Billy Ec - ECKSTINE, Billy: Yours To Command [CD]

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BILLY ECKSTINE Vol.2'Yours To Command' Original Recordings 1950-1952Distinctive is the adjective that best describes one of themost imitated, yet essentially most inimitable of the jazz-singers who, duringthe mid-1940s transformed himself, chameleon-like, from aspiring bebopbandleader and promoter into the sartorially elegant 'Mr B'. The firstAfro-American pop idol of real substance, he set a trend for other black starsappearing before white audiences when to do so was more radical thancommonplace.  The charismatic, multi-talentedBilly (who apart from winning world fame with that unmistakeable baritonalvibrato was also at various stages in his career trumpeter, trombonist andguitarist) was born Clarence William Eckstein in Pittsburgh, Penn-sylvania, on8 July 1914.  He made his singingdebut aged eleven at a church bazaar, and also took piano lessons, but had noformal vocal training. Obsessed as a lad with football, he was the recipient ofan scholarship to St Paul's University, Lawrenceville, and until he broke hiscollarbone looked set for a career in athletics. Imposing in speaking-voice and stage presence, from theearly 1930s onwards Billy worked variously as a vocalist and MC in clubs inWashington and other venues in the East and Midwest until 1936, when hereturned to Pittsburgh.  Thefollowing year he was singing in clubs in Buffalo and Detroit and worked hisway to Chicago where he became resident vocalist at the De Liso, in 1938. Therehe was first heard by pianist Earl Hines (1903-83) who made him principalvocalist with his bigband, in late 1939. Eckstine stayed with the Hines outfitfor four years, specialising in blues vocals (\\Jelly, Jelly became somethingof a theme number) and occasionally doubling on trumpet, which he had learnedto play in spare moments during the band's tours.  The Hines Orchestra became a renowned 'prep school' formodern jazz luminaries, including Dizzy Gillespie, and through Eckstine'sinfluence Hines hired several younger talents, notably Charlie Parker andvocalist Sarah Vaughan, whom he had heard at an amateur night at the New YorkApollo.By 1943 having quit Hines, Eckstine almost immediatelyembarked on a solo career at New York's Onyx Club, but at the instigation ofhis agent Budd Johnson, in June 1944 he formed his short-lived but influential(and since highly acclaimed) big-band. A large-scale jazzband struggling like adinosaur for survival at the tail-end of the Swing Era, this enterprise wasnonetheless monumentally important in the development of bebop, for during thethree years of its activity its ranks nurtured the talents of Gillespie andParker, Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro andLucky Thompson, not to mention Sarah Vaughan and Lena Horne. During 1945-46, apart from leading his band and penningvarious characteristic numbers in blues idiom of his own composition (notably'Blowing The Blues Away' and 'Lonesome Lover Blues') Billy clocked up the firstin a long

When You Return

If

Bring Back The Thrill

Stardust

I Wanna Be Loved

Here Come The Blues

I Left My Hat In Haiti

I'm Yours To Command

What Will I Tell My Heart

I'm A Fool To Want You

Love Me

Once

Be Fair

Pandora

Wonder Why

Enchanted Land

I've Got My Mind On You

Strange Sensation

Because You're Mine

Until Eternity