Emotional Brass

An upper gold tooth shines like a phosphorous eye when she opens her mouth to sing. The scimitar eyes may close, the slender hands seem to carve the phrases out of the choky nightclub air. And the voice, sweet and strong above the rhythm section, curls around the lyrics like a husky caress. The voice belongs to Negro Singer Ernestine Anderson, at 29 perhaps the best-kept jazz secret in the land.

Although she has been singing professionally half her life, Ernestine has caused so little public stir that she only recently caught the ear of the recordmakers (a first Anderson album, misleadingly titled Hot Cargo, was issued this summer by Mercury). Last week Ernestine was singing once a week for $25 at Los Angeles' Little Avant Garde Club. She gave the patrons mostly standards--But Not for Me, Gone with the Wind, Take the A Train--that dramatically displayed her talents. She can swing upbeat ballads in a light-textured voice or noodle a bit of the blues in tones as soft as velvet. She can modulate with shrugging ease, swell or diminish volume with a sure instinct for melody and lyrics.

Most important, she has the rare ability to play the kind of emotional brass that shivers the spine. Ernestine singing My Man somehow makes believable a woman's capacity to suffer a man who "isn't good, isn't true," but to whom nevertheless she will "come back on my knees some day."

Ernestine Anderson was born in Houston, the daughter of a construction worker. In the neighborhood Baptist church she used to sing hymns with her grandmother. At 13 she was singing at the Eldorado, a big Negro ballroom, and after the family moved to Seattle, she became a regular with local bands. She went on tour with Bumps Blackwell's band, then with Johnny Otis, finally with Lionel Hampton, who took her to Manhattan. For a while she had a "steady gig" at a Greenwich Village spot, but she never attracted real attention until she went to Sweden in 1956 with an "allstar" jazz group headed by Trumpeter Rolf Ericsen. The Swedes loved her and mobbed her concerts. When she got back to the U.S., choice dates were still hard to come by, but West Coast jazz critics, notably the San Francisco Chronicle's Ralph Gleason, started to take note of the best new voice in the business.

Partly because the market for good jazz singers--i.e., singers who phrase and improvise in the manner of instruments in a jazz band--is remarkably small, Ernestine has remained a critical success and a popular failure. She is inevitably compared to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday. Ernestine invariably rejects the comparisons. "I wish," she says, "they would let me be just me." She is, and "just me" is plenty good enough.

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