Some Jazz Records: Patty Waters Clippings (In Memoriam)
Comments on recordings from musicians and other actors of the jazz scene. Random and not-so-random listening cues from the archives.
Singer Patty Waters’s passing on June 29, 2024 was recently announced on social media. Born on March 11, 1946, Waters was 78.
Billie Holiday, Lady in Satin, Columbia CL 1157 (CS 8048), 1958, LP.
After leaving her native Iowa in the early 1960s, Patty Waters discovered the music of Billie Holiday, and Holiday became her favorite singer. During a Jazz Inside interview, Ken Weiss asked Waters what specifically resonated with her. "It’s her singing and the songs that she sang, too," Waters said. "It was of the times that she was singing those songs. I loved all of it, everything she ever sang. For a while I had a huge record collection, and I still have at least 25 Billie Holiday albums in vinyl. I just love her. You know how you listen to something and you just don’t want to stop? That’s with her. I just can’t get enough, I love her." In the same interview, Waters warned against the "little flourish" added to a piece JazzTimes had once run about her. "Night after night," it read, "she went to bed listening to the end-of-the-line sentiments of Billie Holiday’s album Lady in Satin."
Patty Waters, Sings, ESP-Disk' 1025, 1966, LP.
The centerpiece of Patty Waters’s discography remained her debut album, with its sidelong rendition of "Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair." "When Albert [Ayler] and Bernard [Stollman] had asked me to do something, I thought I could do something appropriate for an ESP album," Patty Waters said in a 1995 Cadence interview with Robert L. Campbell. "I went to Burton Greene's house—I remember a big loft—and I asked Burton if he’d want to play for me, and I talked to him about what I wanted to do a little bit. And it was just maybe an hour long, of talking and trying to rehearse a little, and then we went in very soon after that, probably within a couple of days or so. […] I had told Burton that I was trying to do something appropriate for the ESP-Disk'." The session reportedly took place in December 1965. "I know that first we did the 'Black' cut and everybody got very excited, and then we kind of stood around and said, 'Well, should we break it up or do you have any other ideas?,'" Waters continued. "I said that I did have some little things that I could try to play, sort of as an afterthought, just to see if anybody would like them, and they used all of them for that other side of the album. The recording was done in one afternoon—no extra time, never going back for anything. […] After I made my album, I took it to Jackie McLean, and I asked him if he felt it was valid. When he said yes, I was happy."
Patty Waters, College Tour, ESP-Disk' 1055, 1969, LP.
In 2018, Blank Forms published raw footage showing Patty Waters performing and talking in 1974. By then, the singer had already put a few years between her and the New York jazz scene and had moved to California. Waters’s second album, her last for many years, had been released by ESP-Disk' in 1969. It contained live recordings from 1966. On camera, Waters discussed her two ESP albums as joint entities. "I don’t like them, I mean, personally," Waters seems to say on the sometimes muddy recording. "They aren’t pretty enough for me to enjoy. They made a statement, and I really had to do it, you know, I had to sing like that, […] very harsh […] like I said the other night, breaking a lot of rules, and… I like traditional music too. You know what I mean, that’s really what I love. But you wouldn’t know it to hear the music that’s on those albums." Then at a turning point in her career, Waters would later assess the avant-garde part of her artistic identity differently.
John Coltrane Quartet, Ballads, Impulse! A(S)-32, 1963, LP; and Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz, Atlantic (SD) 1364, 1961, LP.
Asked by Cadence if she liked to listen to a special kind of jazz, Patty Waters first talked about her all-around love for the great body of recorded jazz, old and new. "I like and admire Coltrane’s music," she added. "The spirituality of it—usually spirituality is the foundation of creative art. I love Coltrane’s ballads, European live recording, and recordings like Ornette Coleman's double quartet with Eric Dolphy. I’m glad I have lived in this era."
Sofia Gubaidulina, Offertorium, Gidon Kremer (violin) with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit, Deutsche Grammophon 427 336-2, 1989, CD.
"It just gives me great pleasure," Patty Waters said of jazz to Halana. "It has unlimited possibilities. I would assume that people who love classical music with a passion are the same way; I love it too, but I’m not passionately in love with classical music. I love Bach and Puccini, the history of it. … But jazz has that edge, and there’s a heartbeat that’s stronger in me with jazz and improvisational music, that is not there with people reading the notes off of a page that someone else has written. I like the rough edges of jazz, the earthiness of it. Although there’s this Russian composer, Sofia Gubaidulina. Have you heard Offertorium, on Deutsche Grammophon? She writes the way that 'Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair' from my first album sounds. She’s amazing."