Biography
West Coast jazz vocalist Pinky Winters ranks among the most distinctive singers of the postwar period. Though widely admired for her subtle and expressive approach, she stayed largely unknown to audiences because of an extended absence from the scene that featured a recording break lasting close to thirty years. Born Phyllis Wozniak in Michigan City, Indiana, on February 1, 1930, she started piano lessons at four and gave her first public recital the following year, then continued appearing at clubs throughout northwest Indiana during her teenage years. After finishing high school she took a short-lived office position before moving to Denver, where she performed with pianist Dick Grove. When Grove and her future husband, bassist Jim Wolf, headed to Los Angeles in 1953, she soon joined them and began working at the Starlight club on Western Avenue alongside pianist Bud Lavin and drummer Stan Levey. In 1954 she recorded her self-titled debut for the Vantage label. Following the 1958 Argo release Lonely One she separated from Wolf, later wed NBC staff saxophonist Bob Hardaway, and withdrew from performing to focus on raising her children. Saxophonist Lanny Morgan persuaded her to return to the stage in 1980 with a guest appearance at the Los Angeles venue Donte’s. After divorcing Hardaway that same year she resumed regular work, and in 1982 formed both a personal and musical alliance with pianist Lou Levy, the highly regarded accompanist previously associated with Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Ella Fitzgerald. Her first new recordings in twenty-eight years, the 1985 album Let’s Be Buddies, appeared next. This Happy Madness came out on Verve’s French imprint in 1994. After Levy died in 2001 she collaborated with pianist and arranger Sir Richard Rodney Bennett on the album Rain Sometimes.
Albums
