Cool Cleo

England has given Noel Coward to the musical stage, the Beatles to rock and Mantovani to schmalz. But try as it might, it has not been able to make a major contribution to that indigenous American art form, jazz. Except, that is, for gin and Cleo Laine.

With the proper schooling early on, Cleo's superb natural voice could have carried her into an operatic or lieder career. Smoky and sinuous in its middle range, it leaps effortlessly between octaves (sometimes going as high as an Yma Sumac "super F" above high C). Sometimes it skitters exhilaratingly around its bright upper reaches, then makes darting swallow-like swoops into the dark, resonant chest-tone regions of a Marilyn Home.

But as Cleo showed recently at a standing-room-only concert in London's Intimate Theater, there is more to her singing than mere vocal acrobatics. There is, for one thing, the sultry, mischievous beauty that belies her 45 years--often enhanced by her penchant for wearing flowing gowns unbuttoned to the waist. There is the emotional intensity that glints inside every wave of her finely controlled vibrato on a ballad like Night and Day. Then there is the quicksilver sensitivity to shifting harmonies on a snaky blues like Gimme a Pigfoot.

Wordless. Unlike the many jazz singers who grimace, snap their ringers or just plain wonder what to do with themselves during long instrumental introductions and interludes, Cleo knows precisely what is called for: she sings along with all the wordless instrumental agility of a clarinet cozying up to a sax. The man who plays sax to Cleo's clarinet is her arranger, conductor and husband, Johnny Dankworth, himself a leading British jazzman and composer.

Cleo and Johnny have been a musical team since the day in 1952 when he offered her six quid a week to sing with his band, and she said, "Make it seven." He did. She came from Middlesex, just outside London, where life as a child was, in her words, "clean but scruffy." Her father, a West Indian immigrant, earned part of his living as a busker outside London's music halls and pubs. Her mother, disowned by her parents for marrying a West Indian, saw to it that Cleo and her two brothers "were swamped in lessons"--dancing, piano and violin.

At age three, Cleo gave her first public performance at a community variety show, warbling a wobbly Let's All Sing the Barmaid Song. "They couldn't get me off the stage," recalls Cleo. "I knew from the start that this was going to be my career."

By the time she was 18, she had been a hairdresser, milliner, pawnshop clerk, librarian, even a cobbler. But having sung on the side all the while, she felt ready to try out for Blanche Coleman's all-girl band. "Good pipes," they told her, "but can you play a bass?" Fortunately for Dankworth and her later career, she could not. Even with Dank-worth's band, she felt after a few years like a "necessary evil" and decided that it was necessary to strike out on her own. What she found waiting for her out there was mostly straight acting parts in London's West End, notably the lead in Tony Richardson's production of the West Indian play Flesh to a Tiger.

In 1958 she married Dankworth and began appearing with his band as a featured act, but she also kept up her new attachment to the theater. She played both Hippolyta and Titania in a West End production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hedda Gabler at Canterbury, and replaced an ailing Lotte Lenya in a production of the Weill-Brecht The Seven Deadly Sins in Edinburgh. Currently she is starring in a London revival of Show Boat, where her breathy, pulsating Bill is a showboat-stopper. Her musically adventurous nature has also led her to give lieder recitals, try some of Dankworth's offbeat settings of Shakespeare Sonnets and Bach inventions, and sing the role of Eve in Arena, a futuristic opera by Britain's George Newson, at a 1971 London Prom concert under Pierre Boulez.

In the U.S., Cleo, like pure-malt Scotch and the metric system, is only beginning to catch on. She and Johnny are scheduled to give a concert in April at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall; that appearance will be followed next fall by a month-long American tour. For both events, Cleo manages to be her own worst promoter. "When I hear myself, I don't like it," she says. "I can't get out what I hear in my head. What comes out is mellow and soft; yet what I try to achieve is an 'edge' to my voice." To her avid public in Britain, Europe and Australia (which includes Britain's Princess Margaret), a more apt description can be found on the working title of Cleo's newest album, which she was recording last week: I Am a Song.

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