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Helen Merrill

Helen Merrill was born on July 21, 1929, in New York City. She is a first generation American, her parents immigrated from what is now known as Croatia. She began singing as a teenager in the late 1940s. In 1951, she was a vocalist with the Earl Hines band. She recorded two songs on the Roost label in 1953, ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘The More I See You’, which mark the beginning of her long recording career. These recordings led to her being signed to a contract on the newly launched EmArcy label of Mercury Records. The first single released by EmArcy Records (EmArcy 16000) was by Helen Merrill. She recorded five albums for EmArcy from 1954-1958. Her debut album, “Helen Merrill” has never been out of print. Her recordings of this period were with highly regarded and talented musicians including Clifford Brown, Barry Galbriath, Frank Wess, Marian McPartland, Bill Evans, Quincy Jones, Hal Mooney, Gil Evans, Milt Hinton, and Osie Johnson.

In 1959, she moved to Europe where she continued to record and perform. The move exposed her to a greater world-view and her music began to reveal this, recording several folk songs on the 1964 album “The Artisrtry of Helen Merrill”. In the early 1960s she made her first tour of Japan as a musician. This would have a major influence on her career later. In the mid-1960s she collaborated with Dick Katz on two memorable albums “The Feeling Is Mutual “and “A Shade of Difference.” Both of these albums are striking in the creativity of all the musicians involved. Besides Mr. Katz these included Thad Jones, Jim Hall, Ron Carter, Arnie Wise, Hubert Laws, Gary Bartz, Richard Davis, Elvin Jones, and Pete LaRoca. Moving to Japan in the late 1960s, due to her husband’s career, she recorded several albums for the Japanese Victor label working with Japanese musicians including Sadao Wantanabe, Norio Maeda, Masahiko Satoh, Takeshi Inomata, and Hozan Yamamoto. Two of these albums included collaborations with American musicians Teddy Wilson and Gary Peacock. While residing in Japan she also hosted a program for a Tokyo radio station.

Miss Merrill returned to live in the United States in the mid-1970s. Her first recording upon her return was the 1976 album, “Helen Merrill/John Lewis”. It was nominated for a Grammy award as was her 1980 album “Chasin’ The Bird’. In the late 1970s she took on a new role as the producer for albums by pianists Tommy Flannagan, Roland Hanna, Al Haig, and Dutch vocalist Ann Burton.

Her career continued in full swing during the 1980s. Early in the decade she recorded albums once again in Japan. Other recording sessions during this time include a composer series, albums of the music of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein. Her wonderfu 1980 album, “Casa Forte”, was produced and arranged by Torrie Zito, who she had a long marriage to until his death in 2009. Mid-decade she recorded two notable albums for the Owl label in France with pianist Gordon Beck and others. From 1987 to the present, she has recorded a number of albums of high merit, both musically and artistically. These include a collaboration with Gil Evans as they revisited their 1956 recording “Dream of You.” The new album entitled “Collaboration.” She recorded “Brownie,” a tribute to Clifford Brown. With Ron Carter she recorded “Duets,” an album with only bass and vocal. Other albums of this period, “Clear Out of this World” and “You and the Night and the Music”, reveal her maturity and what it brought to her music and interpretations, strengthening her legacy as a jazz original.

In the late 1990s recordings continue. In 1998, she recorded “Carrousel” with Finnish composer Heikki Sarmanto, he specifically desiring to work with her. In 1999, she released “Jelena Ana Milcetic aka…Helen Merrill.” This album is an intertwining of her Croatian heritage with her musical history. It is a marriage of music and art of the highest degree.

Her last album to date, “Lilac Wine,” is of songs that she had never recorded with the exception of ‘Lilac Wine.” On this album she continues to push to the future as she took the composition, ‘You,’ from the English rock band Radiohead, and gave it her own interpretation, accompanied by her son, rock singer and composer, Alan Merrill.

It should be noted that during this long career, 60 years plus, Helen Merrill has and continues to perform live at various venues throughout the world, as well as participating on panels and discussion groups with respect to music and her experiences as a jazz musician. In 2014 was was inducted into ASCAP’s Jazz Hall of Fame as a Living Legend. Her three nights of ‘Sayonara’ performances in Tokyo, Japan at the Blue Note Club in April, 2017, were standing room only. Source: Michael Griffes
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Helen Merrill: The Helen Merrill-Dick Katz Sessions and Casa Forte

by Samuel Chell
August 25, 2008

Music-making, from conception to realization, is contaminated by the rhetoric of personality. And even more than instrumental music, vocal performances are often poorly served by language focused on the desires and disappointments, frustrations and satisfactions of the artist's “self" rather than on the “art." But quite apart from the self-expression (since the Romantic era, a birthright of every child) that inescapably clings to the creative process, what remains is something new that has come into being--a creation, moreover, that is ...

267

Album Review

Helen Merrill: Complete Recordings with Clifford Brown

Read "Complete Recordings with Clifford Brown" reviewed by David Rickert

by David Rickert
June 1, 2007

Many people are familiar with Clifford Brown's collaboration with Sarah Vaughan, which many consider to be a classic. Far less well-known is his record with singer Helen Merrill for Emarcy from 1954, which features a similar set up and feel. Merrill has always been on the second tier of jazz singers as far as popularity is concerned, but is a reliable performer who can turn out enchanting performances. She's the type of singer whom many would simply put in front ...

1,021

Interview

Helen Merrill: 60 Years of Warm Sweet Songs

by Joao Moreira dos Santos
November 6, 2006

One of the most distinctive jazz singers ever, Helen Merrill started singing professionally sixty years ago when her warm voice paired with the Reggie Childs Orchestra in 1946. But that was just the start of a long and vivid story which would lead the talented young daughter of Croatian immigrants to make history in jazz by recording with [trumpeter] Clifford Brown and [arranger/bandleader] Gil Evans in the 1950s. A story which includes the opportunity of sharing the stage with luminaries ...

363

Multiple Reviews

Helen Merrill: Lilac Wine; Andrea Wolper: The Small Hours

by Andrew Velez
October 11, 2005

Helen Merrill Lilac Wine Sunnyside 2005

Listen carefully to Helen Merrill's phrasing as she revisits “Lilac Wine , a song she first recorded in the '50s. “...I think I'm ready for my love... It's her ever-so-delicate emphasis of “ready which makes the impassioned state she's in so clear. Always at her own particular pace and tempo, Merrill's ability to express emotional nuances is an essential element in the alluring mystery of her singing. It ...

383

Album Review

Helen Merrill: Music Makers

Read "Music Makers" reviewed by Michael P. Gladstone

by Michael P. Gladstone
December 8, 2003

Jazz vocalist Helen Merrill doesn't record that often and when she does, it is often an unpredictable session. For her last major label work in 2000, Jelena Ana Milcactic A.K.A. Helen Merrill, recorded music based upon her Croatian heritage; it was quite a project but somehow eluded me. Music Makers is a reissue of a 1986 session, originally on Sunnyside, with two unusual trios. Merrill appears with long-time accompanist Gordon Beck on piano and electric piano, plus either master violinist ...

238

Album Review

Helen Merrill: Jelena Ana Milcetic aka Helen Merrill

Read "Jelena Ana Milcetic aka Helen Merrill" reviewed by Mathew Bahl

by Mathew Bahl
September 1, 2000

There has never been a jazz vocal record quite like Jelena Ana Milcetic a.k.a. Helen Merrill. It is obvious from the very first track as the Lado Folk Dance and Music Ensemble of Croatia intone a movement from the liturgical cantata “Telo Kristusevo" against the backdrop of Terry Clarke's thundering drums. It is a prayer sung to God that resonates with all the beauty and mystery of an ancient Eastern European people. It is with the music of her ancestral ...

Video / DVD

Helen Merrill and Bill Evans

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
June 9, 2020

In February 1958, singer Helen Merrill recorded five tracks backed by Bill Evans, who was part of a superb quintet. The tracks would be their only studio recordings together. Evans would move on to the Miles Davis Quintet and Sextet that May and then form his own trio at year's end. Helen would spend 1958 and '59 recording jazz albums and touring before moving to Italy, where she'd spend the next four years. Helen and Evans were close friends. During ...
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Video / DVD

Helen Merrill With Strings

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
September 19, 2018

Between 1954 and 1957, singer Helen Merrill recorded five albums for Mercury's EmArcy division. Yesterday, while writing, I spent the day listening to all of them as well as a bunch of assorted tracks she recorded for the label. Perhaps the best known album of the bunch is Helen Merrill, which she made in December 1954 accompanied by the Clifford Brown Sextet. The second most popular EmArcy album is probably Dream of You, arranged by Gil Evans and recorded between ...
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Interview

Interview: Helen Merrill on Billie

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
January 9, 2015

Following my post yesterday about a private audio recording at YouTube of Helen Merrill and Billie Holiday singing a duet at a New York party in November 1956, I had to know what was going on at the time of the recording. Why were they together. Why was Holiday so intent on singing the ending twice with Helen? Who was on piano? It didn't sound like Leonard Feather. So I called Helen and we had a great chat about the ...
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Video / DVD

Billie Holiday and Helen Merrill

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
January 8, 2015

Tessa Souter, whose singing voice I love (go here), sent along a lovely email the other day. Tessa knows I've interviewed Helen Merrill at length (start here) and wanted me to hear something. It was a link to a tape of Helen and Billie Holiday singing You Go to My Head at producer-writer Leonard Feather's apartment in New York in November 1956. This is right around the time of Holiday's Carnegie Hall concert with Chico Hamilton, and months earlier Helen ...
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Recording

Helen Merrill: 'Parole E Musica'

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
October 1, 2014

Back in 1960, singer Helen Merrill had a bad romantic breakup and escaped to Rome. She was invited to record there by pianist Romano Mussolini, whom she had met at a jazz festival in Belgium. So she broke her Atlantic contract and moved to Italy, where she became a “little star." But, as Helen told me during an interview in 2009, she didn't know what to do with the stardom. During this two-year period of emotional grief and recuperation, Helen ...
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Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Helen Merrill

Source: Michael Ricci
July 21, 2013

All About Jazz is celebrating Helen Merrill's birthday today!

Helen Merrill\'s long history in jazz began with her first album on the Mercury Emarcy label arranged and produced by Quincy Jones in 1954 up to her latest CD album released in early 2000. In between were more then 50 Jazz albums and countless concerts, club dates, festivals and other jazz activities. Ms. Merrill was born in New York City. Her parents were Croatian immigrants and her most recent recording is ...
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Recording

Clifford Brown "The Singers Sessions With Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan And Helen Merrill: The EmArcy Master Takes Vol. 2" On Hip-O Select / Verve

Source: Michael Ricci
October 18, 2012

Available exclusively at Hip-OSelect.com now and available to all retailers October 23, 2012 Legendary trumpeter Clifford Brown was not only a master bandleader, soloist and composer, he was a supremely sensitive sideman – a welcome addition to any jazz session. The newly released 3-CD set, The Singers Sessions: The EmArcy Master Takes Vol. 2, collects the EmArcy label recordings in which “Brownie” is featured behind three of the greatest singers of his era: in an ensemble behind Dinah Washington during ...
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Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Helen Merrill

Source: Michael Ricci
July 21, 2012

All About Jazz is celebrating Helen Merrill's birthday today!

124

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Helen Merrill

Source:
July 21, 2011

All About Jazz is celebrating Helen Merrill's birthday today!

282

Interview

Helen Merrill: Dream of You

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
November 16, 2010

One of the finest jazz vocal albums of the 1950s is Helen Merrill's Dream of You. Recorded over the course of three days in July 1956 for EmArcy, the session paired Helen with arranger Gil Evans nearly a year before his first majestic session with trumpeter Miles Davis. Helen's Dream of You isn't a typical jazz-vocal recording of the period, where a singer belts out a set of American Songbook tunes backed by a bouncy band. Instead, what you have ...
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