Jackie Cain, 1928-2014

Roy Kral and Jackie Cain, in 1998.

Jackie Cain possessed one of the purest voices in jazz and popular music, and a musicality to match. Music aficionados from the 1950’s on were familiar with the Jackie & Roy (Kral) duo. Together they enjoyed a 55-year career and a 53-year marriage. Roy Kral passed away in 2002, and Jackie died last Monday, September 15. Their music ranged from hip and swinging vocalese, to semi-novelty renditions of pop songs, to beautiful ballads with impeccable arrangements by Roy Kral, Quincy Jones, Don Sebesky and others.

Jackie & Roy shared the story of their meeting in our interview, which took place on March 22, 1998 in New York City:

MR:    Was it love at first note for you guys?

RK:    Oh yes, love at first note. But not at first sight. She was much too young for me.

JC:    Well Roy’s seven years old than I am, so at that point I was about 17 years old.

RK:   She told me she was 16.

JC:    No. I met him when I was 17 I believe. And he had another girlfriend, and I was just this little naive girl from Milwaukee. So I don’t think I attracted his attention that much. But then he did like working with me I believe.

RK:    Here’s what happened. A friend of mine brought her in to the club, Jump Town, it was early ‘47, on the west end of Chicago. Dave Garroway was looking for sponsors. Jump Town was his first sponsor. He talked up the club, the place starts to boom. And this friend of mine, a tenor player, brought Jackie in to hear our quartet. I was working with the George Davis Quartet. And this tenor player said, “hey let her sing, she’s really good.” And I says, “naaa, don’t be bringing your girls in here, they’ll ask me to play in the key of X, something that I don’t know anyway.”

JC:    Piano players never like to play for girl singers, because half the time they don’t know what key they sing, and they don’t know what tune they want to do, and that sort of thing. So they’re sort of negative about it in general.

RK:    So I said no deal. We went to the bar and libations, and Vete [Bob Anderson] said, “ah come on, she’s good.” She sang “Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe.” And I happened to have loved that song because hearing Frances Wayne sing it with Woody Herman’s band, a Neil Hefti arrangement. I said God, that’s great. Okay. And she sang that. The club owner was there that night, and he came up to us and said, “you guys need a singer for Friday and Saturday.” Okay.

Jackie & Roy enjoyed early success as members of Charlie Ventura’s small group, and had a few modest hits with songs such as “Cheerful Little Earful” and the unlikely “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Most of their music was indeed cheerful and able to please the average listener, but hip enough to gain the respect of jazz musicians. After leaving the Ventura group, Jackie & Roy paid their share of dues. They described the realities of life as performers while raising small children:

MR:    So after the kind of short lived group with the cello, did you consciously sit and say okay the public wasn’t quite ready for that, what are we going to do now.

RK:    What we did was —

JC:    Have a baby.

RK:    Yeah.

JC:    In the interim, amidst all these things, we’re having kids, and having to do with just living your life. That’s been one of our problems in the sense of being known to the public, because every time we’d get a little momentum going we would have a family thing happen. We were happy about it.

RK:    And it was — I was going to say what we did was cut down to just the two of us, just piano and the two voices, and we worked any way we could. Because things were rather slow. And finally we got on the road with a child, and we had a station wagon and we had a kind of a buggy, and behind the back seat —

JC:    One of those that you lift out of the frame you know? And you put it behind the second seat in the station wagon and so if you have to change the baby you get on your knees and you’ve got your own little bassinet right there. And that was the days when you had to sterilize bottles and everything. Every night you’d check into a motel on a trip and have to take the sterilizer in and wash the bottles and sterilize them.

MR:   If you have a duo gig, and you’re on the road in your station wagon, what did you do with your child while you were performing?

RK:    Well we went to Hawaii, and we were working at this hotel on the roof, and we got into there and didn’t know who we were going get, and finally we found a young Japanese girl who was very responsible, and we would get ready for work and she would come in and read to our first daughter, and then put her to bed, and this Japanese girl would go into the bathroom with the lights on, and do her reading and do her homework, and take care that we finish our show, and we’d come in and she’d go home.

JC:    We had to find people wherever we were and it was always very nerve wracking because you know, are we going to find somebody for the first night? And in fact, in that incident in Hawaii, we didn’t have anyone for the first night, but luckily it was in the same hotel, and so we got her to sleep and we went upstairs and did our show, but this is what happened. She woke up and she heard us because it was all open, there was no air conditioning, it was like an open room thing, and it was just screened in. Anyway she heard us and she went out of the room in her little Dr. Denton’s and she went looking for us, and ended up down in the lobby and the people in the lobby said well where are your parents, little girl? And she said well I hear them singing. So anyway that was one of the funny incidents. And a lot of stuff like that happened. But most of the time we were very good, I mean we were lucky we found people the first day we got there through somebody in the club who knew somebody or whatever.

As a duo they fell into the world of commercial jingles, singing first on an ad for Halo shampoo. The sound of their voices and Roy’s arranging skills made them naturals for this field, and they went on to record many familiar jingles, including Cheerios, Plymouth cars and Borden’s instant coffee. This commercial life was balanced with creative LP’s, my favorite being the 1972 release “Time and Love.” They spoke of this album, made for producer Creed Taylor:

JC:    In 1972 we made that album “Time and Love,” which is the album we did for Creed Taylor, and that was such a wonderful time. And we hadn’t been doing anything because we were doing the commercials. So at one point we said gee we’ve got to record something. We should get back in the studio and do something. And I don’t remember how it came about — oh yeah we were going in and pitch it to Creed.

RK:    We’d done maybe four albums for him on Verve and so forth, and we were going to go into the city and just like talk it up — Creed we want to do another album, and like let’s see what we can do, and so we walked in and we started talking, talking, talking, and he says “that sounds like a good idea, let’s do it.”

JC:    He was for it right away. And then he got Don Sebesky on it, and of course Don Sebesky contributed such a tremendous amount, because he came up with a lot of the ideas and did all these big charts orchestrating, and of course there were a couple of Roy’s things in there too but he orchestrated everything for a 70 piece orchestra. And it was just, I mean it was thrilling to do it.

MR:    You had the best.

RK:    The best players of New York.

MR:    And I specifically remember hearing the title tune and just it was so beautiful, and all of a sudden when the Bach section came in, I said wow, that is brilliant.

RK:    And the opening I think was where Jackie did the French horn part.

JC:    The first day we went into the studio, I had to sing that. And I hadn’t been singing because we were doing commercials and we weren’t working in a club then. And so I was warming up and trying to get my voice in shape, because we always do that before we do anything. But I went in the studio and I was so nervous, because I had to do this a capella.

RK:    “Afternoon of the Faun.”

JC:    Yes, “Afternoon of the Faun.” And so I did it, and it worked out okay. And he was there conducting everything, and a lot of the string things of course were recorded separately and I had to just come in and fit in, with the earphones, and that’s always such an unnatural situation. When you get in the studio, and you’re thrown into these unnatural things where you’re wearing earphones and the band isn’t even there, and you’re singing like alone in a booth, it’s very hard to get into it.

RK:    And there are a few places where it was just all conducted. And we couldn’t coordinate — how long do you wait before you come in, before they come in, there would be spaces. And so we said, “Don, you’ve got to come help us, come into the studio.” He said, “oh sure, yeah.” And he said, “well now it’s going to be like this” and he would come in and it’d be wrong.

JC:    Even he couldn’t really feel it.

RK:    I said, “Don, we’ve got to do this right.” And he says, “yeah but I can’t find it either.” So he said, “try it.” And we put in little things like, gee if you touch yourself three times and then come in then it’ll be all right.

JC:    It was very tricky. But we did enjoy it, and then I got to do “Bachianas Brasileiras,” which was something I would never dream of attempting. But Don thought that I could do it, and thank God he let me try.

MR:    Was “A Simple Song” on that record also?

JC:    Yeah.

MR:    Was that a Bernstein?

RK:    Yes. And Don Sebesky coupled it with Dave Brubeck’s “Summer Song.”

JC:    No, you’re thinking of another one. You’re thinking of “Summertime” and “Summer Song.” “Summertime” coupled with Dave Brubeck’s “Summer Song,” where we sing all the voices, it sounds like a chorus, it’s all us doing it. That was such a fun thing to do, because it was different.

You can listen to the title track “Time and Love” here, and read our previous blog, Songsof Summer where Summertime/Summer Song was discussed.

Jackie was well respected in the music business and she shared her “most important compliment”:

JC:    One time [composer Alec Wilder] said a thing about me that I’ll never forget because he doesn’t say nice things if he doesn’t mean them. He said, “when she sings a song it stays sung.”