List: Swing singers

by likeorhate

•  Frank Sinatra

  Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and actor. Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became a successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, being the idol of the "bobby soxers. " His professional career had stalled by the 1950s, but it was reborn in 1954 after he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He signed with Capitol Records and released several critically lauded albums.

  

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  33.3%
  
•  Harry Connick, Jr.

  Harry Connick, Jr. (born Joseph Harry Fowler Connick, Jr. ; September 11, 1967) is an American singer, actor, composer, and pianist. Connick has sold over 25 million albums worldwide. He is ranked among the top 60 best-selling male artists in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America, with 16 million certified albums. He has seven top-20 U.S. albums, and ten number-one U.S. jazz albums, earning more number-one albums than any other artist in the US jazz chart history.

  

  34.5%
  

  31.0%
  

  34.5%
  
•  Louis Armstrong

  Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971) nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence on jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performers.

  

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  45.2%
  
•  Ella Fitzgerald

  Ella Jane Fitzgerald ' (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996) also known as the "First Lady of Song" and "Lady Ella," was an American jazz vocalist. With a vocal range spanning three octaves, she was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing. She is widely considered one of the supreme interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

  

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•  Billie Holiday

  Billie Holiday (born Elinore Harris; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed Lady Day by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday was a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Above all, she was admired all over the world for her deeply personal and intimate approach to singing.

  

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•  Anita O'Day

  Anita O'Day (October 18, 1919 – November 23, 2006) was an American jazz singer. Born Anita Belle Colton, O'Day was admired for her sense of rhythm and dynamics, and her early big band appearances shattered the traditional image of the "girl singer". Refusing to pander to any female stereotype, O'Day presented herself as a "hip" jazz musician, wearing a band jacket and skirt as opposed to an evening gown. She changed her surname from Colton to O'Day, pig Latin for "dough," slang for money.

  

  25.0%
  

  62.5%
  

  12.5%
  
•  Big Joe Turner

  Big Joe Turner (born Joseph Vernon Turner Jr. , May 18, 1911 – November 24, 1985) was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri. According to the songwriter Doc Pomus, "Rock and roll would have never happened without him. " Although he came to his greatest fame in the 1950s with his pioneering rock and roll recordings, particularly "Shake, Rattle and Roll", Turner's career as a performer stretched from the 1920s into the 1980s.

  

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•  Cab Calloway

  Cabell "Cab" Calloway III (December 25, 1907 – November 18, 1994) was an American jazz singer and bandleader. Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s.

  

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•  Joe Williams (jazz singer)

  Joe Williams (December 12, 1918 – March 29, 1999) was a well-known jazz vocalist, a baritone singing a mixture of blues, ballads, popular songs, and jazz standards.

  

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•  Jimmy Rushing

  James Andrew Rushing (August 26, 1901 - June 8, 1972) known as Jimmy Rushing, was an American blues shouter and swing jazz singer from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, best known as the featured vocalist of Count Basie's Orchestra from 1935 to 1948. Rushing was known as "Mr. Five by Five" and was the subject of an eponymous 1942 popular song that was a hit for Harry James and others. He joined Walter Page's Blue Devils in 1927, then joined Bennie Moten's band in 1929.

  

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•  Frankie Laine

  Frankie Laine, born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio (Chicago, March 30, 1913 – San Diego, February 6, 2007), was a successful American singer, songwriter and actor whose career spanned 75 years, from his first concerts in 1930 with a marathon dance company to his final performance of "That's My Desire" in 2005. Often billed as America's Number One Song Stylist, his other nicknames include Mr. Rhythm, Old Leather Lungs, and Mr. Steel Tonsils.

  

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•  Bunny Berigan

  Rowland Bernard "Bunny" Berigan (November 2, 1908 – June 2, 1942) was an American jazz trumpeter who rose to fame during the swing era, but whose virtuosity and influence were shortened by a losing battle with alcoholism that ended in his early death at age 33. He composed the jazz instrumentals "Chicken and Waffles" and "Blues" in 1935. His 1937 classic jazz recording "I Can't Get Started with You" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1975.

  

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•  Ray Nance

  Ray Willis Nance (December 10, 1913 Chicago - January 28, 1976 in New York City) was a jazz trumpeter, violinist and singer. Nance is best known for his long association with Duke Ellington through most of the 1940s and 1950s, after he was hired to replace Cootie Williams in 1940. Shortly after joining the band, Nance was given the trumpet solo on the first recorded version of "Take the "A" Train," which became the Ellington theme, a major hit and a jazz standard.

  

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•  Slim Gaillard

  Bulee "Slim" Gaillard (January 4, 1916 – February 26, 1991) was an American jazz singer, songwriter, pianist, and guitarist, noted for his vocalese singing and word play in a language he called "Vout". (In addition to speaking 8 other languages, Gaillaird wrote a dictionary for his own constructed language.)

  

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•  John Pizzarelli

  John Paul Pizzarelli, Jr. (born April 6, 1960) is an American jazz guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and bandleader. He has had a lengthy career as a recording artist, performing for a variety of labels that include Telarc Records, RCA Records and Chesky Records, among others. He has recorded twenty-three albums of his own, as well as other joint recordings with his father, Bucky Pizzarelli.

  

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•  Doc Cheatham

  Adolphus Anthony Cheatham, better known as Doc Cheatham was a jazz trumpeter, singer, and bandleader. After having played in some of the leading jazz groups from the 1920s on, Cheatham's career enjoyed renewed acclaim in later decades; Cheatham himself agreed with the critical assessment that he was probably the only jazz musician to create his best work after the age of 70.

  

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•  Bea Wain

  Bea Wain (born April 30, 1917 in New York City) was a American Big Band-era vocalist. On a 1937 recording with Artie Shaw she was credited as Beatrice Wayne, which led some to assume that was her real name. On record labels her name was shortened (without her permission) to "Bea" by the record company, ostensibly for space considerations. As she explained, "They cut it to 'Bea' Wain. They cut the 'Beatrice' out to 'Bea. ' I was just a little old girl singer, but that's the truth.

  

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•  Blanche Calloway

  Blanche Calloway (February 9, 1904 - December 16, 1978) was a Jazz singer, bandleader, and composer from Baltimore, Maryland. She is not as well known as her younger brother Cab Calloway, but she may have been the first woman to lead an all male orchestra. Cab Calloway often credited her with being the reason he got into show business. She made her first recordings in 1925, with Louis Armstrong as a sideman on the session.

  

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•  LaVon Hardison

  LaVon Hardison is an American swing jazz musician.

  

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•  James DeFrances

  

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•  Ethel Azama

  Ethel Azama (August 28, 1934 – March 1984) was an American jazz and popular singer and recording artist. She sang regularly in nightclubs and other concert venues between the mid-1950s and 1984. She was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii and was of Okinawan ancestry. She was a Nisei or second-generation Japanese American.

  

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•  Janet Lawson

  Janet Lawson, born Janet Polun on November 13, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, is a jazz singer and educator. She was born into a family of professional musicians. As a child she performed on the radio and regional television. She has worked with Duke Ellington, Bob Dorough, Tommy Flanagan, Ron Carter, Barry Harris, Milt Hinton, Dave Liebman, Joe Newman, Rufus Reid, Barney Kessel, Clark Terry, Ed Thigpen, Cedar Walton and the Art Farmer Quartet.

  

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