Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 275 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
It’s difficult to place some vocalists in a specific genre bag. I’m a huge fan of women who are considered to be “jazz vocalists” and have featured many of them over the years in this series.
One of the women who can’t be locked in and whose career has spanned multiple genres over the years is Patti Austin, who is celebrating her 75th birthday on Sunday and who has been performing for about 70 of them.
Her bio in Musician Guide, by James M. Manheim and Linda Dailey Paulson, tells that story, though it has her birthday listed as the wrong year, according to all other sources and the number of years that Austin celebrates each year—she was born Aug. 10, 1950.
Austin was born in New York [date removed] and grew up in show business. Her father was a professional trombone player at the time. The family lived in Bayshore, Long Island. At the tender age of four she made her performing debut, singing a song called “Teach Me Tonight” on the stage of Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater during an appearance by vocalist Dinah Washington, who was also Austin’s godmother. A child star, she appeared on Sammy Davis, Jr.’s television variety show, worked on stage with such stars as Ray Bolger of The Wizard of Oz, and when she was nine she went to Europe with a group led by bandleader Quincy Jones, who would become an immensely influential figure both on Austin’s own career and on popular music.
“My friends didn’t know I was in show business until I was 16,” said Austin. “The rest of the time, I never talked about it, because I wanted people to accept me for me, not based on whether I had a hit record or was highly visible or all that nonsense.”
Here she is in 1957 on Arthur Godfrey’s show:
Austin’s first major series of appearances as a mature singer came when she was 16, when she went on tour with pop vocalist Harry Belafonte, then near the peak of his fame. This tour led to a fresh round of television appearances and to a three-year stint as a lounge singer for various international locations of the posh Intercontinental hotel chain. Austin’s first recordings were made during this period as well–for Coral Records in 1965. This material was reissued in 1999.
[…]
With this wealth of professional experience under her belt before she could even vote, it was not difficult for Austin to decide on a musical career. Recording executives and producers valued the young singer’s know-how, and session-work opportunities began to flow her way.
“The first session I did was for James Brown’s hit, ‘It’s a Man’s World,’ and when I got a nice juicy check from that,” Austin recalled in a biographical sketch released by the Concord Jazz label. “I said, ‘Hey let me do some more of this stuff.’” Austin became one of pop music’s leading session vocalists in the early 1970s, backing both R&B and pop vocalists such as Paul Simon, Roberta Flack, George Benson, and Cat Stevens. With her vocals included on the soundtracks of hundreds of television commercials, Austin became one of America’s most heard but least known singers.
That began to change when Austin was signed to the jazz-oriented label CTI in 1976, thanks to contacts with industry veteran Creed Taylor and Belafonte’s former musical director Bill Eaton. The four albums Austin recorded for CTI helped to raise her profile in the industry and were widely appreciated by the architects of the “Quiet Storm” turn that black popular music took in the early 1980s. One of the albums, Havana Candy, was reissued in 1997 and favorably reviewed by Down Beat. The magazine pointed to “Austin’s appreciation of the jazz legacy as well as her love of various pop styles.”
Musician Guide continues her story:
Signed by Quincy Jones
The dawn of the 1980s brought Austin some especially high-profile session assignments: she sang on Gaucho, the rock group Steely Dan’s complex exploration of the possibilities of soft rock, and, on a lighter note, appeared on the Blues Brothers album. She also enjoyed a hit single with “Razzmatazz” on Quincy Jones’s Grammy-winning 1980 LP The Dude, and in 1981 was signed to Jones’s Qwest label. That year, Austin’s Qwest debut album, Every Home Should Have One, finally brought her stardom thanks to her chart-topping duet with James Ingram, “Baby Come to Me.” The album was produced by Jones and Rod Temperton, the same team that would soon be responsible for Michael Jackson’s epochal Off the Wall and Thriller albums.
“Baby Come to Me” was a perfect showcase for Austin’s vocals, which had taken on an exquisite silky quality that blended nicely with the smooth instrumental textures of the period. The song appealed to pop and urban listeners, and was adopted as the theme song of the television soap opera General Hospital. Austin and Ingram followed it up in 1983 with another successful duet, “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?”; part of the soundtrack of the film Best Friends, the song was nominated for an Oscar, and Austin and Ingram performed it on the Academy Awards television broadcast.
I featured James Ingram and Austin not too long ago in “Black Music Sunday: James Ingram—the artist you don’t know you know.” Here are their two megahits:
James Ingram Feat Patti Austin – Baby Come To Me”
“James Ingram & Patti Austin – “How Do You Keep The Music Playing””
Journalist Janine Coveney wrote an absorbing, in-depth feature on Austin in 2007, republished last year for Jazz Times: “Patti Austin: Lady Be Good.”
Doing things in a big way is part of Austin’s style, and she continues the theme on her brand-new Concord/Rendezvous Records release Avant Gershwin. Released in March, the live set-recorded at two WDR concerts in Cologne, Germany-finds Austin belting out both tried-and-true nuggets and lesser-known gems from the Gershwin songbook with the WDR Big Band. Whether breathing fiery life into such unusual Gershwin fare as “Slap That Bass” or “Stairway to Paradise,” caressing the time-worn lullaby “Summertime” or swinging boldly with the rarely heard “Swanee,” Austin confronts the listener with the big, brassy idea that Gershwin is still the most contemporary and relevant of popular tunesmiths, not merely a sentimental songbook elder of yore
“That’s why we call it Avant Gershwin,” explains Austin. “I said I want to take those tunes, I want to put them in a jazz genre but I want to make the grooves more contemporary, more modern, so somebody that’s young will hear it and go, ‘Damn! That’s some hip stuff.’”
The project is part of what Austin has planned as a series of live recordings celebrating some of the great composers and performers of the golden age of jazz. The series got its start in 2002 with the release of the Grammy-nominated For Ella, also recorded live with the WDR Big Band in Germany. The tribute to Ella Fitzgerald found Austin putting her own stamp on many of the songs associated with the late jazz great, and painstakingly re-created Fitzgerald’s indelible scat runs on “How High the Moon” and “Mr. Paganini.”
[…]
After years of working studios in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles alongside some of the top pop, jazz and commercial producers, Austin had plenty of experience as a vocal arranger. The idea of revitalizing the Gershwin material seemed to incite a girlish enthusiasm, particularly in the album’s two medleys, one a combination of Gershwin tunes about music itself, and the other a rich compilation of themes from the folk opera Porgy and Bess. She continues, “I said OK, Michael, there’re all these Gershwin tunes that are about rhythm and music and I wanna find them all and put ’em all together in some kind of order. He said OK. And I said, ‘I want to do a medley of all the Porgy and Bess stuff, but I don’t want to do all the ‘Lawd lawd, he done left me’ stuff. I want to do all the fun stuff, the guy stuff, the Sportin’ Life stuff. Cause to me he’s got all the really cool stuff. And I’ll do an obligatory version of ‘Summertime’ only because I’m so tired of people screaming that song and it’s a frickin’ lullaby. So could we throw in ‘Summertime’ and make it what it’s supposed to be, this gentle, beautiful, elegant moment?’”
[…]
With Abene, Austin crafted an album that isn’t the typical selection of Gershwin standards, nor is it a cozy little listen. Her version of “Fascinating Rhythm” bounds along with bursts of brass, while the rarely heard “Slap That Bass” becomes a slinky commentary on music soothing political turmoil. With elegant, sexy precision, Austin swings on a galloping “Lady Be Good” complete with intricate scat sequences where she trades licks with various members of the horn section. What’s astonishing about the recording is the level at which Austin consistently pushes herself, and the fact that it’s all live. “That’s the other thing that freaks everybody out-they hear the applause and they’re like, ‘What? That was live?’ But that’s where that energy comes from,” Austin explains. “I can only do that kind of a performance with an audience there, because again, that’s the form-it was written to stimulate the audience, and the audience stimulates the actors and away you fly.”
From “4Ella2 — April in Paris”
“PATTI AUSTIN’s Grammy Winning LADY BE GOOD for her Gershwin Gala @ Jazz at Lincoln Center!”
Matt Collar at AllMusic continues her biography:
In 2001, she again hit Top 30 of the Jazz Albums chart with On the Way to Love, which found her returning to Quincy Jones‘ Warner Bros.-distributed Qwest label and reuniting for a duet with James Ingram. Her lovely tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, For Ella, appeared in spring 2002 and reached number seven on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart. In 2007, she delivered Avant Gershwin, a big-band album of George Gershwin compositions that hit number five on the Jazz Albums chart and won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
After a decade on the jazz side of the fence, Austin turned more toward the pop side with 2011’s Sound Advice, produced by Greg Phillinganes. It featured a mix of covers, including interpretations of songs by Des’ree, the Rolling Stones, Depeche Mode, and others.
In 2015, Austin was featured on Patrick Williams‘ big-band album Home Suite Home. Included was her performance of “52nd & Broadway,” which took home the Grammy for Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals. In 2016, she collaborated with author Tara Meyer on the children’s book and accompanying soundtrack Mighty Musical Fairy Tales. A year later, she revisited her Ella Fitzgerald influence with Ella & Louis, a collaboration with trumpeter, trombonist, pianist, and bandleader James Morrison, his quintet, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Northey. A third Fitzgerald-themed album, For Ella 2, arrived in 2023 and featured Austin with Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band. It picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Album.
Richard Scheinin at SFJazz wrote this last year, and I picked his No. 5:
Five Things You Should Know About Patti Austin
In recent years, she has focused on the Great American Songbook, with projects devoted to George Gershwin and the repertoire of Ella Fitzgerald.
The New York Times puts Austin on the “short list” of singers who can authoritatively interpret tunes associated with Fitzgerald, one of her heroes. Austin’s latest album of Fitzgerald covers, For Ella 2, was nominated for a GRAMMY in the 2024 Best Jazz Vocal Album category. In 2003, For Ella, her first foray into Fitzgerald territory, was similarly nominated.
In 2008, her Avant Gershwin album won a GRAMMY for Best Jazz Vocal Album. As an African-American woman, she explained to National Public Radio, her unorthodox approach to Gershwin is a necessity: “We have a `Porgy and Bess Medley’ and I decided that I would do most of the guy’s parts because most of the women’s songs in Porgy and Bess are about, Lord, don’t leave me, oh, my life is horrible. Don’t go away, Oh Lord Jesus, don’t take him away. So, it’s like, we do that enough in real life. I figured I wanted to play the villain. And so Sportin’ Life has all these great villainous, creepy, wonderful lyrics. And so I decided that was the character I wanted to portray more than the suffering woman. So I do `Ain’t Necessarily So.’“
Give a listen to the opening medley:
Music reviewer Katherine Silkaitis at Soundstage wrote:
Avant Gershwin does not sound like a generic jazz-standards album. If anything, a lot of it sounds as though it could have been ripped rom a Cameron Mackintosh Broadway production. But even if that genre is less than enticing for some, Austin does it so well it’s hard to not admire her voice, stamina and, most of all, the arrangements. She throws old-guard ideas of Gershwin arrangements out the window, singing the male parts in the “Porgy and Bess Medley” and opening the album with a 12-minute medley. This track, “Overture/Gershwin Medley,” begins as a typical interpretation of recognizable tunes, including “Slap That Bass,” “I’ve Got Rhythm” and “Strike Up the Band.” But as the track progresses, Austin throws in syncopated verses accompanied by subtle minor chords from the brass and rhythm sections, giving the track a lazy-yet-suspenseful, sensual vibe. Then, the arrangement twists and turns, throwing in an unexpected and frantic loud bridge that combines scat singing and trumpet blasts before returning to its former lounge tempo.
While researching this story, I ran across an Austin duet I had never heard. Here she is with Take 6 at the “We Love Ella! A Tribute to the First Lady of Song” PBS concert in 2007.
Austin doesn’t ignore causes or political subjects. Case in point is her “get out the vote” tune for Georgia in 2020:
Patti Austin Gets Out the Vote With Hilarious ‘Georgia’ Senate Runoff-Election Song
Grammy-winning singer Patti Austin has made a bid to get out the vote in Georgia with a new song posted by the political action committee MeidasTouch.
The runoff vote, which takes place on Jan. 5, could determine whether or not the Senate goes Democrat or Republican Mitch McConnell remains majority leader.
“I know you’ve gotta be tired of washing hands and wearing masks/ But you can save the planet’s ass!,” Austin sings in the big-band spoofing song.
I’ve got lots more Austin to share today, and will do it in the comments section below, where I hope you’ll join me. I’ll close with some Austin that should get you up and moving. She recorded “Razzamatazz” on Quincy Jones’ album “The Dude,” in 1981. Here she is singing it live with The Boston Pops:
Join me in wishing Patti Austin a happy birthday, with many more to come!