Cleo Laine, whose husky contralto was one of the most distinctive voices in jazz and who was regarded by many as Britain’s greatest contribution to the quintessentially American music, has died. She was 97.
The Stables, a charity and venue Laine founded with her late jazz musician husband John Dankworth, said Friday (July 25) it was “greatly saddened” by the news that “one of its founders and Life President, Dame Cleo Laine has passed away.”
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Monica Ferguson, artistic director of The Stables, said Laine “will be greatly missed, but her unique talent will always be remembered.”
Laine’s career spanned the Atlantic and crossed genres: She sang the songs of Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Schumann; she acted on stage and on film, and even played God in a production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde.
Laine’s life and art were intimately bound up with band leader Dankworth, who gave her a job and her stage name in 1951, and married her seven years later. Both were still performing after their 80th birthdays. Dankworth died in 2010 at 82.
In 1997, Laine became the first British jazz artist to be made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight.
“It is British jazz that should have received the accolade for its service to me,” she said when the honor was announced. “It has given me a wonderful life, a successful career and an opportunity to travel the globe doing what I love to do.”
Laine was born Clementina Dinah Campbell in 1927. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was a Jamaican who loved opera and earned money during the Depression as a street singer. Despite hard times, her British mother, Minnie, made sure that her daughter had piano, voice and dance lessons.
She began performing at local events at age 3, and at age 12 she got a role as a movie extra in The Thief of Bagdad. Leaving school at 14, Laine went to work as a hairdresser and faced repeated rejection in her efforts to get a job as a singer.
A decade later, in 1951, she tried out for the Johnny Dankworth Seven, and succeeded. “Clementina Campbell” was judged too long for a marquee, so she became Cleo Laine.
“John said that when he heard me, I didn’t sound like anyone else who was singing at the time,” Laine once said. “I guess the reason I didn’t get the other jobs is that they were looking for a singer who did sound like somebody else.”
Laine had a remarkable range, from tenor to contralto, and a sound often described as “smoky.”
Dankworth, in an interview with the Irish Independent, recalled Laine’s audition.
“They were all sitting there with stony faces, so I asked the Scottish trumpet player Jimmy Deuchar, who was looking very glum and was the hardest nut of all, whether he thought she had something. ‘Something?’ he said, ‘She’s got everything!’”
Offered 6 pounds a week, Laine demanded — and got — 7 pounds.
“They used to call me ‘Scruff’, although I don’t think I was scruffy. It was just that having come from the sticks, I didn’t know how to put things together as well as the other singers of the day,” she told the Irish Independent. “And anyway, I didn’t have the money, because they weren’t paying me enough.”
Recognition came swiftly. Laine was runner-up in Melody Maker’s “girl singer” category in 1952, and topped the list in 1956 and 1957.
She married Dankworth — and quit his band — in 1958, a year after her divorce from her first husband, George Langridge. As Dankworth’s band prospered, Laine began to feel underused.
“I thought, no, I’m not going to just sit on the band and be a singer of songs every now and again when he fancied it. So it was then that I decided I wasn’t going to stay with the band and I was going to go off and try to do something solo-wise,” she said in a BBC documentary.
“When I said I was leaving, he said, ‘Will you marry me?’ That was a good ploy, wasn’t it, huh?”
They were married on March 18, 1958. A son, Alec, was born in 1960, and daughter Jacqueline followed in 1963.
Despite her happy marriage, Laine forged a career independent of Dankworth.
“Whenever anybody starts putting a label on me, I say, ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ and I go and do something different,” Laine told The Associated Press in 1985 when she was appearing on stage in New York in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Her stage career began in 1958 when she was invited to join the cast of a West Indian play, Flesh to a Tiger, at the Royal Court Theatre, and was surprised to find herself in the lead role. She won a Moscow Arts Theatre Award for her performance.
Valmouth followed in 1959, The Seven Deadly Sins in 1961, The Trojan Women in 1966 and Hedda Gabler in 1970.
The role of Julie in Jerome Kern’s Show Boat in 1971 provided Laine with a show-stopping song, “Bill.”
Laine began winning a following in the United States in 1972 with a concert at the Alice Tully Hall in New York. It wasn’t well-attended, but The New York Times gave her a glowing review.
The following year, she and Dankworth drew a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall, launching a series of popular appearances. Cleo at Carnegie won a Grammy award in 1986, the same year she was a Tony nominee for The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
A reviewer for Variety in 2002 found her voice going strong: “a dark, creamy voice, remarkable range and control from bottomless contralto to a sweet clear soprano. Her perfect pitch and phrasing is always framed with musical imagination and good taste.”
Perhaps Laine’s most difficult performance of all was on Feb. 6, 2010, at a concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the concert venue she and Dankworth had founded at their home, during which Laine and both of her children performed.
“I’m terribly sorry that Sir John can’t be here today,” Laine told the crowd at the end of the show. “But earlier on my husband died in hospital.”
Laine said in an interview with the Boston Globe in 2003 that the secret of her longevity was that “I was never a complete belter.”
“There was always a protective side in me, and an inner voice always said, ‘Don’t do that — it’s not good for you and your voice.’”
Laine is survived by her son and daughter.
