Johnny Hartman

Earning distinction as the foremost smooth balladeer among Black crooners of the 1950s and 1960s, Johnny Hartman followed closely in the path of Billy Eckstine while advancing the idiom through major jazz partnerships, above all the 1963 landmark John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Chicago-born, he took up singing at a young age and continued performing during his Special Services stint in the Army. After studying music in college, Hartman launched his professional career in the mid-1940s by joining Earl Hines and cutting his earliest sides for Regent/Savoy. When the Hines band dissolved later in 1947, he moved to the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, remaining two years and laying down several additional tracks for Mercury.

Hartman issued his debut full-length album, Songs from the Heart, in 1956 on Bethlehem, backed by a quartet under trumpeter Howard McGhee. Later the same year he recorded a follow-up titled All of Me, yet remained largely absent from studios until 1963, when the duet set John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman appeared on Impulse. This elegant collection of ballad standards, highlighted by standout versions of “Lush Life” and “My One and Only Love,” triggered renewed activity that included two further Impulse releases: I Just Dropped by to Say Hello in 1963 and The Voice That Is the next year. Through the late 1960s and early 1970s he produced a series of jazz and pop standards albums for ABC, Perception, and Blue Note. Recording infrequently during the remainder of the 1970s, Hartman resurfaced with two albums in 1980, one of them—Once in Every Life—receiving a Grammy nomination two years prior to his death in 1983.