Dame Cleo Laine, British jazz icon and the first Brit to win a GRAMMY award in Jazz, passes away at the age of 97.
Born Clementine Dinah Hitching on October 28, 1927 in Southall, Middlesex (now considered the Greater London area), Dame Cleo was the product of a Jamaican father and an English mother. Her introduction to music came through her father who was a labourer and a busker on the streets while her mother enrolled her in singing and dancing classes.
Dame Cleo started her career in the 1950s at the age of 24 when she auditioned for British jazz multi-instrumentalist and composer John Dankworth’s The Johnny Dankworth Seven. At the time, she was a young wife and mother who had worked several jobs as a hairdresser, a hat-trimmer, a librarian and an associate in a pawn shop. Her audition with Dankworth was successful and she regularly performed with Dankworth’s big bands, Johnny Dankworth & His Orchestra and Johnny Dankworth & His New Radio Orchestra. She divorced her first husband and later married Dankworth in 1958.
In addition to singing, Dame Cleo ventured into acting, playing the lead role in Jamaican-British playwright Barry Beckford’s Flesh to a Tiger which was staged in 1958 followed by The Barren One by another Jamaican playwright Sylvia Wynter in the same year.
Known for her scat singing and four-octave vocal range, Dame Cleo and Sir Dankworth would spend the next five decades touring across the world and releasing close to 40 records in her lifetime. In 1970, they converted an old stable block in the grounds of their home in Milton Keynes into a music venue called The Stables, now considered one of the UK’s beloved music venues presenting around 400 concerts and 200 education events each year.