Film Forum

“If you want to learn how to sing, listen to Sarah Vaughan."
– Ella Fitzgerald

Following Film Forum tributes to iconic African American artists Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, we now celebrate “The Divine One,” Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990), born on this day 100 years ago. This one-of-a-kind program of rare film performances, produced by Bruce Goldstein and compiled and presented by author, producer, and Wall Street Journal jazz critic Will Friedwald, covers Vaughan’s five-decade career, from her roots in Newark to the height of her international fame. Along the way we meet such legendary co-stars as Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Dizzy Gillespie, and Michel Legrand.

"From the moment she won the Apollo Theater amateur contest at age 18, Sarah Vaughan immediately joined the pantheon of great jazz singers. While Ella was the voice of pure melody, Dinah the voice of the blues, and Billie the voice of the human condition, Sarah was the voice of The Angels. "The Divine One," or “Sassy,” as she was nicknamed, was the closest jazz ever had to an artist with operatic chops: she took a technique normally associated with Verdi and Puccini to extoll the glories of Gershwin and Ellington. Likewise, she took the pure power and passion of the great gospel singers and brought it to bear on earthly matters like love and the blues. Hers was a voice that often seemed to be more than merely human, and yet her greatest strength was not the purely rapturous quality of the voice but her down-to-earth nature; not her divinity but her humanity. She was the very spirit of human playfulness, of spontaneous melodic invention, and of effortless swing." – Will Friedwald