Lena Horne is in the studio, putting together the songs for a new album. Graying hair tucked beneath a black cap, a silk scarf around her neck, a large pair of horn-rimmed glasses propped on her nose, she works through the material with producer/guitarist Rodney Jones. After some concentrated work on this and that, trying to find the most compatible musical settings, it's time for a break. Horne leaves the studio for a few minutes. But Jones and keyboardist Mike Renzi decide to go over another tune--a new arrangement with a tricky modulation.
"Wouldn't it be great if she could do this?" Jones says as he runs through the complicated chord sequence.
A few minutes later, Horne walks back into the room, listens for a moment and asks, "Hey, what's that you're playing?"
"Well, something really tricky," says Jones.
"OK," counters Horne, "let's try it."
And, without a whisper of a problem, she sings it perfectly the first time through.
Her voice is smooth, almost caressing, with its warm timbre and seductive drawl--honey and bourbon with a teasing trace of lemon. And her musical skills are so solid that she is capable--now at 80--of quickly moving past the technique and into the music.
"She always looks for the gold, for the creative experience," says Jones. "It's fascinating to listen to her, to work with her and see how her body language, every part of her, becomes what she sings. She's playing for keeps, and she's singing from her heart."
Horne has been "singing from her heart" for six decades, since she made her first recordings in the early '40s.(More than two dozen Horne albums are currently available on CD.) Since then, she also has starred in films, television, stage and cabaret in a career that has been marked by jagged peaks of success, achievement and loss.
The first African American actor to be featured on the cover of a major magazine (Motion Picture), she appeared in her early films only in rigidly proscribed roles reflecting the segregated U.S. society of the '40s. Praised for her beauty, she was viciously condemned when she married a white man.
Always atypical, never easily definable or predictable, either as an artist or as a personality, Horne nonetheless belongs in the pantheon of great female musical artists that includes Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae.
"Oh, please," comments Horne, who has a far more modest view of her skills. "I'm really not Miss Pretentious. I'm just a survivor. Just being myself."
An apropos description, since "Being Myself" is also the title of Horne's latest album on Blue Note Records, her first studio date in four years, scheduled for release on Tuesday. And with a contract already signed for a follow-up album, it's clear that, although she will be 81 on June 30, she's not ready to sing any swan songs.
To the contrary, in fact. Her 1995 live album "An Evening With Lena Horne" (Blue Note) received a Grammy for best jazz vocal performance; last year she celebrated her 80th birthday with a performance at Avery Fisher Hall in New York; and she's been heard lately singing in Gap television ads.
And through it all, there is the smoothly purring, subtly intense, instantly recognizable sound that has made her one of the legendary divas of American popular music.
"I've worked with a lot of the great ladies of song," says Jones, "and I find that Lena, more than any of them, really gets into the lyric, and into the emotion of the song. She finds the points that resonate with her own experience. When she sings about heartache, she's singing it from something she's experienced. When she sings about joy, it's the same thing, and you feel the soaring quality in her music."
Horne, typically, prefers to give the credit to her players.
"Oh, well," she says, "everything I know musically has come from musicians, starting with Lennie [a reference to her late husband, famed arranger Lennie Hayton] and going on older and longer. And the musicians continue to teach me so much."
And she's learned it well, with--despite her modesty--a great deal of hard work.
"When she did her Carnegie Hall concert a few years ago, she rehearsed for about a full month, every single day," recalls Bruce Lundvall, Blue Note's president. "I wished that every artist on this label could have been in the audience. Because Lena did everything right. She sang great, she looked great, she moved great, what she said to the audience was terrific. It was a consummate example of a well-prepared performer in action."
The new album reflects the same type of meticulous concern for detail (see review, Page 90).
The recording offers a selection of material that ranges across the past and present of popular music. There are standards such as "Autumn in New York" and "Willow Weep for Me," as well as newer items such as "Some of My Best Friends Are the Blues."
