Celebrated singer with an agile contralto voice who, with her husband John Dankworth, helped bring new audiences to jazz
Cleo Laine, who has died aged 97, was not only the most creatively and materially successful jazz singer the UK scene has known, but was also respected worldwide as one of a handful of truly original jazz-inspired vocalists. From modest beginnings in the pubs and dancehalls of austerity Britain in the 1950s, the diminutive singer with the majestic and agile contralto voice went on to achieve international fame in a career that also embraced acting and writing.
Laine could travel easily in almost any idiom, from jazzy standards-singing to the frontiers of classical music and opera, and she was the only female singer to receive Grammy nominations in the jazz, popular and classical categories. When she became the first British artist to win a Grammy as best female jazz vocalist (for the third of her live Carnegie Hall albums) in 1985, she received two dozen roses from Ella Fitzgerald and a card inscribed: “Congratulations, gal – it’s about time!”
Even late in her career, Laine’s remarkable range, theatrical awareness of contrast and drama, sensitivity to melody and mood, and astute choice of high-class songs, prevented her from ever sounding remotely dated. Whether in coolly countermelodic duets with her husband John Dankworth, the alto saxophonist, in flat-out exercises in zigzagging scat or stomping swing, or in spacey moods of poignant reflectiveness, Laine was never less than the classiest of acts.
