Betty Roché

A singer who performed with Duke Ellington in both the '40s and '50s, Betty Roché was famous for her strong, dramatic way of putting across blues material, a talent that not every vocalist with this big band had. Ellington, who was sometimes prone to hire vocalists with stilted, nearly classical delivery, described Roché with typical grace: "She had a soul inflection in a bop state of intrigue and every word was understandable despite the sophisticated hip and jive connotations." She was born Mary Elizabeth Roché and began her career by triumphing at an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. In 1941, she sang with the Savoy Sultans, then joined Ellington two years later. It was a tough assignment, replacing one of the bandleader's most popular vocalists, Ivie Anderson, just days before Ellington's first concert at Carnegie Hall. She rose to the occasion, scoring highly with both the critics and audience in her featured section of the Ellington suite "Black, Brown and Beige." Her vocal on this number comes on during the blues sequence, and was the composer's interpretation of the feelings of urban blacks at the start of the 20th century. It became one of Ellington's greatest pieces for a singer, an ambitious slab of scoring that showed the skill with which the composer was able to make use of the basic feeling of the blues as part of a sophisticated, advanced musical structure. To give credit where credit is due, there were many vocalists who worked with Ellington who would not have been able to pull this number off as effectively as Roché did. Nonetheless, her concert recording rendition was not released until the '70s. Ellington could not make a studio recording of the suite until 1944, by which time Roché had already been replaced by Joya Sherrill. In a...