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SATURDAY | AUGUST 12 | 4 PM
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SUNDAY | SEPTEMBER 17 | 7 PM
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PRESS RELEASE
Media Contact:
Sue Auclair, President
Sue Auclair Promotions
For Immediate Release:
August 1, 2023
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Award-winning Documentary
About Providence-Born Jazz Legend Carol Sloane
to Screen at Rhode Island International Film Festival
Saturday | August 12 | 4 PM
Film also features her longtime pianist, close friend
and ‘Providence pal,” the late Mike Renzi
Sloane: A Jazz Singer
Set To Also Screen At
The Newburyport Documentary Film Festival
Sunday, Sept 17 | 7 PM at the Firehouse Center for The Arts
The largely unknown star was a 1960s regular on The Tonight Show.
She opened for Oscar Peterson at The Village Vanguard.
She was often compared to Ella Fitzgerald.
And she spent most of her life just trying to pay her rent.
Providence, RI and Newburyport, MA--World-renowned singer and Providence native, the late Carol Sloane is the subject of the new feature-length documentary, Sloane: A Jazz Singer, directed by Michael Lippert.
The film has also been selected by the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival with a screening on Sunday, September 17 at 7:00 pm at The Firehouse Center for the Arts, 1 Market Square, Newburyport, Massachusetts. This event will be celebrated by several close friends of Carol's, notably Ron & Joyce Della Chiesa, Sue Auclair and Carolyn Ingles, all of whom will be on hand to tell funny "Sloane" stories. Tickets for the Newburyport festival will be available soon.
The Providence, RI Connection:
As a teenager at North Providence High School, a young Carol Sloane (then Carol Morvan) would get dressed up and sneak into the city’s famed Celebrity Club where she would intently listen to the world’s finest jazz artists onstage. She also spent many hours at the record shop next door, where store owner Carl Henry ensured she was tuned in to all the latest sounds, while introducing her to many of the outstanding musicians who were playing at the club.
Carol made her professional debut with the Ed Drew Orchestra in Providence when she was fourteen-years-old. She was introduced at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1961, became a 1960s regular on The Tonight Show and opened for Oscar Peterson at The Village Vanguard. Throughout her career, she was often compared to Ella Fitzgerald.
Here are some fun videos from the film of Sloane and Mike Renzi as they prepared for their final Birdland show:
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The North Shore of Boston Connection:
Carol Sloane was a resident of Stoneham, Massachusetts after she met and married talent booker and magician, Buck Spurr at a little jazz club called The Starlight Roof in Boston. The two love birds shared a Stoneham apartment from 1986 until their passings.
Filmed mainly in 2019, it was awarded Best Documentary this year at its world premiere at the Santa Fe Film Festival in February, 30 days after Carol Sloane passed away on January 23 near Boston due to long-term complications from a stroke.
In June, the film was awarded Best Documentary Feature at the Manhattan International Film Festival in New York City. It was also named Best Documentary at the Buffalo Roots Film Festival in Rome, Italy and has been screened in La Femme Independent Film Festival in Cannes, the Nepal America International Film Festival, as well as in festivals in Orlando, FL, Louisville, KY and Winston-Salem, NC. The documentary is also an official selection of the Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival hosted in San Jose, California in August.
The film follows an 82-year-old Sloane in September 2019 in the days leading up to her final live album recording at Birdland Jazz Club in New York City. In revealing interviews and through fascinating archival footage, the film shares reflections on her storied but largely unknown career involving everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to The Rolling Stones.
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Sloane was inspired as a teen by the great Black singers of the day like Carmen McRae and Sarah Vaughan, whom she heard on late night radio performing standards at NYC clubs like Birdland. She later became an overnight sensation herself in the 1960s after stunning crowds with an acapella performance at The Newport Jazz Festival, where she landed a two-record deal with Columbia. The film reveals, however, that her star faded almost as quickly as it formed, particularly when rock’s British Invasion swept popular culture and rendered her professionally obsolete and often penniless. Despite singing and touring the world with everyone from Oscar Peterson to Ella Fitzgerald, offering advice to an unknown Barbra Streisand, impressing luminaries like Johnny Carson and Richard Pryor and producing over 30 albums, she never received one cent in royalties, and is still barely known among the public at large.
The 90-minute documentary investigates how such a staggering talent, once called “Fitzgerald’s rightful heir” by The New York Times, could go so underappreciated, while also exploring the meaning of success in a world where “art don’t pay,” as the artist herself contends. Through a decades-spanning narrative of rare archival footage, intimate and sometimes tearful moments with Sloane, as well as enlightening commentary from industry notables, we learn of this singular artist’s faithful adherence to her craft, despite ever-mounting trials. As she sings in one of her popular tunes by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, “I never went away.”
Through years of ups and downs, director Lippert follows Sloane’s tumultuous career to the unlikeliest of places - from a second act in North Carolina, to major popularity in Japan, only to find endless dead ends and financial strife around nearly every corner. As longtime friend and producer Stephen Barefoot puts it in the film, “That’s just the story of her life: the ups and downs . . . and the downs go very far.”
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CAROL SLOANE AT NEWPORT, 1961 | photo by Bob Bonis
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She was always an after-thought. Critics would frequently comment when speaking about the major female vocal jazz legends of the time, “And then, there’s Carol Sloane.”
The film never loses focus of Sloane’s iron will to keep pursuing her passion, to “always leave the door a little open.” Her place in jazz legacy is illuminated by commentaries from multi-Grammy® winning editor/writer Dan Morgenstern, Grammy®-winning singer Catherine Russell, Emmy-winning composer and musician - the late Mike Renzi, Grammy®-winning pianist Bill Charlap, Duke University Vice-Provost for the Arts John Brown, Emmy®-winning recording engineer Joel Moss, plus notables John McDaniel, Natalie Douglas, Daryl Sherman and others. Together, they reveal to us a flawed but inspiring woman determined to not only stick to her art, but to keep it alive for future generations.
Captured just prior to the 2020 pandemic, the film’s reminder of the social and cultural importance of live jazz, its venues, and the preservation of its history, proves especially timely. At one point during the film, Carol recalls “walking the earth when all the hierarchy of jazz were alive,” and she would perform and attend at all the famous clubs on 52nd Street. “I was surrounded by it and it was so healthy. And then suddenly, it was gone.”
Carol’s 2019 performance at Birdland is the major climactic moment of the film. To pull it off, the crew worked closely with Birdland owner Gianni Valenti, who arranged the performance and live recording with longtime Sloane friend and entertainment attorney Mark Sendroff.
“Everyone knows about Birdland, around the world,” Valenti says in the film. Knowing Birdland’s special historic significance, Lippert wanted to capture Carol’s performance without getting in the way.
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Carol 0n Stage at Birdland with Pianist Mike Renzi, 2019
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“The real joy is seeing just how Sloane defies all preconceived notions about old age, walks up there with an aching back and an incessant film crew following her, and still knocks it out of the park,” Lippert comments. “The young woman who blew everyone away in the 60s is still in there, totally intact, just a little wiser and sassier now.”
Two and a half years after her Birdland performance was filmed and recorded, “Carol Sloane: Live at Birdland” was released in April 2022 by Club 44 Records. It would become Sloane’s very last album.
Carol’s final live performance was at North Carolina’s Clayton Center in October 2019, billed as “Two for the Road, with longtime friend and pianist Mike Renzi. She had plans for more, but the pandemic soon brought performance opportunities to a halt around the globe.
In June 2020, Carol Sloane suffered a stroke and lived in a nursing facility near Boston til her death, only days before the film’s official world premiere in Santa Fe. Mike Renzi, Carol’s longtime musical director with her at the Birdland engagement, passed away in September of 2021. Before she died, Miss Sloane was able to view a close-to-final cut of the film, gave it her blessing and asked that it be dedicated to Mike Renzi.
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Reviews for the film have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Jazz writer Joe Vanderford recently said the film is “a proper couplet to the renowned 20 Feet from Stardom. This film needs to be seen by everyone who loves music – and those who understand the challenges of growing up and growing old...” The film was also called “an invaluable gift” by the New York City Jazz Record, and Boston Jazz Chronicles said “the true summa to [Carol’s] sixty-year career is Michael Lippert’s documentary, Sloane: A Jazz Singer.”
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Carol Sloane, Jazz Singer Who Found Success Early and Late, Dies at 85
After seemingly being on the verge of stardom, she languisted for decades, battered by changing tastes and bad luck, before enjoying a midlife comeback.
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By Penelope Green
The crowd had thinned by the time Carol Sloane, then 24, took the festival stage in Newport, R.I., in July 1961. The Saturday afternoon slot was a showcase for new talent, hence the sparse attendance. Ms. Sloane had chosen to sing “Little Girl Blue.” The pianist knew the tune but not the rarely performed introduction, so she sang it a cappella, hitting every ravishing note.
“When I was very young/The world was younger than I/As merry as a carousel. …”
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Carol Sloane, jazz singer of late-blooming acclaim, dies at 85
By Matt Schudel
January 24, 2023 at 12:00 p.m. EST
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Carol Sloane, a jazz singer who won early acclaim for her sultry interpretations of classic songs, then emerged decades afterward from near-obscurity with a late-career resurgence that brought her fresh recognition as one of the world’s finest song stylists, died Jan. 23 at a senior care center in Stoneham, Mass. She was 85.
The cause was complications from a stroke two years ago, said her stepdaughter, Sandra de Novellis.
Ms. Sloane was among the last singers who came up in the big-band tradition of jazz and swing music and was seen as an heir to the jazz vocal tradition of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and her idol, Carmen McRae.
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Carol Sloane, graceful jazz singer for decades, dies at 85
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Carol Sloane was only 14 and growing up outside of Providence when she began her professional singing career by accompanying an area dance band. She pocketed $11 a week for those early gigs.
“I was independently wealthy,” she told jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason in 1964. “My family let me keep the money.”
During a decades-long career that at one point took a detour to a secretarial job in North Carolina, Ms. Sloane became one of the nation’s memorable jazz singers, even if she sometimes found the term limiting.
“Carmen McRae and Billie Holiday are jazz singers, and I don’t know why,” she told Gleason for a Globe interview. “And I am not a jazz singer, and I don’t know why. I hate categories and all I do is sing the songs I love and the music I love.”
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The Songs Sinatra Sang, 1995
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When I Look IN Your Eyes, 1994
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Sloane at C Grace, Raleigh, NC; May 2018
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