Jazz, blues and pop singer Ernie Andrew dies; towering figure on the Central Avenue music scene
Few artists besides expert jazz and blues singer Ernie Andrews, who died Monday at 94, could claim to owe their big break to the iconic film star Betty Grable, and fewer still could boast that their music teacher was the famed New Orleans jazz trumpeter Bunk Johnson.
Andrews earned his most prominent platform after bandleader Harry James, then married to Andrews fan Grable, asked him to join the Harry James Orchestra in 1959. The singer accepted and for the next decade toured with the orchestra nationally and internationally. It was a musically conservative gig, however, that wasn’t especially suitable for Andrews’ ability to let loose with octave-spanning expressions of individuality.
By the time the family arrived in Los Angeles in 1945, Andrews was already well schooled in live performance. “We’d go to stage shows and there I saw all the greats: Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmie Lunceford, Earl Hines,” Andrews told The Times in 1994. “I saw so many shows that I knew I wanted to be a part of all that, but didn’t know how to do it.”
Then again, by the mid-’50s, the timing wasn’t right for a versatile young jazz and blues singer looking for smash hits. “Rock ’n’ roll came, and then after that it was rhythm and blues,” Andrews said in “Blues for Central Avenue.” “I really tried to make a change — just to give it a shot. But it just didn’t feel right with me.”
Andrews, added Minor, “understood not only the music he was singing but the story. He was a storyteller. He had you as soon as he started the first line. You’d go. ‘I need to hear the rest of this story.’” Minor noted that Andrews had high expectations of his backing players, and could be blunt in his criticism. “But by the end of the night, he would always pull me to the side and say, ‘You know, we’re hard on you because they’re not going to be light on you out there in the real world.
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