# Carol Sloane, a jazz singer of impeccable taste, is dead at 85: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/01/27/carol-sloane-a-jazz-singer-of-impeccable-taste-is-dead-at-85-video-photos/
- Published: 2023-01-27T00:02:10+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Carol Sloane, a jazz singer whose smoky tone, unerring taste and judicious instinct
secured her stature as a choice songbook interpreter even in the long stretches 
when broader recognition eluded her, died on Monday at a senior care center in Stoneham,
MA. She was 85.**

The cause was complications from a stroke, her niece, Carol Bates, tells WRTI. Sloane
had a career equally touched by good fortune and bad timing. She emerged at the 
tail end of the big band era, and had started to build brisk momentum — releasing
two albums on Columbia, making frequent appearances on Johnny Carson’s _Tonight 
Show —_ when rock ‘n’ roll upended the market for popular music. “Had Carol been
born five years earlier,” critic Marc Myers has asserted, “she surely would be as
well known today as Carmen McRae, Chris Connor and other headline singers who emerged
during the rock-free early 1950s.”

She sang in an alto whose texture and register drew comparisons to Sarah Vaughan.
But Sloane was a less digressive stylist, preferring to trace the line of a song’s
melody more or less to the letter — an approach that made her subtle variations 
of phrase and inflection seem all the more striking. Her core influences were Ella
Fitzgerald, an early lodestar; and McRae, who served as a mentor, and later the 
focus of a 1995 album for Concord, _The Songs Carmen Sang_.

“She had no pretensions,” says WRTI’s Bob Craig, who welcomed Sloane on his program
[Voices in Jazz](https://www.wrti.org/show/voices-in-jazz) twice, in 2010 and 2015.“
She always incorporated these very subtle motivic elements. She had this mellow 
flow with a melody, and her choice of songs was always extremely tasteful.” (Craig
will devote an hour of this Sunday’s show to Sloane, drawing from their conversations
and playing her music.)

Born Carol Morvan on March 5, 1937 in Providence, RI, Sloane grew up in nearby Smithfield.
She was the younger of two daughters; her parents, Frank and Claudia Morvan, worked
at a textile mill during the war, and encouraged their children’s musical interests.
Young Carol grew up loving jazz on records and on the radio, but she began singing
in a church choir. At 14, she landed her first professional engagement with Ed Drew,
whose society band played dances two nights a week at the Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet
ballroom in Cranston, RI.

At 18, she married a local disc jockey, Charlie Jefferds, who was soon drafted into
the Army. She followed him to Colorado for basic training, and then to Germany, 
where he was stationed for a year. When they returned stateside, they divorced, 
and she began to pursue a career as a singer, starting out in small clubs in New
England — which is how she caught the ear of a representative for the Les and Larry
Elgart Orchestra.

Larry Elgart, an alto saxophonist, split off from his brother shortly afterward;
his album _Easy Goin’ Swing_, released on RCA in 1960, features one of the only 
credits for Carol Morvan, before he insisted that she adopt a stage name. In [a 2009 interview](https://www.jazzwax.com/2009/03/interview-carol-sloane-part-1.html)
with Myers, she said she couldn’t recall who came up with “Sloane,” but that she
was the one who insisted on the silent “e” at the end; the day after coming up with
the idea, she legally changed her name.

Sloane left the Larry Elgart Orchestra after two years of touring, and began working
as a solo act. In 1960, Jon Hendricks saw her perform at a jazz festival in Pittsburgh;
duly impressed, he asked her to fill in for Annie Ross in his crackerjack vocal 
trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, on a gig at Pep’s Lounge in Philadelphia. Sloane
continued to sub for Ross periodically over the next couple of years, and the added
visibility led to other opportunities, like a slot opening for pianist Oscar Peterson
at The Village Vanguard.

This was the backdrop for Sloane’s appearance on the 1961 Newport Jazz Festival (
the only edition of the fest produced by Sid Bernstein, rather than George Wein).“
She had been presented on a Saturday afternoon in a grab-bag program of ‘new talent’
that attracted a skimpy audience of 300,” wrote John S. Wilson in _The New York 
Times _later that year. “But her performance aroused so much excitement, particularly
backstage among the musicians and the jazz reporters, that a place was found for
her on the final evening program when she repeated her success before an audience
of thousands.”

It was an unmistakable triumph that helped propel Sloane through the transitional
years of the mid-’60s, when she socialized with both The Beatles and The Rolling
Stones during their first incursions on American shores. Work began to dry up; to
make ends meet, she took temp and secretarial jobs, and even became a freelance 
contributor to _DownBeat, _writing about other singers’ records. By the end of the
decade, she’d left New York, moving to Raleigh, N.C.

![](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/68c5573/2147483647/strip/true/crop/
480x597+0+0/resize/880x1095!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnpr.brightspotcdn.com%
2F0f%2Faa%2F87a5ac4143b3a194cca67a22563d%2Fcarol-sloane.jpeg)

There she found another scene, singing at The Frog and Nightgown and hosting a jazz
show on North Carolina Public Radio. She relocated to Boston in the mid-1980s, subbing
on the air at WGBH and meeting her next husband, Buck Spurr. Two of his children—
her stepdaughter, Sandra de Novellis, and stepson, David Burr — survive her along
with Carol Bates and a nephew, James Souza. Sloane’s sister, Lois Souza, predeceased
her in 2020.

Sloane, who once felt compelled to name an album _I Never Went Away, _enjoyed a 
career resurgence during her later years; in 2002, she appeared on Marian McPartland’s
Piano Jazz. But she hadn’t released an album in almost a decade when she decided
to record one at Birdland in 2019, with a band featuring saxophonist Scott Hamilton,
pianist Mike Renzi and bassist Jay Leonhart. Her trepidation about the engagement
can be seen in a new trailer for _Sloane: A Jazz Singer, _a film by Michael Lippert,
currently in production.

By all accounts, Sloane’s stand at Birdland was a smashing success. The veteran 
saxophonist and jazz historian Loren Schoenberg, writing about it on social media
at the time, enthused that “a spell was cast from the moment she walked to the stage
to the moment that she left it, after two standing ovations.”

“The great majority of the time,” Schoenberg went on, “Sloane stayed deliciously
close to the melody, but with the kind of personal alterations that stamped each
interpretation as hers alone, the same art that Bobby Hackett, and Ben Webster practiced
with their melodic paraphrases.”

Sloane was scheduled to return to Birdland in March 2020, but those plans were derailed
by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Later that year, she had her stroke, which
left her in a rehabilitation center.

_Live at Birdland _was released last year, and well received despite a touch of 
bittersweetness. Sloane was no longer performing, and Renzi had died in 2021, at
80. But to hear the album even now is to reckon with the sound of a singer in majestic
form, and reveling in it. “I’m certainly in my prime,” Sloane sings in the opening
track, a standard called “Having Myself a Time.” Its opening stanza reads as follows:

_I’m having myself a time_

_I mean I’m having what I want_

_Wanting what I have_

_Doing what I like_

_And liking what I do_

_And I’m having myself a time…_

![Carol Sloane in an appearance on ABC's 'The New Steve Allen Show,' on Nov. 8, 
1961.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/e646ec9/2147483647/strip/true/
crop/1024x1024+0+0/resize/880x880!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnpr.brightspotcdn.
com%2Fb9%2F5a%2F66e16c9a40fa9f78526411e4d7bf%2Fgettyimages-472896454.jpg)

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