Biography
Born Mary Elizabeth Roché, the vocalist joined Duke Ellington’s orchestra for engagements spanning the 1940s and 1950s, distinguishing herself through an uncommonly forceful and theatrical approach to blues repertoire that many big-band singers lacked. Ellington, who occasionally engaged vocalists whose phrasing leaned toward stiff, almost operatic delivery, once characterized her with characteristic elegance: “She had a soul inflection in a bop state of intrigue and every word was understandable despite the sophisticated hip and jive connotations.” She launched her professional path by winning an amateur night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, then sang with the Savoy Sultans in 1941 before entering Ellington’s ranks two years later. The timing proved demanding; she stepped in for the bandleader’s longtime favorite, Ivie Anderson, only days before his debut Carnegie Hall concert. In the blues portion of Ellington’s suite “Black, Brown and Beige,” her performance conveyed the composer’s vision of early-twentieth-century urban Black American experience and earned strong praise from both listeners and reviewers. That sequence stands among Ellington’s most ambitious vocal features, a complex orchestral design that integrated raw blues feeling into an advanced musical architecture. Not every singer who passed through the band could have realized the passage with comparable conviction. The concert documentation remained unreleased until the 1970s. Ellington could not commit the full suite to a studio recording until 1944, by which point Joya Sherrill had already taken Roché’s place. A parallel misfortune occurred when she performed the Ellington standard “Take the ‘A’ Train” for the 1943 film Reveille with Beverly, the entire ensemble squeezed into a back-lot railway-car set; a studio version appeared only years later on the bebop-inflected album Ellington Uptown. Wartime conditions and the ensuing recording ban prevented Ellington from preserving much of his 1943 output. Outside the Ellington circle, Roché also worked and recorded with pianist Earl Hines, trumpeter Clark Terry, and the soulful singer-pianist Charles Brown, who himself died just one week after she did. Under her own name she cut three sides for the Bethlehem and Prestige labels at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. In the mid-1950s she participated in the studio cast recording of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess alongside Mel Tormé. Her impact on the jazz community exceeded what limited documentation might suggest: she is widely acknowledged as a formative influence on bebop vocalists and on audiences’ readiness to embrace that adventurous style. For nearly three years she performed nightly with the house band at Minton’s, sharing the bandstand with pianist Thelonious Monk and drummer Kenny Clarke.
Albums
