June 1982 at The Hollywood Bowl. It was only the fourth year for the Playboy Jazz Festival at the celebrated amphitheater, and the lineup was spectacular: Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, Tal Farlow, Dexter Gordon, Weather Report, The Manhattan Transfer, Grover Washington, Jr., Maynard Ferguson, Lionel Hampton, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Willie Bobo, Woody Shaw, Milt Jackson, Sarah Vaughan. Front and center amidst this jazz royalty was vocalist Nancy Wilson, in a rare concert with trumpeter/ flugelhornist Art Farmer and saxophonist Benny Golson.
“I remember that concert,” Golson says. “I was wondering if I would be good enough for her.” His concern is understandable given the kind of form she was in. On stage that day, she reprised one of her hits from Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley, her 1961 album for Capitol Records with the famed alto player. During “Save Your Love for Me,” you can hear all of the defining features of Wilson’s vocal style – the warm throatiness, the crisp articulation, and the characteristic growls, cries, and upswings. But more striking than these is her transparent personal relationship with the lyrics. She was above all else a storyteller.
The live recording of the festival – the Elektra/Musician album In Performance at the Playboy Jazz Festival – documents just one of Wilson’s many mid-career appearances, when her voice was at the height of its power. By 1982 she had already cut more than 30 jazz, pop, and soul records, with at least 40 more yet to come. She had won her first of three eventual Grammy Awards, hosted an Emmy-winning series (The Nancy Wilson Show), and logged more than 100 television appearances as a singer or actress. Later, she would receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, an NAACP Hall of Fame Image Award, a Peabody Award for her NPR documentary series Jazz Profiles, an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship Award, and a spot in the International Civil Rights Hall of Fame. Hardly any performer of Wilson’s generation can match her in creative and social output during these years.
Even though jazz history has claimed her as its own, Wilson didn’t consider herself a singer of any one type. Born in 1937 in Chillicothe, Ohio, she came up through the gospel choirs of her hometown and the R&B clubs of Columbus before moving to New York City in 1959; within a year she had released her first popular record, an R&B-inflected cover of “Guess Who I Saw Today?” Cannonball Adderley, on whose advice Wilson had moved to New York to begin with, then urged her to delve more deeply into jazz – a recommendation that gave rise to one of her most seminal albums.
Golson adds that Wilson was always gracious toward musicians and notably easy to work with. “She was vibrant and friendly – she had nothing to prove. That’s why I liked her so much,” he remarked. “She was always willing to work to make things as good as they could be.”
After some bouts of ill health, in September 2011 Wilson played her final concert in Athens, Ohio, within a stone’s throw of the places where she’d first learned her craft. Last December, at age 81, she passed away in her Southern California home. “When she stopped singing it was a real disappointment,” admitted Golson. “I still miss her.”
With these few words he speaks for the world.