This memorable evening with captivating jazz singer Sarah Vaughan was taped in 1985 and offers a rare recorded "in person" performance.
"Sassy" as Sarah Vaughan was lovingly called, is considered to be, along with Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee, one of the definitive, great women singers of jazz and popular music. She memorably began her career as a pianist and vocalist with her lifelong fellow musician and friend Billy Eckstine.
Before she died in 1990 she had recorded with many, many jazz greats including Count Basie, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, the legendary Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Benny Carter and Quincy Jones who said "Sassy and Ella were 'fire breathing monsters, they saw themselves as horns'".
Sarah Vaughan, who was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1924 like Ella Fitzgerald, first came to attention when she won the Apollo Theatre Amateur Night in 1942. By 1950, she had become a bestselling recording artist with recordings like Linger Awhile and You're Mine You. She had also become a millionaire, a rare achievement for a female musician at that time. By the mid-1950s, Broken Hearted Melody had sold over a million copies.
This concert, taped in 1985, offers a rare recorded "in person" performance of Sarah Vaughan. It has never been seen before and gives us a wonderful opportunity to enjoy a happy, relaxed, warmly humorous and vocally supreme presentation by the great singer.
Backed by a jazz trio, she sings several of her well known, classic songs including Poor Butterfly, East Of The Sun as well as her two most identified songs Misty and Stephen Sondheim's Send In The Clowns. This DVD offers the great singer in a perfect melding of a visual/song performance that was rarely captured during the unforgettable Sarah Vaughan's musical lifetime.
