Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan

If you are interested in a biography of Sarah Vaughan: read it. You don't need the specific critiques of reviews to guide your decision. I happen to believe that Queen of Bebop is about as good of a biography of Sassy as we are likely to ever get.

Vaughan was a relatively guarded woman who seldom spoke of her personal life, and Hayes does admirable work piecing together her life story from available sources. Hayes is a musician and brings a high level of technical awareness and analysis to her descriptions of Vaughan's output. I, as a musician, appreciated this effort.

While a great deal is known about Vaughan's career (naturally), from Hayes' writing it seems that much less is known of her personal affairs apart from her oftentimes tumultuous relationships with men. I admire that the book respects Vaughan enough as an artist to focus primarily on her art. Greater insight into personal matters would have been appreciated, but my sense is that this deficit is due to a paucity of sources rather than any lack of effort on Hayes' part.

I also respect the fact that Hayes does not shy away from discussing Vaughan's life and work in historical, social, and cultural context, which naturally includes the implications of race and gender. After finishing the book, I read James Gavin's review in The New York Times, in which he asserts that Hayes may have been a bit overzealous in assigning political motivation to individual actors, including Vaughan. I'm inclined to agree with him.

One of the best takeaways from the book is the understanding of how Vaughan and other jazz artists had to balance their most artistically valuable work with more commercial output, especially earlier in their careers. Importantly, she does so without judgement and lambasts the jazz critics of the day for their condemnation. Jazz artists are/were real people, with all the complexity that that entails! Vaughan and others were under great pressure by record executives to record subpar material, and they had to financially support themselves somehow. (Billy Eckstine's polemic against jazz critics who would seemingly rather he die of an overdose than live long enough to record pop music was incisive.)

Hayes doesn't create an explicit list of recommended listening, but if you are a jazz fan, she has done the work of separating the wheat from the chaff. As of finishing Queen of Bebop, I have several more Sarah Vaughan records to listen to, and I also know which ones to skip entirely.

I highly recommend Hayes' biography to any jazz musician. The tradition is in the music itself, of course, but it is also in the stories of our heroes, and The Divine One is far from the least of these.