ECKSTINE, Billy: My Foolish Heart

• Eckstine, Billy: My Foolish Heart
• Product Type: Abis Music
• Brand: Naxos

BILLY ECKSTINE‘My Foolish Heart’ Original Recordings 1945-1951One of the most immediately recognisable — and, on account of its vibrato, most imitated — of the jazz-singers, during the mid-1940s the personable Billy Eckstine evolved from would-be bebop bandleader and promoter into the sartorially elegant ‘Mr B’, the first real Afro-American pop idol, a black star who appealed directly to both black and white audiences in an era when it was ‘radical’ rather than commonplace to do so. The multi-talented Billy (who apart from winning world fame with that massively resonant and highly distinctive baritone voice was also at various stages in his career trumpeter, trombonist and guitarist) was born Clarence William Eckstein in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 8 July 1914. After making his singing début at a church bazaar at the age of eleven, he began taking piano lessons but had no formal vocal training. In his youth his greatest interest by far was football; indeed, he was the recipient of an athletic scholarship to St. Paul’s University, Lawrenceville and it took the misfortune of a broken collarbone to refocus him towards music.Initially, Billy had worked as a vocalist-MC in clubs in the East and Midwest (most notably with a band led by Tommy Myles) until 1936, when he returned to Pittsburgh. By 1937 he was singing in clubs in Buffalo and Detroit, gradually working his way to Chicago where he became resident vocalist at the De Liso. He was first heard there by Earl Hines (1903-83) and it was through Hines he got his first big break, as principal vocalist with that piano giant’s bigband, in late 1939. Eckstine would remain with Hines for four years: noted already for his specialising in blues vocals, he occasionally also doubled on trumpet, which he had learned to play in spare moments during the band’s tours. The Hines Orchestra became a renowned ‘prep school’ for modern jazz luminaries, including Dizzy Gillespie, and through Eckstein’s influence Hines hired several young talents, notably Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughan, whom Eckstine had heard singing at an amateur night at the New York Apollo.By 1943 Eckstine had quit Hines’ outfit and almost immediately embarked on a solo career at New York’s Onyx Club, but at the instigation of his agent Budd Johnson, in June 1944 he formed his short-lived but influential (and since highly acclaimed) big-band. A large-scale jazzband struggling for survival at the tail-end of the Swing Era, this enterprise was a dinosaur, but proved nonetheless monumentally impor-tant in the development of bebop, for during the three years of its activity its ranks nurtured the talents of Gillespie and Parker, Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro and Lucky Thompson, not to mention the vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Lena Horne. During 1945-46, apart from leading his band and penning various characteristic numbers in