Artist: Andy Bey
Genre(s):
Vocal
Jazz
Pop
Discography:
American Song
Year: 2005
Tracks: 10
Thuesdays In Chinatown
Year: 2002
Tracks: 11
Shades of Bey
Year: 1998
Tracks: 10
Ballads, Blues and Bey
Year: 1996
Tracks: 10
One of the great unsung heroes of jazz singing, Andy Bey is a commanding interpreter of lyrics wHO has a broad vocal image and a large, rich, full voice. Bey enjoys a belittled following that swears by him; still, he isn't near as well known as he should be. Born and raised in Newark, NJ, non far from New York, Bey was open to wind as a baby and started vocalizing in front of local audiences as early as ashcan School. At some gigs, an eight-year-old Bey was accompanied by tenor adolphe Sax great Hank Mobley. Bey was 13 when, in 1952, he recorded his first base solo record album, Mama's Little Boy's Got the Blues; and he was 17 when he formed Andy & the Bey Sisters with his siblings Salome and Geraldine in 1956. The grouping did a 16-month tour of Europe and recorded trey albums (unitary for RCA Victor in 1961, 2 for Prestige in 1964 and 1965) before breakage up in 1967. In the 1960s and seventies, Bey's vocals were featured by Max Roach, Duke Pearson, and Gary Bartz (for whom he delivered very socio-political lyrics, including some searing condemnations of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War). The 1970s as well launch Bey recording Have and Judgment for Atlantic and start a long association with piano player Horace Silver, wHO featured him conspicuously on many of the religious-themed albums he put out have his own Silveto label in the seventies and 1980s. The LPs contained what Silver termed "metaphysical self-help music" and preached a sort of religious self-help doctrine that wasn't unlike Reverend Ike's message -- regrettably for Silver and Bey, this approaching meant limited distribution and minuscule commercial appeal. Bey continued to run with Silver into the 1990s, when he was featured on Silver's 1993 Columbia appointment It's Got to Be Funky (which pronounced a return to concentrated bop's mainstream and did much better commercially than his "self-help medicine"). Labels Bey recorded for as a drawing card in the 1980s and 1990s included Jazzette, Zagreb, and Evidence, which, in 1996, released the superb Ballads, Blues and Bey. The success of Blues, Ballads and Bey entrap a place for the piano player to stretch out a minuscule and explore his more intimate side. Bey followed with Shades of Bey in 1998 and Tuesdays in Chinatown in 2001, choosing to explore outside the earth of jazz with covers of Nick Drake and Milton Nascimento and others. American Song followed in early 2004.
Jaco Pastorius and Joni Mitchell
