Blossom Dearie, cabaret singer, dies at 82

By Stephen Holden, New York Times
Posted: 02/08/2009 05:30:46 PM PST

NEW YORK — Blossom Dearie, the jazz pixie with a little-girl voice and pageboy haircut who was a fixture in New York and London nightclubs for decades, died Saturday at her apartment in Greenwich Village. She was 82.

She died in her sleep of natural causes, said her manager and representative, Donald Schaffer. Her last public appearances, in 2006, were at her regular Midtown Manhattan stamping ground, the now defunct Danny's Skylight Room.

A singer, pianist and songwriter with an independent spirit who zealously guarded her privacy, Ms. Dearie pursued a singular career that blurred the line between jazz and cabaret. An interpretive minimalist with caviar taste in songs and musicians, she was a genre unto herself.

Rarely raising her sly, kittenish voice, Ms. Dearie confided song lyrics in a playful style below whose surface layers of insinuation lurked. Her cheery style influenced many younger jazz and cabaret singers, most notably Stacey Kent and the singer and pianist Daryl Sherman.

But just under her fey camouflage lay a needling wit. If you listened closely, you could hear the scathing contempt she brought to one of her signature songs, "I'm Hip," the Dave Frishberg-Bob Dorough demolition of a name-dropping bohemian poseur. Ms. Dearie was for years closely associated with Frishberg and Dorough. It was Frishberg who wrote another of her perennials, "Peel Me a Grape."

Ms. Dearie didn't suffer fools gladly and was
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unafraid to voice her disdain for music she didn't like; the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber were a particular pet peeve.

The other side of her sensibility was a wistful romanticism most discernible in her interpretations of Brazilian bossa nova songs, material ideally suited to her delicate approach.

Her final album, "Blossom's Planet" (Daffodil), released in 2000, includes what may be the definitive interpretation of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Wave." Her dreamy attenuated rendition finds her voice floating away as though to sea, or to heaven, on lapping waves of tastefully synthesized strings.

Born Marguerite Blossom Dearie in East Durham, N.Y., on April 29, 1926, she was a classically trained pianist who switched to jazz after joining a high school band. Moving to New York City in the mid-1940s, she sang with the Blue Flames, a vocal group attached to the Woody Herman band, and with Alvino Rey's band before embarking on a solo career.

Traveling to Paris in 1952, she met the Belgian flutist and saxophonist Bobby Jaspar, to whom she was briefly married.

She also met Norman Granz, the owner of Verve Records, who signed her to a six-album contract. All six albums — "Blossom Dearie" (1956), "Give Him the Ooh-La-La" (1957), "Once Upon a Summertime" (1958), "Sings Comden and Green" (1959), "My Gentleman Friend" (1959) and "Soubrette Sings Broadway Hit Songs" (1960) — are today regarded as cult classics.

Blossom Dearie on YouTube