Joe DiMonte

Creativity of jazz great Sandy Staley set her apart

Buzz up!By Tom Yerace, VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH
Friday, September 4, 2009

In a 1984 Valley News Dispatch story, Brackenridge resident and legendary jazz singer Sandy Staley recalled the guidance her father gave her.

She said Bill Staley, a trumpet player and band leader whose band she started singing with at age 4, cautioned her about being self-indulgent.

"He taught me you are there to perform for the public and not yourself," Staley said.

The thousands of people for whom she performed during her long career in the Pittsburgh jazz scene, probably would attest that she took his words to heart.

Sandy Staley, a member of the Pittsburgh Jazz Hall of Fame, died Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009, after a long battle with a respiratory illness. She was 69.

In that same 1984 article, she also recalled: "My dad always said, 'You don't just want to be a singer. There are hundreds of singers. You want to be a musician and know about what you are singing."

Don Aliquo, a prominent jazz saxophonist and Lower Burrell resident, said that's exactly what she did.

"I'll just miss completely her musicianship," Aliquo said. "It requires more than just being a vocalist. It requires that she sing with, number one, a lot of feeling and a lot of jazz feeling; number two that she sing in tune and with jazz inflections.

"She just had the balance of knowing the melody and where to embellish. She just sang the melody, good in tune and with good feeling."

Frank Cunimondo, a renowned jazz pianist who lives in Harrison, said he knew Staley for 35 or 40 years. She was a regular performer when he owned a jazz nightclub in Verona, Cunimondo's Keyboard.

"She was a regular down there," Cunimondo said. "She was a really big hit down there. Everybody loved Sandy.

"I used to always announce her as 'The Great One.' "

He described her singing style as "very loose and very improvisational."

"She didn't stick to any certain format," he said. "She just sang off the top of her head, whatever she felt."

As for her greatest attribute as a performer, Cunimondo said, "It was her ability to sing on the fly. She was so creative, she could take any song and make it into something.

"What she used to do at my club, she used to sing the menu. She would pick up the menu and just start singing it, making a song out of it."

He said while Staley did not try to emulate the great Ella Fitzgerald, her style was reminiscent of Fitzgerald, including the ability to sing scat, carry a melody using sounds or nonsense syllables. He said she had the ability to make her voice sound like a trumpet, which always drew laughs from the audiences at his club.

"She was not only a great vocalist, she was a great entertainer," Cunimondo said. "You could put Sandy up against anyone. Had Sandy been anywhere else but Pittsburgh, she probably would have been a great international star."

Aliquo agreed that Staley could have gone on to bigger things if she had wanted to.

"She could have made the national scene but never truly had the wherewithal and never tried it," Aliquo said. "And I don't think she ever really wanted to."

In that 1984 newspaper profile of her, Staley acknowledged as much.

"I could never be on the road," Staley said. "I'm not a traveling person. ... I love Pittsburgh. I love my home, a small town. I'm realistic."

Joe Negri, prominent Pittsburgh guitarist and former WTAE-TV music director, said Staley often performed with him and his brother, Bobby.

"She has always been one of my favorite people," Negri said. "We've been like family for many, many years. She had a great love of life and a lot of style about her. She was an impeccable jazz singer. She knew so many songs."

"One thing about Sandy, she would not do what she did not want to do," Cunimondo said. "She would not do anything for commercial reasons.

"She used to say, 'A lot of people do the top 40, I do the bottom 4,000.'

"She did all the good songs," Cunimondo said. "She had the respect of all the musicians. She was one of Pittsburgh's best."

__________________
"Clark Terry - C.T.,as his friends call him,is not only a master of the trumpet and flugelhorn,but a master musician and a leader to the manor born." - Dan Morgenstern.