Marilyn Moore (June 16, 1930* – March 19, 1992) was an American jazz singer during the 1950s.
Marilyn Montez Moore was born to Montez and Lester Moore, backstage at a Chicago theatre, the Moores moved to Oklahoma City. Marilyn began performing at the age of three, singing and dancing in the finale of her family’s vaudeville act. She attended Jefferson and Edgmere grade schools, Harding junior high school and graduated from Classen High School in 1946. As a teenager, she decided to concentrate on singing and soon turned to jazz, working in clubs in Oklahoma City and Chicago.
During her high school years, she performed with Herbie Fields and later with Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker in Chicago. Following graduation, Marilyn joined the Woody Herman band then went on tour with Benny Goodman and his orchestra. Twenty-five years after her parents had played there, she was the featured vocalist with Charley Barnett at the Apollo Theatre in New York.
From the early 50’s she sang with various groups, including those led by Ray McKinley, Boyd Raeburn and Al Cohn, whom she married in 1953 and became a lifelong resident of New York City. They had two children, Lisa and Joe Cohn (now a leading jazz guitarist), and Moore’s life became focused upon her home and family.
Here’s “I’m Just A Lucky So And So” from above LP.
In 1957, however, she was invited to record for Bethlehem and the resulting album, on which she is backed by Cohn, Joe Wilder, Don Abney, Barry Galbraith and other leading jazzmen, attracted a great deal of interest.
The following year, she was cast in a jazz show, Oh Captain!, recorded by MGM Records with Leonard Feather’s jazz treatment of tunes from the musical. A heavyweight jazz critic and unabashed fan of Marilyn Moore, he featured Moore on five of the nine cuts, backed in various configurations (quintet, quartet, big band) by the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Dick Hyman, Oscar Pettiford, and the Johnson-Hinton rhythm section.
Soon afterwards, Moore and Cohn were divorced and once again she was tied to home-making and family-raising. Despite a deep desire to go back to professional singing and make more records, she never returned. A warm and sensitive voice marked Moore’s work and in her phrasing and overall style there is evidence of her affinity for Billie Holiday and according to jazz critic Will Friedwald, Holiday and Moore were friends.
She died in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA on 19 March 1992, at the age of 61.
Overlooked and under-recorded, the quality of Moore’s singing on her first album, reissued on CD in 1990, marks her out as one of the great losses to the world of jazz.
(Edited from AllMusic, Timeless Spirits & Wikipedia) ( * Some sources give 1931 as birth year)