Remembering the 'Sweet Soul' of Al Jarreau

Success didn’t come early or easily for Al Jarreau, but when the vocalist finally broke through in the mid 1970s, he changed the musical landscape.

A brilliantly inventive scat singer, Jarreau excelled at just about every musical style he touched. The only singer to win Grammy Awards in the Jazz, R&B and Pop categories, he died on Sunday, Feb. 12 in Los Angeles at the age of 76 just days after his manager announced that the singer was retiring from decades of international touring.

In many ways Jarreau’s passing marks the end of an era, in that he might be the last of his kind: A jazz-steeped African-American male singer who broke through as a pop star. Bobby McFerrin followed in his Bay Area footsteps, expanding on Jarreau’s instrumental palette as a scat singer, but after McFerrin scored a Top 40 hit he began turning his attention to the classical world. Jarreau thrived over decades of changing musical tastes, influencing countless singers and instrumentalists. His imprint is evident on pianist Robert Glasper, a gifted jazz musician who’s also found a broader audience via R&B.

The son of a vicar turned welder, Jarreau didn’t start on a path likely to produce a musical pioneer. He grew up in a working-class family in Milwaukee where it was drilled into him that he was going to get a college education. After earning a master's degree in psychology, he moved to San Francisco in the late 1960s and began doing social work, but he also found time to indulge his love of music, hooking up with an ambitious young pianist named George Duke.

"I was doing rehabilitation counseling during the day and singing nights with George,” Jarreau told me in a 2006 interview. “We were swinging. This was the day of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead coming on the scene, and there George and I were, holding forth in this little jazz club, packing them in on weekends, and kind of swimming up-stream."

When he decided to pursue music full-time, Jarreau moved down to Los Angeles and spent the first half of the '70s on the road. But instead of using the standard piano, bass and drums rhythm section preferred by most jazz singers, Jarreau kept expenses low and musical options high by performing accompanied only by an electric guitarist.

The duo format gave him the space to develop his trademark scatting technique, as he laid down his own bass lines while imitating various horns. He was singing mostly the same American Songbook standards, jazz tunes and bossa nova hits as other vocalists, but his versions transformed the songs into extended scat excursions.

“I suddenly found all this space to go like this,” he said, launching into a walking bass line with a percussive beat. “Just after the George Duke period I found all of the stuff that’s my thumbprint these days.”

Jarreau was well into his 30s when he finally broke through in 1975 with We Got By, an album that won widespread critical praise. In jazz terms, he set an unsurpassed benchmark with his 1977 live double album, Look to the Rainbow, though he probably reached his commercial zenith with his hit theme song to the popular TV show “Moonlighting.” In the '90s, his music seemed tailored for the adult contemporary radio format, but he continued to expand his sound.

He earned his seventh Grammy Award (under the best traditional R&B vocal category) for his collaboration with guitarist George Benson and vocalist Jill Scott on Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child." His last album was 2014’s homage to his lifelong buddy, My Old Friend: Celebrating George Duke, a project featuring guest artists like Lalah Hathaway, Marcus Miller, Dianne Reeves and Dr. John. Right up until the end, he never tried to limit himself.

“I heard that music from Haight Ashbury,” Jarreau said. “I was listening to Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. There are lots of different people inside me, including Sly Stone and James Brown. That’s why my music sounds like a lot of different things at different times.”

He was the smooth R&B crooner celebrating new love, the agile scat trickster navigating a steeplechase bebop line, and a vocal horn player evoking a muted trumpet. What united all of Al Jarreau’s different sounds was the sweet soul underneath.