frequently with the great tenor saxophonist, including the excellent Just Friends, made not long before Getz died in 1991.
That she can swing, too, is not in doubt, nor is she confined to ballads. But her expressively foggy voice is made for a slow, intimate, conversational style of singing and it's this she's probably best at. Certainly, acclaimed later albums such as Clear Out Of This World, made in 1991 with Wayne Shorter and Roger Kellaway; Brownie, her 1994 tribute to that classic 1954 session; and the 1996 You and the Night and the Music, confirm her gift as a ballad singer.
That gift for intimacy is still evident on her most recent record, Jelena Ana Milcetic a.k.a. Helen Merrill, where her willingness to take chances is clear. Some of the choices are decidedly odd - who else would have tried to give some gravitas to difficult-to-take-seriously songs like I'll Take you Home Again, Kathleen and Among my Souvenirs? (They don't work, by the way, largely because they're unworthy of her talent.) But though anno domini has frayed the voice round the edges, she has bent these lived-in signatures to her own expressive ends. With just pianist Ted Rosenthal and bassist George Mraz to back her at Vicar Street, the audience is likely to be treated to just the kind of intimate recital that is her forte.
Helen Merrill will perform at Vicar Street on Sunday, October 15th as part of the ESB Jazz Series