“We asked her to sing ‘How High the Moon,’ but she said, “No puedo, that’s Mama’s song!” recalled Gilberto Torres, a seventy-five-year-old self-proclaimed jazzista whose home in the Santa Amalia district of Havana has been, for the past thirty years, the gathering place of a spirited, almost all-black private dance club called La esquina del jazz, “The Jazz Corner.” To jazzistas in the know, “Mama” is Ella Fitzgerald. Vaughan was reluctant to sing her colleague’s signature material, though in the end she did. On a recent Saturday night meeting of the dance club, an ebullient Gilberto, shouting
...more
