Born in Washington, D.C., in 1934, Shirley Horn’s contra-alto voice and piano skills have influenced generations of artists.
“She’s beautiful,” Quincy Jones told The Washington Post about Horn in 1982. Jones produced two of Horn’s albums in the early 1960s.
“To me she was the prototype for what Roberta Flack ended up doing,” Jones continued, referencing another celebrated artist whose career took off in the D.C. area. “Sometimes you can end up being a little ahead of your time.
As a youth, Horn studied classical piano at Howard University’s Junior School of Music.
She was known for her distinctive singing voice, and the slower pace of her music. She enunciated every word in the lyrics so that listeners felt emotion from everything she sang.
Close friends, Horn and Miles Davis were both National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Masters. According to an interview from NEA, in 1963, Horn and Davis were to record the song “You Won’t Forget Me” but couldn’t do it because of a death in Horn’s family. They finally recorded the song in 1990.
“We both felt the same about the use of silence. We got that from each other,” said Horn in a NEA interview.
In 1998, Horn recorded the album “I Remember Miles” in tribute to Davis, the legendary trumpeter, composer, and bandleader. She received a Grammy award for the album.
Traveling across the nation and Europe, Horn collaborated with many jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Toots Thielemans, Ron Carter, Carmen McRae, Roy Hargrove, and Wynton Marsalis.
Horn, who lived in the Brookland community in Northeast D.C., died on Oct. 20, 2005.
