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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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\u00a0received two dozen roses from\u00a0Ella\u00a0Fitzgerald and a card inscribed: \u201cCongratulations, gal \u2013 it\u2019s about time!\u201d<\/p>\n Even late in her career, Laine\u2019s remarkable range, theatrical awareness of contrast and drama, sensitivity to melody and mood, and\u00a0astute choice of high-class songs, prevented her from ever sounding remotely dated. Whether in coolly countermelodic duets with her husband John Dankworth<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n In 1997, she and Dankworth were, fittingly, given a Royal Albert Hall Prom concert<\/a> in honour of their joint 70th birthdays. As long-time stars of a usually low-profile British jazz scene, they brought together the worlds of dinner-jacket arts and unruly jazz. They helped put British jazz on the map, encouraged music education, smuggled jazz into the sensibilities of listeners who had thought they loathed it, and generally added a splash of style and confidence to a sometimes shadowy and defensive subculture.<\/p>\n Laine\u2019s onstage glamour would give way to a far more worldly and down-to-earth magnetism as soon as the spotlight was off. A candid and personable woman, she impressed those who met her with her easygoing alertness, unexpectedly small stature for those who had previously only encountered her on a concert stage, and penetrating green eyes framed by dark curls.<\/p>\n Laine singing with the John Dankworth Group at the Jacksonville jazz festival, Florida, in 1997. Photograph: Will Dickey\/AP\/The Florida Times-Union<\/p>\n She was also \u2013 in the age of the ubiquitous psychotherapist \u2013 mock-guilty about her lightness of spirit, saying simply: \u201cI\u2019m not a very neurotic person.\u201d This realism allowed her to consider both her talents and her shortcomings with neither self-importance nor guilt. She would occasionally ponder whether two parents spending a lifetime on the road was not textbook childcare by some standards, but pointed out the independence and self-reliance of her children with Dankworth \u2013 their son, Alec, became a successful double-bassist and bandleader, and daughter, Jacqui, a vocalist, actor and songwriter with much of her mother\u2019s canny timing, emotional subtlety, and inclusiveness of taste.<\/p>\n Laine was born in Southall, west London, one of three children of a Jamaican father, Alexander Campbell, and an English mother, Minnie Bullock, who took in lodgers. Raised as Clementina Campbell (the fact that her birth had been registered under her mother\u2019s name, before her parents married, did not emerge until she applied for a passport at 26, by which time she was performing as Cleo Laine), she showed early singing talent and was encouraged by her mother to take singing and dancing lessons.<\/p>\n After leaving school at 14, she found work in a hairdresser\u2019s, milliner\u2019s, pawnshop, cobbler\u2019s and library, and married for the first time, to George Langridge, in 1947, while still in her teens. But she was restless and the example of her father \u2013 who sang, and loved music, but made his living selling goods door-to-door \u2013 had also given her an inkling that a life in music might provide an escape.<\/p>\n Modelling herself on the black singers she heard in American musicals such as Cabin in the Sky, she unintentionally developed a sound that was conspicuously different to that of most popular female singers of the 40s and early 50s. Choosing black artists seemed obvious to her, and the threatening implications of being in a racial minority in Britain were not as evident as they were to become later in the 50s. Laine recalled, however, that as a child during the second world war she had speculated on where children like herself might hide if nazism won.<\/p>\n In her mid-20s Laine began seriously to apply herself to singing. She had started out in pubs (\u201cuseful training for improvisation\u201d she would ruefully recall) and eventually auditioned for the successful British modern jazz band led by Dankworth. Though she was a raw unknown, Dankworth and his musicians recognised her promise.<\/p>\n \u201cI was amazed they liked me,\u201d Laine told the Guardian in 1997. \u201cI had begun to think auditions were my hobby, I\u2019d been rejected on dozens of them, and talent competitions too.\u201d But Dankworth was after somebody different, and Laine was unusual as a rich-toned contralto. She listened closely to Billie Holiday for her presence and\u00a0sense of drama, Fitzgerald for the thought processes and technique that allowed her to improvise so exuberantly, and Sarah Vaughan for her operatic range. The mature Laine was to exhibit all these qualities.<\/p>\n She toured the UK extensively with the Dankworth band in the mid-50s. She divorced Langridge in 1957 and the following year married Dankworth, and shared the care of her first son, Stuart \u2013 by then 13 and sometimes a traveller with her on the road \u2013 with her mother and sister. She accompanied Dankworth to the US in 1959 for his appearance at the Newport jazz festival, and sang with the band at Birdland in New York on the same trip. She also began to read widely, and developed an enthusiasm for poetry \u2013 particularly that of ee\u00a0cummings, one of whose pieces she was to record as a song.<\/p>\n Laine with Pearl Prescott in Flesh to a Tiger at the Royal Court, London, 1958. Photograph: David Sim<\/p>\n She also started to act and was initially confined to Caribbean roles, but her skill bloomed, and she was to regard her appearances at the Edinburgh festival in the 60s and in\u00a0A\u00a0Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, 1967, as high points. But there were many others: Flesh to a Tiger, directed by Tony Richardson at the\u00a0Royal Court theatre in 1958, the\u00a0English musical Valmouth, the title role in Ibsen\u2019s Hedda Gabler, plus musical appearances in Show Boat, Colette, The Seven Deadly Sins, A Little Night Music and The\u00a0Merry Widow.<\/p>\n She also originated the role of Princess Puffer (and won several awards and nominations for it) in the Broadway hit musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1985. She took on parts as diverse as the voice of God in the BBC Proms\u2019 production of Benjamin Britten\u2019s Noye\u2019s Fludde (1990) and the Witch in Stephen Sondheim\u2019s Los Angeles production of Into the Woods (1988).<\/p>\n She recorded prolifically in the 60s, on show-song and soundtrack projects (Dankworth was an in-demand movie composer at the time) and straight jazz albums with guests including the British sax virtuoso Tubby Hayes and her vocalist contemporary Annie Ross<\/a>, and in that decade she was also a frequent guest on the British TV satire That Was the Week That Was<\/a>.<\/p>\n Dankworth, meanwhile, had begun exploring jazz variations on non-jazz traditions in his own music, and broke through to a new public with arrangements of Shakespeare sonnets \u2013 Shakespeare and All That Jazz (1964), which won widespread acclaim and a five-star accolade in the US magazine DownBeat. Laine took to them eagerly \u2013 on slow pieces such as O Mistress Mine<\/a> and Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer\u2019s Day<\/a>, she showed a remarkable ability to make the quietest sounds ring like tiny bells, and then be enveloped in a wash of resonant low notes.<\/p>\n Classical audiences, too, were now beginning to wake up to Laine\u2019s skilful control, rich tones and spontaneous jazz sensibility. She was Julie in the spectacularly successful 1971 London production of Jerome Kern\u2019s Show Boat, made an acclaimed New York debut in 1972 and the first of her Carnegie Hall appearances (her Live at Carnegie Hall album from 1974 brought her a first Grammy nomination), and further expanded her palette in recording Arnold Schoenberg\u2019s poetry-cycle Pierrot Lunaire<\/a>, which was nominated for a classical Grammy. Despite an increasingly frenetic working life, she and Dankworth also oversaw the development of their Buckinghamshire home at Wavendon as a working theatre<\/a>.<\/p>\n Laine and Dankworth at their home in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire, in 2009. Photograph: Richard Saker\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Over the next decades, Laine collaborated with the flautist James Galway (1980) and classical guitarist John Williams (1984), contributed to Michael Tilson Thomas\u2019s LSO series The Gershwin Years (1987), and a tribute to female songwriters including Joni Mitchell and Holiday (Woman to Woman, 1989). Her bluesily soulful encounter with Ray Charles<\/a> (Porgy and Bess, 1976) was a highlight, as was a hip and swinging meeting with Mel Torm\u00e9<\/a> (Nothing Without You, 1992). Laine also appeared alongside Frank Sinatra<\/a> during a week of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in 1992.<\/p>\n Following her autobiography, Cleo (1994), Laine also published You Can Sing If You Want To (1997) \u2013 an informal guide to learning to use the voice freely and confidently as an instrument.<\/p>\n The Dankworths slowed down only marginally in their 70s \u2013 their concerts worldwide still continued to sell out \u2013 and when Laine hit 80 in 2007 (Dankworth\u2019s 80th having preceded hers by a month), she performed a series of UK shows, including a reunion of the John Dankworth Sextet that had set her stardom in motion. A four-disc box set, I Hear Music<\/a>, was released documenting the pair\u2019s work from 1944 to 2005.<\/p>\n Dankworth\u2019s health declined late in 2009, on a US tour that had to be curtailed. He died on the morning of 10 February 2010. He and Laine, plus a glitzy cast of guests, had been due to play at Wavendon that night, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stables theatre. Impelled by the conviction that Dankworth would have wanted the celebration to go on, Laine went home from the hospital, played the gig, and broke the news<\/a> of his death to a stunned audience only at the close.<\/p>\n She continued to perform for some years, frequently with a Dankworth rhythm section including Alec on bass and the pianist John Horler, thus demonstrating, as at the Cheltenham jazz festival in 2011, that Laine could still deliver a classic jazz song such as Duke Ellington\u2019s Creole Love Call with a freshness not far away from Adelaide Hall\u2019s 1920s version of the\u00a0original.<\/p>\n Laine and Dankworth foresaw the contemporary developments that have led to the growing embrace of jazz innovation by audiences coming from the European art-music tradition, from western pop, or from cultures unrelated to either. Laine would readily agree that grand opera at its best was \u201cglorious \u2026 but Louis Armstrong is glorious, too, and operatic in his own way\u201d.<\/p>\n For her musicianship, and for that breadth of view, she acquired a raft of accolades and prizes, and in 1997 she was made a dame. Her achievements were a rich blend of the creative journey and the crusade, qualities of a musical life that she and Dankworth conducted with the lightest of touches. Despite all the globetrotting, the jet-lag and the impossible schedules, it seemed more fun to them than working.<\/p>\n Stuart died in 2019. Laine is survived by Alec and Jacqui.<\/p>\n Cleo Laine (Clementine Dinah Bullock), singer and actor, born 27 October 1927; died 24 July 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cleo Laine, who has died aged 97, was not only the most creatively and materially successful jazz singer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292496,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-292495","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114917899192150671","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}