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Eddie Jefferson
The Jazz Singer (Inner City 1016)
The Main Man (Inner City 1033)
Eddie Jefferson, born in Pittsburgh in 1918, was a true jazz original. He began working as a tap dancer in the ’30s, but by the late ’40s he had developed a singing approach called “vocalese,” in which he took the recorded solos of jazz horn players, wrote lyrics to them and sang them as tributes to their creators.
One of the first of these was James Moody’s tenor saxophone solo in a recording of I’m in the Mood for Love. Jefferson recreated it as Moody’s Mood for Love, which became a big hit when recorded by the rhythm and blues man King Pleasure in 1952.
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