Patty Waters

Patty Waters received scant notice throughout her abbreviated spell of recording activity in the mid-1960s, yet she has since earned recognition as an inventive vocalist whose contributions reach beyond jazz into modern music at large. Most of her material centered on subdued ballads performed alone at the piano, allowing her delivery to recede into a murmur that listeners could scarcely detect. The recordings that generated real interest, by contrast, were her experimental excursions, where she distorted and extended her instrument through twisted shrieks and cries that bordered on terrifying. Such an unsettling quality is certainly not to every taste, though Waters deserves acknowledgment for probing the outer reaches of vocal possibility in ways comparable to Joan LaBarbara and Yoko Ono.

Her earliest points of reference remained relatively traditional: Billie Holiday, Nancy Wilson, and Anita O'Day. After arriving in New York in the early 1960s, she was performing in a club when Albert Ayler heard her and urged the forward-thinking jazz imprint ESP to record her. The opening half of her 1965 debut, Sings, consisted entirely of brief, self-written piano solos that left listeners unprepared for the album’s second half, which contained nothing but her thirteen-minute treatment of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” That performance built to harrowing screams and spontaneous vocal invention, accompanied by a compact free-jazz group, and it remains the track with which she is most identified. Waters issued only one further album, the live College Tour, several months later. A more committed avant-garde statement than her first record, it presented entirely different material, nearly all of it original, often dispensing with words in favor of wordless moan-scats and wails while employing a larger ensemble that included pianists Ran Blake and Burton Greene. Apart from a 1968 appearance with the Marzette Watts Ensemble on a single LP, no additional recordings surfaced until 1996. The scarcity of her two ESP titles over the intervening decades only deepened her aura, and those discs have lately been reissued on CD in Germany.