2.
Johnny Hartman – The Voice That Is
Johnny Hartman represents in my mind the last hurrah of the jazz vocalist. It was right around the time when Miles Davis was like, ‘We don’t need these guys!’ And coincidentally, it happened to be around the time when jazz stopped being popular music. It was the last heyday of jazz. Jazz’s whole response to to rock & roll was to pivot to Miles Davis – the musicians said, ‘We’re not going to do that worshiping one guy thing, we’re going to go a different way.’ Fine. But the reality of it was, Frank Sinatra did a bossa nova album, that was supposed to be the next globally transformative thing but it didn’t work and the jazz singers lost. They died.
Selected in other Baker’s Dozens: Lord Spikeheart, Tom Ravenscroft
