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Jackie Cain
Jackie Cain in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American jazz vocalist best known for her partnership with her husband Roy Kral as the team Jackie and Roy. ger/pianist Roy Kral. They first joined forces in 1946, and in 1996 they celebrated their 50th anniversary as a vocal duo. Jackie and Roy's stint with Charlie Ventura's band in 1948 and 1949 brought them a great deal of recognition; Lou Stein's "East of Suez" was an unusual feature for their voices. Shortly after leaving Ventura in June 1949, they were married and worked together on a regular basis thereafter. Jackie and Roy had their own television show in Chicago in the early 1950s, worked in Las Vegas from 1957 to 1960, settled in New York in 1963, and appeared on some television commercials. They recorded many spirited jazz performances for a variety of labels through the decades, and performed until Roy Kral's death in August 2002. Fairly early in their career, Jackie and Roy were befriended by composer Alec Wilder, who wrote the liner notes for one of their earliest albums, Jackie Cain and Roy Kral (1955). They had always favored Wilder's songs and, ten years after his death, paid tribute by recording an entire album of them, An Alec Wilder Collection.
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Jackie Cain & Roy Kral: A Wilder Alias
by Chris May
Jackie Cain & Roy KralA Wilder AliasCTI Masterworks2011 (1974) Producer Creed Taylor's 1970s' label, CTI, has had a controversial history. Some of its detractors, averse to the lush sound and embrace of fusion, have been reluctant even to recognize CTI as a jazz label. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (Macmillan, 1988 and 1994), for instance, the most authoritative pre-internet compendium of jazz information, contains no potted history--nor, more significantly, a ...
read moreJackie Cain & Roy Kral: Echoes
by Edward Blanco
Recorded live in September, 1976 at Howard Rumsey's Concerts by the Sea in Redondo Beach, California, Echoes captures a jazz vocals performance by the husband and wife team of Jackie Cain and Roy Kral. Unfortunately, Kral passed away in 2002, making the release of this never-before-issued album the first for Cain since Kral's death.
The singing duo brings along three fine musicians from San Francisco, forming the quintet that played the gig at Rumsey's room. The players included ...
read moreJackie Cain & Roy Kral: Echoes
by Jack Bowers
In the annals of jazz vocal duos, none stands taller than Jackie Cain and her husband, the late Roy Kral. When it came to interpreting American popular songs they were without peer, and like Bobby Short or Matt Dennis, every note, every measure, every phrase was urbane and tasteful.
Echoes, on which Cain and Kral radiate hipness and charm as leaders of a blue-collar quintet, was recorded live in September 1976 at Howard Rumsey's Concerts by the Sea in Redondo ...
read moreMeredith D'Ambrosio on Jackie Cain
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
When Jackie Cain died last week, I immediately thought of jazz singer-pianist Meredith d'Ambrosio. Meredith also has an intimate, conversational vocal style and, like Jackie, has an ear for great little-known songs that match her personality perfectly. Meredith and I chat often, so I asked her for a few recollections on Jackie (and Roy). Here's what Meredith said... From the moment I heard Jackie and Roy's Euphoria on Symphony Sid's amazing jazz show on Boston radio in the early 1950s, ...
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Jackie Cain (1928-2014)
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Jackie Cain, a vocalist who gave bebop a carefree vocalese spin in the late 1940s with her singer-pianist husband Roy Kral and, as Jackie and Roy, became one of the most beloved jazz-pop singing duos and recording artists of the 1950s and beyond, died Sept. 15 at her home in New Jersey. She was 86. Throughout her career, Jackie was widely admired by jazz and pop vocalists but never duplicated or bested. The ringing sound of her voice, ease of ...
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Losses: Jackie Cain, Joe Sample
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Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
Following a long illness, Jackie Cain died Monday afternoon in her New Jersey home. She was 86. She and Roy Kral combined their talents in 1946. They incorporated the spirit of bebop in their work with Charlie Ventura’s sextet, capturing the public imagination with “East of Suez” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Recorded with Ventura at a concert in Pasadena, California, in 1949, the records received widespread radio airplay in the days when that was still a route to jazz ...
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Tommy Wolf + Fran Landesman
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
If many of today's jazz musicians and singers lack anything, it's curiosity. Talent they've got plenty of, but a deep interest in the past beyond what they already know about the music seems alien to their approach. Based on the CDs that cross my desk, the same two dozen standards are being recorded endlessly—At Last, Autumn Leaves, When Lights Are Low, Like Someone in Love, The Very Thought of You and so on. What's hurting the music isn't a lack ...
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Interview: Jackie Cain (Part 4)
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
The popularization of the 12-inch LP in 1956 boosted the fortunes of Jackie Cain and Roy Kral. On the larger color covers, the attractive duo was portrayed as hopelessly upbeat lovebirds, while their vocals inside sounded more like personal diary entries than the works of third-party songwriters. Producers and LP art directors cast Jackie and Roy as typical fun-loving suburbanites, but nothing could have been further from the truth.
By the mid-1950s, Jackie and Roy were the parents of two ...
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Interview: Jackie Cain (Part 5)
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
By the mid-1960s, Jackie Cain and Roy Kral were slowly becoming victims of a dramatic shift in music tastes. As rock swept away a generation of young listeners, Jackie and Roy's tightly choreographed vocal sound no longer was as radical as it once had been. The couple recorded from time to time and, to reach their already established fan base, they toured extensively. No matter what the couple sang, they always adhered to the same formula of swing, clever chord ...
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Interview: Jackie Cain (Part 2)
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
By age 17, Jackie Cain was earning a living in Chicago as a big-band and small-group singer. But unlike many up-and-coming club singers who emerged during the late 1940s, Jackie had not spent a single day on New York's 52nd Street. Instead, the Milwaukee native listened carefully to records, studied with a vocal coach and sang with local jazz groups, one of which featured pianist Roy Kral. At first, Roy was hesitant to accompany a female vocalist. But once he ...
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Interview: Jackie Cain (Part 3)
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Working with Charlie Ventura in 1948 and 1949 thrust Jackie Cain and her singing partner Roy Kral into a high-anxiety environment. In addition to performing with Ventura almost nightly, Roy had to arrange the band's book, rehearse the Ventura group when charts were completed, and work with Jackie on complex vocalese treatments. During this period of high stress and little sleep, the duo fell in love as they provided each other with emotional and creative support. But by mid-1949, the ...
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Interview: Jackie Cain (Part 1)
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
There is no cheerier voice in jazz than Jackie Cain's. A teenage singing sensation in Milwaukee and then Chicago in the mid-1940s, Jackie met her life-long husband and singing partner Roy Kral by accident after dropping in at a local club. Shortly after the vocalese duo joined Charlie Ventura in 1948, they rose rapidly to prominence and were featured in the high-octane Bop for the People" concert in Pasadena, CA, in May 1949. In the 1950s, Jackie and Roy's popularity ...
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