New Pop Singers

The ears of Manhattan night-livers were happily tuned last week to a pair of pretty girl singers. Caterina Valente had already gone far -- all the way from Germany to the Cotillion Room of the posh Hotel Pierre. Barbara Lea had only gone as far as the tiny downtown and downstairs Village Vanguard, but she was already breaking many of the customers' hearts twice nightly.

Modified Moorish. Songstress Valente first burst on the U.S. scene last winter with a brassy but strangely appealing version of Malaguena (Decca). Her high, uninhibited voice soared with the echoing strings, and the record became a hit (TIME, Feb. 7, 1955). Unfortunately, her only U.S. appearance at the time was a single shot on TV, and few admirers were able to find out just why the girl with an Italian name should be singing a Spanish song in German.

Now, lean and attractive, and sporting a yard-long pony tail, she explains something of herself as she entertains her audience. She stems from a long line of show people, went on the road with her Italian-comedienne mother as a dancer at the age of five. Caterina is the youngest of four children, was born in Paris where the family now makes its comfortable home. There, after World War II, Caterina began to exploit her pretty voice, learned the American jazz style from recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday. By 1952, Caterina had married a German juggler named Eric van Aro, now lives in West Germany as a popular recording artist and movie actress. Her singing style has settled into a kind of modified Moorish that can develop into a frightening, savage howl or sink into a sweet whisper. Last week she occasionally accompanied herself expertly on a guitar, playing some poignant harmonies that freshened the overfamiliar Latin tunes.

Hers is a carnival kind of talent, not naturally adapted to the chic mannerisms, the sexy wiggles or the whining American vocal inflections that she often attempts, but a pleasant one nevertheless.

Modified Wellesley. Songstress Lea (from Leacock) is bedeviled by the fact that her singing reminds people of Lovelorn Jazz Singer Lee Wiley--a matter of pleasure to others and pride to herself, but bothersome nonetheless. She stands quietly before her audience, looking sweet-faced as the college girl she recently was, smiling a slow, shy smile. Her singing voice is satisfyingly low, delightfully sandy, bewitchingly intimate, and her vocal style is almost like speaking, conveying a rare sense of lucidity and conviction. She sings many--too many--unfamiliar numbers, e.g., You Irritate Me So, This Is Where Love Walked In, Honey in the Honeycomb, as well as more recognizable show tunes and the kind of attractive oldies that always seem to avoid being predictable.

Barbara's Detroit parents jokingly decided she was going to be a blues singer when she was four, although she preferred to think of herself as a future coloratura ("I didn't even know what the word meant"). By the time she heard her first jazz singing, Billie Holiday's Fine and Mellow, she was a self-conscious teenager and could barely bring herself to stand up in front of a summer-resort band. The next year she decided to go to Wellesley in the mistaken belief that Wellesley had a course in automobile mechanics ("I have a knack for scientific things"), then found herself spending most of her time with a Harvard undergraduate outfit known as the Crimson Stompers.

"If anybody knew how rough it was going to be," she says ruefully, "nobody would go into show business." She worked in a real-estate office, moved to New York, took "gesture lessons," and picked up stray singing jobs. Eventually, she recorded a single for Cadillac, an LP (A Woman in Love) for Riverside, has another (Barbara Lea) upcoming for Prestige. Her musical ambition, which she is well on the way to achieving, is to sound like "a nice, warm person--just someone you would like to know."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.