Sarah Vaughan - Lullaby of Birdland CD

Born on March 27th 1924 in Newark, New Jersey, and christened Sarah Lois Vaughan, the woman eventually known as "Sassy" or "The Divine One" began taking piano lessons at seven. Her parents were deeply religious, and encouraged their only daughter to sing and play at their local New Mount Zion Church. Fortunately for the jazz-world, little Sarah developed a fondness for popular music and eventually dropped out of High School during her junior year to concentrate on her music. After winning the Amateur Night at the Apollo Theatre at the age of eighteen she had an engagement with Earl Hines’ band, as well as a host of club-engagements and recordings, always with the brightest and best players around. Finally, in 1947, Sarah Vaughan won the New Star Award of Esquire magazine, as well as Downbeat magazine’s critic’s poll as "best singer"
Witnessing her effortless and playful vocal ways with the new music called bebop, it is obvious why most critics and listeners praised and adored "Sassy".
After leaving Columbia in 1953, Vaughan signed with Mercury Records – recording the more jazzy sides for their subsidiary EmArcy in the mid to late Fifties. During this time she arguably made some of the most beautiful and important recordings of her career, mostly in her loose, relaxed, and supremely sensual style. By now firmly established as a Jazz-icon, her personal- and business-situation were far from perfect, with the "mercurially temperamental" Vaughan getting divorced three times, running into trouble with the IRS, and often changing record labels. She did however keep making wonderful music for all these different companies, recording everything from Jazz to
Pop, from Brazilian music via the poems of Pope John Paul II to the Beatles’ songbook until well into the Eighties. With her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and after her induction into the American Jazz Hall of Fame, Sarah Vaughan died of lung cancer at her home in California on April 3rd 1990, just a week after her 66th birthday.

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