Her Key to Success : At 57, singer-pianist Shirley Horn wins acclaim for ‘You Won’t Forget Me’--thanks to some guests and her own accompaniment

Success in music tends to arrive early--if ever.

For every artist who achieves hit records and international acclaim after the age of 30, there are dozens who find success not long after turning 20. Harry Connick Jr., the Marsalis family and Joey de Francesco come to mind.

That’s what makes Shirley Horn’s current success one of the most dramatic stories of the year in jazz.

Horn, 57, has long enjoyed the respect of her peers, having been praised by such notables as Quincy Jones and Miles Davis. But the singer-pianist did not come close to a hit before her latest Verve Records album, “You Won’t Forget Me,” which topped the national jazz charts for seven straight weeks.

The album--which features guest appearances by some of the hottest names in jazz, including Davis, Wynton and Branford Marsalis and harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans--has also been hailed by critics. Don Heckman, in his review for The Times, called her a “superb pianist” and “arguably one of the finest jazz singers in the world today.”

With the album’s success, Horn--a native of Washington who has been living and chiefly performing there since the late ‘50s--is suddenly in demand.

She recently headlined a week at the Cinegrill in Hollywood--where she’ll return for two weeks in February--and appeared on “The Tonight Show.” She has also traveled to Europe several times this year--playing at the North Sea Festival in The Hague and opening for Miles Davis in front of 10,000 fans at Vienne, France--and performed at Carnegie Hall in New York in June as part of the JVC Jazz Festival.

There’s a good deal more on her itinerary, with engagements scheduled for New York’s Lincoln Center, nightclubs in Boston and Philadelphia and a return to Paris, where she will perform at the 2,000-seat Theatre du Chatelet.

In the midst of it all, Horn is getting ready to record her next album, which will feature a string orchestra arranged by Johnny Mandel, the Oscar-winning composer of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and will again spotlight trumpeter Davis.

“Shirley Horn is absolutely mesmerizing,” said Mandel, one of the most admired arranger-composers in contemporary music. “What makes her unique is that she’s not just a woman playing the piano and singing--it’s one of those cases where the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts.”

Indeed, Horn’s singular gift is the ability to blend her elegant, classical-trained piano and her smoky, intimate voice so seamlessly that they become a virtual unit. That she is more than a mere self-accompanist has long been evident; she supplied the piano backup for Carmen McRae’s latest Novus/RCA album, “Sarah--Dedicated to You,” and a recent Joe Williams CD featured her singing and playing on two cuts.

Although she is delighted with the increased attention, one gets the feeling that she wouldn’t be heartbroken if all the sudden interest evaporated.

“I wasn’t unhappy with what I was doing before this,” the soft-voiced Horn says, lighting up her fifth cigarette during a recent interview in Los Angeles.

“I’m happy back home with my daughter, who’s brilliant--she has a fine job in marketing with the post office--and she’s given me three little grandsons. So whatever happens, my mind is at peace.”

Shirley Horn seems to have been born with a love of music. In most families parents have to prevail on recalcitrant children to keep up their piano studies. Horn ran contrary to form: Beginning at age 4, she practiced so obsessively that her mother had to prevail upon her to stop for a while and go play with other children.

From ages 12 to 18, Horn studied piano and composition at the Howard University School of Music. During this period, she also studied privately and moonlighted--playing the classics at a local club. Later, she attended Howard as a college student, majoring in music, and gradually began to work jazz tunes into her performances.

“In school I loved Debussy and Rachmaninoff,” she says. “My first jazz idols were Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal. In fact, Jamal became my Debussy and Oscar my Rachmaninoff.” She also cites Erroll Garner as an influence, along with such singers as Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, whose records Horn’s mother often played around the house.

An early marriage (when she was 21) to Shepherd Deering--a Washington Metro Line mechanic--slowed Horn’s career for a time. The couple had a daughter--Rainy, now 28--and the singer-pianist wanted to stay close to home. For many years, she just worked clubs around Washington and Baltimore.

Horn became more active in 1959, when her trio accompanied the legendary jazz violinist Stuff Smith on six of 11 tracks on the Verve album “Cat on a Hot Fiddle.” Yet when the album was issued, only the two other pianists on the session were listed. The exclusion was probably accidental but even today, 30 years later, Horn recalls the heartache of not being credited for her first appearance on records. “It was so frustrating,” she says.

Soon after that, Horn made “Embers and Ashes” on the Stereocraft label, and though the album received scant distribution--it is currently out of print--it caught the attention of Miles Davis, who insisted that the Village Vanguard hire her to open for him. Later, John Levy, then managing George Shearing and Joe Williams, was sufficiently impressed to persuade Mercury Records to sign Horn. She recorded three albums for the label, beginning in 1963.

Horn got into singing professionally by accident one night when an inebriated patron in a Washington club asked her to sing “Melancholy Baby.” She continued to slowly add vocals to her performances, though she considered herself primarily a pianist.

But the singing so impressed Mercury executives that they turned “Loads of Love,” her debut for the label, into a strictly vocal showcase and hired other pianists to accompany her.

“They put me in this little closet with a microphone, and I nearly went ape,” she recalls. “It was truly a petrifying experience. The pianists they chose were good, but I need to hear my own chords and set my own tempos--in fact, nobody knows how to play for me except me.”

Her next album, “Shirley Horn With Horns,” produced the same year for Mercury by Quincy Jones, was also recorded with other pianists, although the cover subtitle read, “Shirley Horn at the Piano.” The actual pianists were Bobby Scott (whom she says she found so distracting that she had to remove her headphones) and Jimmy Jones.

Ironically, the writer of the original liner notes for “Loads of Love” expressed gratitude that Horn was able to sing “without the inhibiting responsibility of having to accent her lyrics with her own accompaniment.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

“The piano is my root, my foundation,” Horn insists during the interview. “I’m not ashamed of those Mercury albums, but they were not what I’m about. They just aren’t me. Besides, I hadn’t had enough experience to really understand what some of the lyrics meant.”

The albums sold modestly, but Mercury didn’t re-sign Horn, and she dropped out of the record world, preferring to concentrate on club dates while she raised her daughter. She made only two more albums over the next 15 years--on which she both sang and played piano.

Horn began a low-key return to the record business in the early ‘80s, eventually making four albums as singer-pianist for Steeplechase, a Denmark label that had only spotty distribution in the United States. Early in 1987, Horn recorded “Softly,” her first U.S. album in years, but it wasn’t released by Audiophile Records until 1989; it went largely unnoticed.

The current upswing began later in 1987 when she signed with Verve Records. Her first album, “I Thought About You,” was recorded in May of that year at the Vine St. Bar & Grill in Hollywood. Ron Berinstein, owner of the club and producer of the album, remembers the sessions with fondness.

“It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had with a recording artist,” says the man who has also produced albums by Joe Williams, Marlena Shaw and Nina Simone. “She has a perfect sense of time. If we repeated a tune, even if she might have varied the tempo from slow to fast to medium, it was exactly the same every time. It was as if she had a metronome buried in her heart. And yet she would sound beautifully spontaneous.”

“I Thought About You” and the follow-up album, 1989’s “Close Enough for Love,” produced by Verve vice president Richard Seidel, did moderately well, building a foundation for the breakthrough this year with “You Won’t Forget Me.”

Though Horn’s own talent is what eventually hooked listeners, the presence of Miles Davis, the Marsalises, et al. certainly helped draw attention to the album.

Horn smiles at the mention of Davis’ participation in the album. Despite the trumpeter’s fondness for Horn’s work, he did not volunteer for the project.

“I called him and said, ‘Listen, you have to do this because I want it,’ ” Horn says. “He moaned and groaned and hemmed and hawed, then I said, ‘You must do this because you love me.’ So he did it.”

Asked to comment on her changed career, Horn is typically direct:

“How do I feel? Tired, of course, but it’s worth it. I’m just happy to be sitting at that piano. In my career, the thing that’s been important to me has not been money or prestige but that I had the respect of other musicians.”