Remembering Patty Waters
March 11, 1946 – June 29, 2024
A tribute to the innovative jazz singer
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Jazz singer Patty Waters passed away on June 29, 2024 at the age of 78.
She was born on Mar. 11, 1946 in Iowa.
Waters began singing professionally while in high school for the Jerry Gray Hotel Jazz Band.
After moving with her family to Denver and becoming a bit influenced by Billie Holiday, she moved to New York in the early 1960s.
She met the innovative saxophonist Albert Ayler who was very impressed by her adventurous singing and recommended that Bernard Stollman of ESP Records sign her.
Arguably the first avant-garde jazz singer (although one could argue for Jeanne Lee), Patty Waters recorded two albums for ESP during 1965-66.
The first, Patty Waters Sings, mostly features her as a solo singer-pianist although the highpoint is her lengthy, emotional and somewhat scary 14-minute exploration of “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair”; pianist Burton Greene, bassist Steve Tintweiss, and drummer Tom Price accompany her wild flight on that memorable performance.
The second album, 1966’s College Tour, which has Waters joined by a quartet with Greene and flutist Giuseppi Logan (plus a version of “It Never Entered My Mind” with pianist Ran Blake), has briefer pieces but is also adventurous.
After recording three numbers (including Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”) with a group led by tenor-saxophonist Marzette Watts in 1969, Patty Waters dropped out of the music scene, moving to California and raising her son.
30 years later she made a comeback, mostly singing Billie Holiday-inspired ballads, recording a few albums for small labels, and appearing once at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
In 2019 Patty Waters (along with pianist Burton Greene, bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Corey Fogel) revisited “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair” for the first and only time in concert.
While this version (made when she was 73 as opposed to being 19 on the ESP recording) does not quite reach the emotional heights and depths of the original recording (which is available on CD), it gives one an idea of how adventurous her improvising was in the mid-1960s.
-Scott Yanow
