A VOICE THAT SPANNED CONTINENTS AND CENTURIES

The trouble with singers who insist on being versatile is that they make everyone else look lazy. Dame Cleo Laine, who died on July 24th at her home in Wavendon, England, aged 97, was particularly guilty of this sort of thing. Her nearly four-octave voice wandered from gravelly blues to ethereal coloratura with the casual ease of someone changing shoes. While most performers spend entire careers perfecting a single style, Laine collected Grammy nominations in jazz, pop and classical categories like stamps from exotic countries.

Born Clementine Dinah Hitching in 1927 in Southall, she arrived into circumstances that seemed designed to teach lessons about crossing boundaries. Her father was a Jamaican war veteran who busked between building jobs; her mother, an English farmer’s daughter disowned by her family for the crime of falling in love across racial lines. If there was a metaphor lurking in young Clementine’s background about the arbitrary nature of musical and social barriers, she spent the next seven decades proving it right.

The transformation from Clementina Campbell Langridge (her first married name) to Cleo Laine happened in 1951 when she auditioned for John Dankworth’s jazz group. The band rechristened her because, as she later noted with characteristic directness, her real name “sounded like a cowboy.” Dankworth asked his musicians what they thought. “I think she’s got something,” he ventured. The Scottish trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar, described as the group’s “hardest nut,” was more succinct: “Something? She’s got everything.”

Deuchar, it turned out, was underselling the case. Laine’s party trick of matching the band “glass for glass” during tours of British nightclubs suggested someone uninterested in conventional expectations about how female vocalists should behave. Her marriage to Dankworth in 1958 created what the press inevitably dubbed Britain’s “royal couple of jazz,” though their approach to the music was more democratic than regal. They combined bebop with baroque, blues with classical precision, creating arrangements that treated genres as suggestions rather than rules.

American audiences discovered her in the 1970s at Carnegie Hall, where her vocal acrobatics left critics groping for adequate metaphors. The Washington Post’s Mark Kernis managed this: “Laine can dip effortlessly into smoky lows and then reach through the stratosphere for perfectly pitched highs. And she can hold most notes at either end long enough for you to get a cup of coffee.” Whether this was entirely a compliment remained unclear, but accuracy was never in doubt.

Her theatrical instincts proved equally unpredictable. Beginning with serious drama at London’s Royal Court Theatre, she graduated to West End musicals, most memorably a 1971 revival of Show Boat that ran for hundreds of performances. Critics noted her uncanny ability to locate the laugh in sophisticated wordplay while maintaining dramatic weight, a skill that would prove essential when she encountered Stephen Sondheim’s verbal obstacle courses.

Laine and Sondheim were natural collaborators, though neither probably expected it. His songs demanded precisely the sort of technical precision and emotional intelligence that she had spent decades developing. Where other performers often made Sondheim’s intricate lyrics sound like crossword puzzles set to music, Laine found the human feelings buried beneath the clever rhymes. Her interpretations suggested that complexity need not come at the expense of feeling, a lesson that certain contemporary singer-songwriters might profitably study.

The secret to her success appeared to be a refusal to treat different musical styles as foreign languages requiring separate passports. Whether navigating Noël Coward’s brittle wit or Duke Ellington’s harmonic sophistication, she sounded like herself rather than a tourist. This may seem obvious, but the history of crossover artists is littered with performers who approached unfamiliar genres like anthropological expeditions.

Her only Grammy win came in 1986 for Cleo at Carnegie: The 10th Anniversary Concert, though by then she had been nominated in enough categories to stock a small music store. The delay seemed less like oversight than cosmic timing. The recording industry, never famous for rushing to judgment, had perhaps needed a decade to figure out what pigeonhole she belonged in before realizing that the whole filing system was inadequate.

Dankworth died in 2010, just hours before they were scheduled to perform together. Laine gave the concert anyway, informing the audience of her loss only at evening’s end. “That’s what he would have wanted,” she explained, demonstrating either admirable professionalism or the sort of sangfroid that comes from a lifetime in show business. Probably both.

Even as her voice dimmed in later years, she continued working until 2018, suggesting either unusual dedication or an inability to think of anything better to do with her time. Derek Jewell’s 1970s assessment that she was “quite simply the best singer in the world” had seemed like typical critical hyperbole until one actually listened to her range of work. The claim became harder to dismiss.

Her career stands as a rebuke to the modern tendency toward specialization. In an era when musicians are encouraged to find their lane and stay in it, Laine treated the entire musical highway as her personal property. She proved that excellence need not be imprisoned by category, leaving behind a body of work that defies convenient summary while demanding universal respect. Whether this was a blessing or a curse for those who had to follow her probably depends on how much they enjoyed looking lazy by comparison.