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Dame Cleo Laine, the UK’s most successful and celebrated jazz singer, has died aged 97.
A statement from her children Jacqui and Alec reads: “It is with deepest sadness that we announce the passing of our dearly beloved mother, Cleo, who died peacefully yesterday afternoon. We will all miss her terribly. The family wish to be given space to grieve and ask for privacy at this very difficult time.”
She was well known for a longstanding collaboration with her late husband, the composer and reed player John Dankworth, singing with his jazz bands from the mid-1950s onwards. But she also had a stellar solo career, including in the US, where she became the only female artist to be nominated for Grammy awards in pop, jazz and classical categories; few singers have the versatility to deliver atonal Arnold Schoenberg pieces and to have duetted with Ray Charles.
Laine was born in Uxbridge, west London, in 1927, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an English farmer’s daughter (her original name was Clementina Campbell, though she was registered at birth as Clementine Bullock, her mother’s surname). She was raised in nearby Southall and had an unassuming youth, working at various jobs after leaving school including as a hairdresser, librarian and pawnbroker. Still a teenager, she married George Langridge and had a son, Stuart.
She sang in clubs after work, but became a professional singer in her mid-20s after successfully auditioning for Dankworth’s band the Dankworth Seven. “In a sense, with them, I started at the top,” she later said. She earned £7 a week, and changed her name to the snappier Cleo Laine. Her marriage faltered – Langridge “thought my career was a pipe-dream”, she said – and Laine left him for Dankworth, marrying him in 1958.
She developed her voice, eventually reaching a four-octave range and becoming one of the most esteemed proponents of the scat singing style. She acted in plays and musical theatre in London, as well as performing with Dankworth and his band; in 1961, she crossed over into the British pop charts with You’ll Answer to Me reaching No 5.
She and Dankworth achieved further recognition with their jazz arrangements of poetry by Shakespeare, ee cummings, WH Auden and TS Eliot. Emboldened by a successful Australian tour, they began live performances in New York. US reviewers received her rapturously, and Laine cemented her American career with concerts backed by her husband at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, alongside musical theatre on Broadway. She recorded an acclaimed album of Stephen Sondheim numbers, duetted with Ray Charles for a recording of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, and made collaborative albums with the guitarist John Williams and the flautist James Galway. In 1992, she supported Frank Sinatra for a five-night residency at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
In 1970, she and Dankworth founded the Stables venue in the grounds of their home in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire, which has gone on to present concerts by Dave Brubeck, Amy Winehouse and many others, and hosts music education projects.
In 1979 she was awarded an OBE and in 1997 she was made a dame. Dankworth was knighted in 2006.
The couple continued to tour together until shortly before Dankworth’s death on 6 February 2010, aged 82. Laine performed later that night, alongside their musician children Jacqui and Alec, for a scheduled concert celebrating 40 years of the Stables; she only announced her husband’s death at the end of the concert. “It wasn’t so much ‘the show must go on’ – I’m not that committed to the stage,” she said in 2010. “I instinctively knew Johnny would want it to. That if I had died he would have gone on. Johnny and me – we were joined at the hip.”
She is survived by Jacqui and Alec. Her son Stuart died in 2019, aged 72.
English (US)