Connee Boswell
photo: nbc / ernest a. bachrach · public domain ↗Connee Boswell was the lead voice of the New Orleans trio the Boswell Sisters, whose daring, tempo-shifting vocal-jazz arrangements in the early 1930s made "real" jazz singing commercially palatable years before it was fashionable elsewhere. After the group disbanded in 1936 she carried on as a hugely popular solo recording and radio star into the 1940s, her warm, technically immaculate voice — sustained by a breath control she credited to studying Caruso's records — becoming a direct model for the next generation of jazz vocalists, Ella Fitzgerald above all.
Boswell said she was "definitely influenced" by Mamie Smith as a girl, going every Friday night to New Orleans's Lyric Theatre to hear her sing, and named her — alongside Caruso — as one of her two formative musical influences.
listen forListen for the big, declarative, blues-shouter power Boswell brings to her lower register on up-tempo numbers — the same room-filling belt she admired in Smith's live and recorded performances.
Boswell said she studied Caruso's records trying to copy his phrasing and credited his breathing technique specifically with teaching her to "sing and breathe properly," even on blues and swing material far removed from opera.
listen forListen for Boswell's long, unbroken vocal lines and controlled dynamic swells on ballads — operatic-scale breath control applied to popular song, most explicit on her own swing arrangement of the Martha aria Caruso himself recorded.