Jazz icon Annie Ross, a singer of great range and vocal flexibility, and a master of vocalese, has died aged 89, just a few days short of her 90th birthday. Ross was in hospice care in her home in New York and passed due to emphysema and heart disease. In her later years she was a New York fixture, with cabaret and club appearances, including an ongoing residency at the Metropolitan Room.
She was born Annabel Short on July 21, 1930 to Scottish vaudeville artists John and Mary Short. The family emigrated to New York when Ross was four. She was sent to Los Angeles to live with singer-actress aunt, Ella Logan, and began her her career in show business almost immediately. She sang “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond” in Our Gang Follies (1938) and portrayed Judy Garland’s younger sister in Presenting Lily Mars (1943), gaining a reputation as “the Scottish Shirley Temple.” She left school around the age of 16 and returned to Scotland, where her patents were then residing. On the plane there she changed her name to Annie Ross.
In the UK, the newly-named Ross began her singing career in earnest, working with such musicians as James Moody, Coleman Hawkins and Kenny Clarke, with whom she had her only child, a son. Ross returned to New York and worked with members of the Modern Jazz Quartet. In 1952 she and fellow vocalist King Pleasure recorded an album for the Prestige label that included “Twisted,” a vocalese version of her lyrics to saxophonist Wardell Gray’s 1949 solo composition. The tongue-twisting tune, about a patient who’s convinced she’s smarter than her psychiatrist, became a hit and one of her signature songs. She also collaborated with alto saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, trumpeter-vocalist Chet Baker and others. In 1953, she toured Europe with Lionel Hampton and his band.
Ross’ most famous partnership was with Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks, with whom she worked from 1957 to 1962. Their first album was Sing a Song of Basie, which was followed by several others, such as The Real Ambassadors in collaboration with Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck. But during this time, Ross began experimenting with drugs and developed a heroin addiction. She left Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and returned to England to beat the addiction, which she did on her own terms. While in London she opened Annie’s Place with her son, a nightclub in which performers such as Nina Simone headlined.
As an actress, Ross appeared on the stage, including the musical revue Cranks in London, alongside Vanessa Redgrave in The Threepenny Opera in 1972 and with Tim Curry in Joseph Papp’s 1980s production of The Pirates of Penzance. Her films include Yanks (1979), Superman III (1983), Throw Momma From the Train (1987), Pump Up the Volume (1990), Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993) and Blue Sky (1994). Her voice was used to replace Britt Ekland’s in the horror film The Wicker Man (1973).
Ross was a Grammy Award winner, was named a Jazz Master in 2010 by the National Endowment for the Arts and was the subject of a documentary, No One But Me, two years later. She was inducted into the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame in 2009 and received the MAC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.
Annie Ross sings “Twisted” at the 2011 MAC Awards.
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