Sandra King, British jazz singer heard across Europe, has died at 75

Sandra King, a British jazz singer whose recordings for European radio orchestras earned her the nickname "a phenomenal sorceress of song" from critic Rex Reed, has died at 75, JazzTimes reported August 17. She died August 11 at St. Wilfrid's Hospice in West Sussex, England, after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer; her death was announced by her nephew, Matt Fairbrass.

From 1969 into the late 1990s, King's voice reached jazz radio listeners across England, Germany, Denmark, Holland and other European countries through recordings made with orchestras for broadcast, backed by arrangers including Robert Farnon and pianist and composer Richard Rodney Bennett. She rarely tampered with a melody, a restraint the Scottish pianist Pat Smythe, who helped launch her career, taught her directly: "It's what you leave out that's important," he told her.

King was born Sandra Fairbrass in East London in 1950 and got her start singing in jazz pubs with her pianist brother Richard, who taught her Charlie Parker solos when she was 11. At one of those pubs, the American jazz singer Mark Murphy overheard her and told her, "Kid, you've got a hell of a voice." Murphy later recalled his own astonishment: "Here was this 17-year-old girl and she sounded as mature as a 40-year-old woman." Murphy arranged for her to meet Smythe, who took the teenager under his wing.

Smythe brought King to a rehearsal at Ronnie Scott's on February 1, 1969, telling her, "This will be your audition for Ronnie." Stan Getz, closing an engagement there that night, walked up and asked her, "Would you like to do a song with me?" She sang "A Sleepin' Bee" with Getz on the spot, and club owner Ronnie Scott, who had been listening from a table, offered her a three-week run opening for Horace Silver: "Hello, kid," he said. "How would you like to come work here?"

Critic Benny Green wrote her first major review after an early solo engagement at London's Pickwick Club, calling her "a born singer, with a maturity quite staggering in one so inexperienced." Her 1969 debut album, Warm and Swinging: Sandra King Sings the Big Hits of Henry Mancini, was conducted by arranger Ken Moule, and led to broadcast work with Holland's Metropole Orchestra, the BBC Radio Orchestra and Big Band, and Hamburg's NDR Big Band, where her jazz repertoire ranged from Brazilian songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim to a cover of Kate Bush's "The Man with the Child in His Eyes." Arranger Robert Farnon, whom Andre Previn once called "the greatest writer for strings in the world," told her: "Sandra, you're one of my very favorite singers. Find something you would like and I would love to do an arrangement for you."

King made her American debut on April 4, 1982, performing a Vernon Duke songbook program with Smythe at Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery of Art, a concert broadcast by NPR and later released on Audiophile Records; "What Is There to Say?" became her trademark song from it. Critic Joel Siegel wrote in the liner notes that the resulting album was, to him, "one of the essential collections of American popular song." It was one of King and Smythe's last collaborations: he died of cancer the following year, and her accompanist Bob Cornford died of a heart attack two months after that.

King spent part of the 1980s and 1990s living periodically in New York, recording albums with Bennett and performing at the jazz club J's, before returning to England in 1997 to care for her ailing mother. She later married Andy Dobson, settled in Bognor Regis, and sang in public for the last time around 2010, while on vacation in Italy. "I don't miss it," she told JazzTimes.

In a visit weeks before she died, King told the magazine plainly that she had a fabulous life. "I've had a fabulous life," she said, adding, "Look at the people who admired me: Bill Evans! Stan Getz! I'm so proud of that!"