Sassy was definitely not the Avon lady

A TRIBUTE

When one profound talent encounters another, the synergy may produce as exciting apiece of art as each of the artists creates separately. One such instance is this tribute to African-American Classical vocalist Sarah Vaughn (1924-1990) penned by Amiri Baraka (Everett Leroy "Le Roi"Jones, 1934 - ). Baraka-the internationally lauded poet, playwright, essayist. teacher, critic, musician, producer and incandescent performer who arose out of 20th-century United States ofAmerica-embodies and champions the Left-leaning ethos of the common masses in general, and of African Americans in particular. He is well known for his encyclopedic understanding of the composers and performers who illuminate the world with African-American Classical music, a.ka. jazz."

Both Sarah Vaughn and Amiri Baraka were sculpted by Newark, New jersey. Baraka's description of the locale and the evolution of his appreciation for Vaughn becomes a personal memoir portraying her as inspiration, muse, or a perhaps unwitting mentor or role model--and, most intimately, as a touchstone in childhood's landscape, as church neighbor and family friend.

Sassy was definitely not The Avon Lady..

But she was the divinity from Avon Av between Belmont and the Circle, Right around the corner from the old Silver Saddle, where we first dug Bird. Her '50s landmark crib, for little Bop anointed hipsters, going back home, up the, to the, Hill, digging, not pausing. Hey, that's where Sarah Vaughn lives... a crazy million times on the way to the Four Corners where we lived. Near Babs and Little Jimmy and Brody and Grachan, the Holy Temple of Belmont Av where we got saved every Sunday night by Nat Phipps, Jackie Bland, Bull Moose Jackson, Lynn Hope, Illinois, Ammons, Bostic.

The Hill, old 3rd ward, wherein, also, Booby Heard's Howard Street is the raw tip, the under-over wailing rhythms where rid-oh-Blues leaped out the souls there, turning the streets and the peoples faces Afro-Hillian blue. bere, like tasted memory, reached back the place, as a face of faces, beyond our conscious knowing, until we stumbled into ourselves.

Yes, she was Divine, the true origins of that word. To see the future. Which is what Sassy was singing. For the diggers Sassy's voice was an instrument expressing the exact sensuousness of our hearts. How fantastic that was, how she swooped and bent the beauty of it, ascending like our hopeful vision, the emotional touching of our would-be rationalized reflections-what we had picked up trying to dig the world.

Ella [Fitzgerald] was the umbrella of vision, the common dimension of our AT, the house, the windows, our parents. Dinah Washington, the ubiquitous encirclement of sound in which we stanced across those streets. Ruth Brown too, "Teardrops from My Eyes," had held us in those teenybopper Belmont Av and Spruce St Masonic years.

Then we heard Sassy, maybe one night, on (Sid growl) "The awlll night all frantic one...," Symphony Sid, our main man, pulling apart night shadows to show the burning blue and fire inside: "From the Jazz corner of The World. The Divine One, Ms Sarah Vaughn."

... oh, and altogether at once right then, the radio glowed, rose and became sacred.. made your ears incredible treasure, made you stand up inside yourself reaching beyond where you could see, all the way out to where you could dig another world. Unfolding with the glide and turn and whipping moon-flecked speed of the ancient Black Bird. Or get down with the Charlie Bird, Lullaby of that world, of the human-headed soul, of Bird Land. And even if somebody blew, well, "You're Not The Kind Of Boy for a Gir-ir-ir-irl like me...." [Sarah was] sudden, surprising, possessing your wanting with her desire, like it was "Just One Of Those Things," you dig.

Or at sun speed, she re-blued the tale of "Perdido" or in deep indigo, "Lonely Woman," or the acidly anthemic "Sassy's Blues," and let you know with sound and word, and utter gorgeousness what hip is, to hold in our knowing for ever. You want to know where she would take us? She spun a thread of living "wheres" like "How High The Moon."

If you told me some "where" any body could go, past her sailing soulfulness, I would say you was probably still saying "Hep" and wearing pegs. Sarah's voice was dazzling broad, instantly re-imaging re-hearing re-sounding. The voice alone was unbelievable the way it lit excitement through you. Clear strong blues-shaped church-muscled and intense, with the wide open conquest of where it touched.

Sassy was the Scatters' scatter, the bebop horn mouth of our song. Ella before her, the paradigmatic mistress of high scat, Sassy picked whole, on her way to her self's wonderfulness.

But Sassy was hippest, the most daring, and innovative, the clearest voice of the new music. She was not accompanied, she was organically part of The One, the fluid Outness of the whole. She was the beautiful song trumpet banner of the emerging Gone. The voice that told the whole story of what the new music was being, its ultragonic tempos, rhythm-born "jooking" melodic lines, harmonic innovation, the re-incarnated "newness," freshness of its sound.

Underneath all that glorious wailing was the church, and this is not much understood. Mt. Zion Choir, like many of the hincty middle-class Black churches was pushing the Fisk Jubilee Singers "concertization" of the Sorrow Songs, moving them from the field to the house, but slavery limited class distancing, so that the essence of the songs' beauty remained intact. In fact, Sassy's mother and my grandmother helped form the William P. Sims Gospel Singers, just to make sure the upwardly mobile Negroes, at Mt. Zion and Bethany Baptist (which also sang Handel on Easters), still stayed in touch with the traditional gospel funk of the Black working class church.

So Sassy carried the swooping keening ascending and descending vocalism identified with opera (unless we know the traditional West African vocal style), drawn from her peepas' transatlantic appreciation of that style, before she hit Juilliard. It is the combining of these "techniques" Sassy opened our ears and heads with. That even when she was all the way hot funky wailing, grooving "straight ahead" in a beat, she would be gone, up up and away, circling, diving, turning, gliding, like the glowing Black Bird she was, aloft, but still "getting down." She was the Charlie Parker of the Voice, and remained so even when she went all the way out, past Serious, as is all our destination, back to the Sun.

What could you be

When you heard Divine all around you

Floating I Am misty elegance across the streets of The Hill

Where could you be but where your self Divined you would have to be

To be digging what had helped shape you before you even knew there

Was a you to do that

Plus, we thought, absolutely, that Sassy was one of the most beautiful women we'd ever seen. like that, the entire umbrella of sky, magnetized to her breathing, transformed then into sonic images of light. Ahhh, and then we thought, anyway, all that world-altering revelation, the flood and flash of what the Imperial Ghost wordpackaged as "Be Bop." All of what that did to us, in our open youngness, was transforming, and convinced us we had been sanctified with knowing. A knowing from incredible feeling, made us think we could know whatever there was of value in the world.

So We were Sassy's "Funny Valentine"s, in a world of "Polka Dots & Moonbeams," all us, including "Cherokee," "Old Folks," any groove being who could "Shulie Bop." Or understood "Don't Blame Me" or "September Song," even in July, or could feel with "Poor Butterfly" in our "Misty" disposition, that "It Shouldn't Happen To A Dream," why we say, Sassy, Sassy, Oh, Divine One, "Lover, Come Back To"...We....

And as she booked, there was... a climbing rush of whispered Blueness, introed the silence her leaving left Spirit splitting across the sky, trailing lyrics, sad ironic, made us cry.... Send In The Clowns," that wonderful haunting, deep with tears, "Send In The Clowns....

And then, lastly; from the stunning Outness, of Sassy's flying "where," That last sound, to those on the ground, "Don't bother...they're here...."

Amiri Baraka

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved