Love the Music, Not the Biz : Gifted singer-pianist Shirley Horn is back--many say better than ever--but still playing to her own beat

Few artists have been as stubborn as singer-pianist Shirley Horn in waiting for their moment. She once sat out of earshot for over a decade. But at 58, when most jazz musicians are beginning to feel used up, she’s retained a musical presence of mind that makes every number she performs sound as though it’s being expressed for the first time, with the intimacy of a breath passing along your cheek.

Her latest album on Verve, “Here’s to Life,” stayed on top of Billboard’s jazz chart for 15 weeks over the summer, and that’s not just because Johnny Mandel did the arrangements--he had to resist any tendency toward orchestral lushness, except when there was an opening for it--but because each of Horn’s numbers is so nuanced and self-contained that any extraneous touch would spoil it.

“You have to be very careful with someone like her,” Mandel says. “She works a small emotional gamut. But she’s the best living interpreter of songs I know. She’s in a class with Mabel Mercer. She’s got the best taste and a delicious voice, full of wonder.”

“Jazz is feeling,” Horn says. “It’s fire and ice. It’s you. I want the people in the audience to feel and see the picture I’m trying to paint. I want to be in touch with you and get inside of you.”

Horn is one of those figures who quiets a room the moment she sits down. Her voice, a dusky contralto, is an instrument of dynamism, tact and, in the mid-to-low range, where she’s most comfortable, perfect control--she can hold a note as round as a pearl and then trail it into a softly rippling diminuendo, moonlight in a pond. She’s a classically trained pianist who uses the piano as an extension of her voice.

In “How Am I to Know?,” for one of endless examples, she sings “Why didn’t I see/Your eyes turn to me?” as a straight question, but it’s a single note on the piano that expresses what she feels: an icicle of regret.

“Her interpretation of ballads and slow numbers is amazing,” says pianist Marian McPartland, who has hosted Horn a couple of times on her nationally syndicated radio program, “Piano Jazz.”

“I don’t know how she manages to sing that slowly and hold everything together. She’s a fine musician with a great quality of emotion in her voice. She can swing, but slow songs are her specialty. She makes everything count, and has an uncanny use of musical space--she’s not a busy player who has to fill every musical hole. She plays a single chord, and it becomes the basis for a spare, meditative quality. There’s a sensuous, sexy quality to her music too.”

There are so many elements at play in a Horn number that it’s no surprise to learn that they emanate from a complex, even enigmatic personality, hidden under layers of doggedness and habit, and an outwardly simple life--if any life is truly simple.

She didn’t leave her parents’ home in Washington until she was married at 21 to Shepherd Deering, a bus mechanic for the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. She hates to travel as much as she dislikes giving interviews. She has a long memory for both slights and pleasures (which is another reason her music is so alive; it calls to mind Wordsworth’s definition of poetry: “emotion recollected in tranquillity”).

“I think I understand her artistically, but not personally,” says Joel Seigel, a Georgetown University literature and film professor who managed Horn for 10 years (they parted company last May). He also wrote the lyrics for “Estate” on “Here’s to Life.”

“She’s extremely complicated and secretive. I was either with her or on the phone with her for the whole time we were together, and 10 years later she’d still surprise me. Her reticence is a little like Miles’ (Davis) was, an anti-show-biz attitude. She doesn’t put on a show, which gives her a certain mystique. It’s wonderful to see the response she gets without pushing it. And when she’s on, you feel like you’ve left the planet.”

Horn recently played a date at the Cinegrill, punctuating her Hollywood arrival with a wry version of the “Playboy After Dark” theme as her opening. She wore white gloves (she has a circulatory disorder) and said, shielding her eyes, “If you just turn some of these lights out, we can get down to business.”

Lights dimmed, and she eased into a bluesy, mid-tempo version of “Too Late Now,” eyes narrowed skeptically, her mouth in a half-smile of remembered treasure. She followed with a tender version of “A Time for Love,” then “How Am I to Know?” and, to end the set, a deliciously low reading of “Mellow Me Baby, Way Down Inside.”

Every number was a fresh musical excursion, full of shifting time schemes and melodic discoveries--her left hand recalls Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans, but her personalized diction uses upper-register notes that don’t belong to their supporting chords, yet wind up making sense anyway.

“I once saw her perform in a New York club when drummer Grady Tate was there,” Seigel said. “I watched him tap the table trying to find the beat. He couldn’t follow her. It’s very demanding on her sidemen.” (Bassist Charles Ables and percussionist Steve Williams have been with her for 21 and 11 years, respectively.)

After the set, the room now empty and the bartender churning out the night’s receipts on the cash register, Horn eased herself into the dreaded interview over a ritual snifter of Drambuie with a Heineken chaser and a pack of Pall Malls.

“We’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately: Savannah, Jacksonville, Minneapolis,” she said wearily, exhaling through a gathering shroud of smoke. “I had to cancel New York. In ‘90, we did Japan, Paris, Seattle, Canada, the North Sea. It’s all taken a toll. I’m no spring chicken anymore. Fifteen years ago Milt Jackson said, ‘The road will kill you.’ ”

Soon the Drambuie began to soften her querulousness, and she talked about her early life and career:

“I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. I have two younger brothers. My mother was a housewife and my dad worked for the government and drove a cab part-time to pay for my studies. He died four years ago. She’s still alive. I heard all the best singers as a kid. Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington. My grandmother was a sweet little short lady who never studied music but played piano and pipe organ in her parlor. I called her Mama. I liked to play in that parlor. I was cold in there. It could be 80 degrees outside, but I’d have to wear a coat.

“I had my first lesson when I was 4. I couldn’t wait. All I can remember is just wanting to play the piano. I didn’t do the normal things teen-agers do. All I wanted was music. I wanted it with a passion.”

Horn took private lessons and at the age of 12 began studying music at Howard University’s School for Gifted Children (she later had to forgo a Juilliard scholarship because she couldn’t afford the expense of living in New York). She was a devotee of Rachmaninoff and Debussy, but she also had an ear for Erroll Garner, Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson, and later in her teens began playing some of the local clubs.

How Horn and Deering have managed to stay together over 37 years while inhabiting what would appear to be radically different worlds is both a mystery and a tribute. “She assigns scripts to everyone who enters her life,” says an observer who knows them both. “It was never a problem,” Deering says. “It was understood that she would do music, but she never made a big deal out of it. That’s her life. I stay out of it.”

“He’s a good man, good for me,” Horn said. “He spoils me. In the beginning he thought I was going to be a housewife and forget about music. Like a lot of people, he didn’t realize what music meant to me. It’s a sickness. Music is my life. He wanted a baby and I gave him one, but I knew one day my time would come. Shep’s cool. He’s always been there for me.” Their 29-year-old daughter, Rainy, now has a supervisorial job with the Post Office; Horn is the grandmother of three.

She continued performing in the Baltimore-D.C. area and in 1959 made her first recording on Verve when her trio accompanied violinist Stuff Smith on six tracks of the album “Cat on a Hot Fiddle.” Her exclusion from the list of accompanists on the record jacket--probably accidental--still rankles. Soon after, she recorded “Embers and Ashes” on the Stereocraft label. The album didn’t do well, but caught the ear of Miles Davis, who became such an instant devotee that he refused to work the Village Vanguard until the owner hired her. They remained close friends until his death last September (they recorded together on her 1991 album “You Won’t Forget Me,” along with Branford and Wynton Marsalis, and Toots Thielmans).

“Lemme tell you something about Miles,” Horn said. “After he met me and my mother-in-law and we got to know each other, he became very protective about me. Around him, I couldn’t smoke, couldn’t sit at the bar, couldn’t sit in the back room where they all talked dirty, and I had to be careful about what I ate. He knew I was a hayseed. He looked after me like a child. I loved him so much.” She paused to hold in her tears.

Horn discovered her singing voice in a club performance one night after a tipsy customer bribed her with a teddy bear to sing “Melancholy Baby,” and it was as a vocalist, shortly after, that she made “Loads of Love,” the first of three albums for the Mercury label (she did not accompany herself). She also sang on two movie tracks, “A Dandy in Aspic” and “For Love of Ivy.” The albums were not great successes and she elected to stay close to home, recording only twice over the next 13 years.

“A lot of people ask, ‘What made you come back?’ But I was never in retreat. I stayed home to raise my daughter. She needed me. I needed her.” Besides, “I have no love for the business. It’s ugly. It makes me sick. Even this interview is a drag. I like to be away from everything. I’m happiest when I’m sitting at the piano.”

It was during this period that she met Seigel. “I’d known of her music since grad school in the ‘60s,” he said. “I heard her on one of those Mercury albums and she melted my heart. I lived in Washington for 15 years before I actually got to hear her play live, but when I asked her to appear in a ‘Great American Songwriters’ series I was producing at the Corcoran Gallery, she refused. I saw her a number of times after, but each time it was like we were being introduced. She was aloof, regal. But she likes hot food. One night I took her to a Sichuan restaurant, she bit into a spicy shrimp, and it was like she saw me for the first time. Then she asked me if I’d manage her. I’d never managed anyone before in my life.”

In 1981, Horn was invited to the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands, and then the Hague, where she was rediscovered by the international jazz community. Seigel: “She said, ‘Before this, I never knew what it meant to be treated like an artist instead of an entertainer in a joint.’ I think that trip made her rethink her career.”

Horn began traveling widely, and made several more albums on small labels such as Audiophile and Denmark’s Steeplechase, and then signed with Verve again in 1987 to make “I Thought About You” at Hollywood’s Vine St. Bar & Grill.

The album was only a modest success, but her career began to move. She followed with “Close Enough For Love” in 1989. “You Won’t Forget Me” was smartly titled--her reputation beyond the musical cognoscenti was at last secured as the album rose to first place in the jazz charts.

“Now she’s having so much more success, she’s fighting not to be chewed up,” Seigel says. “I think her desire to make music is stronger than her personality, but she’s amazingly intuitive. When her style of music wasn’t in fashion, whether it was the Beatles or rock, she sat out. She didn’t budge an inch. She waited for the world to catch up with her.”

Says Mandel, “She detests show business. She’s a homebody. There’s no sway in her. She won’t argue--she’s non-confrontational--but she knows exactly what she wants. She wouldn’t be the artist she is if she didn’t go her own way. But that’s true of all the greats: Peggy Lee, Lester Young, Billie Holiday. Their individuality isn’t just found in their art; it’s the way they’ve lived their lives.”