Music: Horn of Plenty

What becomes a legend most? In a word, longevity. After recording in the early-to-mid-1960s for Mercury and ABC-Paramount and later SteepleChase and a soundtrack collaboration with Quincy Jones, Jazz pianist/vocalist/arranger Shirley Horn moved to Verve, where she recorded 10 heralded albums since 1987.

In between, pulled by the loyalties of motherhood, she decided to live life off the stage and raise her daughter in her hometown, Washngton, D.C.

Only a few musicians possess the talent, staying power and resolve to make such a bold, career-altering move.

Her daughter, 10 years old at the time, was at a “very sensitive, delicate age,” Horn says from her D.C. home, a television audible in the background behind her slow, even-speaking voice. “I missed her, I needed her, and she needed me. I just took the time off and stayed in Washington. I did take time off, and I’m glad I did. I’m very proud of her. I wasn’t gone that long, and we were very fortunate that she had both grandmothers alive.

“I have no regrets.

She’s beautiful inside and out.”

In 1998, Horn recorded I Remember Miles, a quietly exquisite and musically sumptuous love letter to her “uncle” and one of her staunchest and earliest supporters — legendary trumpeter Miles Davis. Still, she teeters somewhere in the ether that’s neither obscurity nor superstardom.

Here’s the thing with Horn: Either you know who she is or you don’t. That is not a rarity in Jazz, considering that so many major Jazz talents are dwarves by Pop standards. They become banished either to the outskirts of music trivia or linger as mere obsessions to a handful of fans.

The fact that several respectable music reference books either completely omit Horn or relegate her recordings or accomplishments to a scant few paragraphs is shamefully telling. As legends go, Horn surely deserves more historical notice.

Her persona is a mirror image of her musical personality. She is wise, dicey, wary and comical. She is your favorite aunt, your beloved grandmother.

And she can play and sing it slooow.

Horn, who says she’s “around 60,” began taking Classical piano lessons at the age of 4. At 5, she gave her first public performance in D.C. at the Shiloh Baptist Congregational Church.

She’s one of those Jazz musicians who’s been on the scene for a long time. If you know anything about the music, you’ve probably been aware of her.

As a compadre and collaborator of Davis, a confidante of Carmen McRae and sister/girlfriend/cook to Sarah Vaughan, Horn is also a lovemaker to the 88s and those deliciously slowed-down ballads and standards like “My Funny Valentine,” “Summertime” and “My Man’s Gone Now,” for which she is frequently recognized.

However, Horn is not some laughable, dusty lounge act. She still swings deep in the pocket with drummer Steve Williams, who’s been with her 18 years and 30-year Horn alum and bassist Charles Ables.

The drums shimmer and kerplunk, the bass sails and the piano shades notes that seem to go on about their own business. Meanwhile, Horn’s voice, much like that of Vaughan’s and Dinah Washington’s, bottoms out and tops off the whole melange like a wounded horn.

On I Remember Miles, young trumpeter Roy Hargrove “speaks” secrets for Davis on four tracks while legendary bassist Ron Carter holds it down on five tunes, and Toots Thielemans’s harmonica weeps on “Summertime.”

The choice of songs, arrangements — even musicians — are Horn’s doing, and she would have it no other way. But is it alienating or liberating? Perhaps Horn has been both blessed and cursed by her single-mindedness.

“I’m stubborn, and I haven’t changed,” says Horn. “I do different songs. The way I approach music hasn’t changed. There was a time when The Beatles came through, and it was a major takeover. But I will not stoop to conquer. I’ve had some good people in my corner who’ve trusted me.”

Horn gained an ally in Davis who was inspired by her first album, Embers and Ashes and later by her readings of “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home” and “Basin Street Blues” during her opening spot at the Village Vanguard in the early 1960s.

As a tribute to Horn, Davis recorded the same three tunes on his landmark Seven Steps to Heaven.

Horn credits Davis and booking agent John Levy, the man behind the careers of Cannonball Adderly, Nancy Wilson and Joe Williams, among others, with sustaining and supporting her artistic vision.

“He was grooming me for something else,” Horn says of Levy.

But for a woman who literally lives on music, Horn concedes she was disappointed her daughter did not take an interest in her mother’s vocation.

“She never wanted music, and that kind of hurt me,” Horn says. “I remember sitting in my grandmother’s parlor. I never wanted to go out and play with the kids. I just wanted to plunk on that old piano. I don’t like the pomp and circumstance, but I have to have music,” she says.

After re-emerging from the daily rigors of motherhood, Horn signed with Verve and has been basking, under a somewhat dimmed strobe, in the renewed interest in her talents.

As for the elusiveness of fame as we know it — the kind that has befallen recent Horn cutouts like Cassandra Wilson and Diana Krall — Horn says she does not begrudge the younger female singers what is rightfully theirs.

In fact, she respects her contemporary Ernestine Anderson and the younger vocalists Dianne Reeves and Vanessa Rubin. But she takes issue with the lack of originality in the presentation of some.

“(Krall) came up to me at the Academy Awards and said, ‘I just love your music.’ I thought, ‘Why don’t you get your own songs?’ But I have no problem with her.”

So as many female phoenixes continue to rise, finding their voices by taking up the ruins of the masters before them, Horn sits at her piano, much like she did as a young girl in D.C. in her grandmother’s parlor.

But she says the messages and legacies left by Vaughan and McRae, by Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter, are not lost on her. Neither would they be if those Jazz divas were still alive.

“Carmen came to me in California,” Horn remembers. “She said, ‘I want you to come to the house.’ I carried seasonings from Virginia. She loved my greens and fried chicken.

“She talked to me for an hour, which was frightening. She said, ‘You’ve gotta carry the torch.’ She made me see something else. I came out at the end of all those folks. I miss them a lot. Those were the people I knew,” she says, her voice trailing off in memories.

“I get kinda lonely, sometimes. There’s no one for me to relate to right now.”

But for those of us who know Horn, we relate to her just fine.

This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2000.