Shirley Horn
Shirley Horn chose every song on this record herself ... She was fifty-eight ... The record is from 1992, on Verve, and it is the one people mean when they say her name ...
She was a pianist first, from Washington, who sang from the piano bench and never left it ... In 1961 Miles Davis heard her first record and would not play the Village Vanguard unless she opened for him, which is the kind of story that gets told about a person for the rest of her life, and it was true ... Then she went home to Washington and raised a daughter and played the rooms there for twenty years while the rest of the world forgot, and then the rest of the world remembered ...
Here's To Life was a new song then, by Artie Butler and Phyllis Molinary, and this was its first recording ... Johnny Mandel wrote the arrangement and won a Grammy for it ... strings, a full studio orchestra, laid around the trio she had kept for years, Charles Ables on bass and Steve Williams on drums ... What Mandel understood was to leave her room ... Horn sang slower than anyone alive, so slow that a phrase could stop and wait and start again, and the orchestra had to learn to wait with her ...
A toast is a short speech ... this one is five minutes long and takes its time getting to the glass ...