The Triumph Of Class Over Style
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The music of Annie Ross is a vivid example of the difference between style and class. All too often, style is imposed upon a song by singers desperate to call attention to themselves. Class, on the other hand, always emerges organically from within, when a singer knows the best thing she can do is let a melody sing itself and let the story tell itself.
Ms. Ross, who celebrated her 75th birthday last month and this week opened at Danny’s Skylight Room, proves not only that class supersedes style, but that it can straddle many categories. With her sultry, dark voice, sassy attitude, and unforced sense of swing, she has conquered not only jazz and cabaret singing, but musical comedy, non-singing theater, and film roles.
Fifty years ago, Jean Bach introduced Ms. Ross to Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks, and they formed what Mr. Hendricks refers to in shows as “the greatest vocal group of all time.” (He has never been contradicted.) Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross’s main focus was adapting jazz instrumentals – most famously those of Count Basie and Horace Silver – into vocals.
Each of the threesome contributed something special. Mr. Hendricks wrote the lyrics, Lambert the expert arrangements. But it was Ms. Ross who added the indispensable combination of sex and class. Ms. Ross left Lambert and Mr. Hendricks in 1962, but the trio’s influence endures. Virtually every jazz singer of the last 40 years grew up on LHR, whose standards for vocalese (adapting instrumental solos into song form) and the interaction of three voices has never been surpassed.
For the past few years, Ms. Ross has been occupied writing her autobiography, which seems to have reminded her of a lot of wonderful songs from the 1930s and 1940s. Earlier this month, she taped a new album with a band of mostly old friends, including Jimmy Wormworth, the drummer from LHR, and Dave Usher, who had produced her first session 53 years ago. That album, remarkably, is already released, as “Let Me Sing” (CAP 095), and she is singing at Danny’s with the same band: Warren Vache (cornet), Tardo Hammer (piano), Neal Miner (bass), and Mr. Wormworth.
Ms. Ross once had the pipes to approximate all manner of super-high trumpet and piano solos, but she hasn’t for quite a long time. Yet the loss of those chops forced her to develop her other resources that much more acutely. Her way of dealing with the aging process and vocal deterioration follows the path set by Maxine Sullivan and Rosemary Clooney: She emphasizes both rhythm and emotion.
Unlike many singers her age, Ms. Ross doesn’t pad her show by opening with a band instrumental – on Wednesday night, she exploded onto the stage in jungle-red satin, swinging from the very first downbeat. She opened with “Fun To Be Fooled” in a bright two-beat, and pounced on the first beat of each line. Her other big rhythm number was the Jimmie Lunceford specialty “‘Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It),” which seemed entirely fitting.
Still it was ballads that held the show together. The most surprising was a medley of two songs by the American operetta master Victor Herbert: the gentle turn-of-the-century waltz “Kiss Me Again” and his posthumous pop standard “Indian Summer.” On another medley, she sang “Nobody’s Heart” unaccompanied for a whole chorus, before leading into “By Myself.”
Here and on elaborate story-songs like “Lush Life,” Ms. Ross has developed her own form of communication, part speech and part song, entirely dependent on swing and rhythmic placement. The highlight of the show was “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” during which she gazed out into the house as if the streets of wartime London were reflected in her eyes. Before she reached the end of the first chorus, they were in all of ours as well. It’s all part of the triumph of class over style.
August 31 and September 7, 14, 21 & 28 at 9:15 p.m.; September 3 & 10 and October 8 at 7 p.m. (346 W. 46th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 212-265-8130).