I imagine my interest in music must have started when I was a baby. My father was a very musical man. Not a performer, but someone who loved good music. I don’t remember this, but I’m told that as a child, I used to know all the popular tunes of the day, like most children do today because of listening to music that’s being played constantly on radio and television. I found out later on that there were two or three relatives of mine who were musically inclined. I mean musically inclined to the point of having good sounding voices. They could have been singers if they had wanted to be, but I guess they never did. So maybe that’s where whatever musical talent I have came from.

I’m the only one in my family that’s in this business. I have been fortunate: they all wished me well and they might have wished me their talent. Their talent and maybe a bit of my own have helped me get where I am today. I had to become one of two things in life: someone who was musically inclined and good enough to be able to perform or else a good audience of music. I just happen to be a performer.
When I was still in my teens, I met a woman who became my idol. She was my idol then and continued to be my idol; though she is dead now, she is still my idol. That’s Billie Holiday. I met Lady when I was very young, and she was one of the most impressive women I have ever met in my life. She really scared me as far as singing was concerned. She seemed so utterly perfect to me that I felt anything after her would be anticlimactic. Consequently, I was afraid of becoming what I had hoped to become at an earlier stage in my life. That was a very important phase to me. After that I had some minor experiences with Benny Carter’s band, Mercer Ellington’s and Count Basie’s band, just short stints which really couldn’t influence me much because I was too young. What helped me was Billie Holiday, which happened at a very early stage in my life.

The next thing was going to Chicago [sings]: "Sorry that I can’t take you…" I’m getting carried away! Anyway, I went to Chicago and liked the city. In order to stay I had to make a living. A friend of mine who was an ex-chorus girl knew I could play and sing, which I would do just for friends, not professionally. She said, "Why don’t you take a job playing and singing?" I said to her, "Lulu, that sounds great, but I don’t know if I’m capable." She said, "I know someone who wants a girl singer and piano player. If you go and you don’t make it at least you tried." I said, "It’s hard for a woman like myself, who is an Aries, to take a defeat. I would rather hear nothing than hear no." She convinced me, I went, and the man there was beautiful to me. I will never forget him. He gave me a job for two weeks, with a two-week option to play the piano and sing. He advanced me money to join the union. I stayed two weeks, and he picked up the option.

I realized that my piano playing was very limited, because I had never intended to become a real pianist except just to play for myself or to rehearse a tune. It became essential to play better. I stayed at that job for seventeen weeks. During that time I hired a piano, and as my repertoire was very shallow, I rehearsed every day until my repertoire grew bigger. I stayed in Chicago and worked there for three and a half years, which was the greatest experience I could ever have had. I don’t care that it happened in Chicago. I don’t care where it happened, as long as it happened. I found out that I could make a living playing and singing. My idols were great pianists like Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum, so I could not be fooled by my own piano playing at all. My piano playing was just a means to get where I wanted to get as a singer.

Going by my experience, it is one of the most important things. I don’t believe I would have whatever reputation I have today if I had not had any knowledge of the piano. That experience of studying music is what put me where I am today. Without it I would perhaps not even be singing, or of I had become a singer, it might not be as impressive as whatever it is I do now. I have said this for years and I still think it is extremely important. It is important if you want to be a lasting artist. Any artist who really knows what he or she is doing musically will last. I think it’s the non-professional professionals who fade out. They earn a lot of money in a minute, yet don’t make it somehow. After they're gone, people don’t even remember who they were. That’s why it’s very important to know your craft.

When you are onstage, are you singing for yourself, for the musicians, or for the audience?

I’m glad you asked me that. That’s one of the most important things in the world. I can answer this question better than a lot of other questions. I have to sing for myself. Let’s look at this thing in the proper light. I am involved because I am the one doing what I am doing. Right? I only do what I do because I want to please the people who have taken the time to come and hear me. I have to do it for somebody; because that’s the only way I can find out whether I was right or wrong to feel good about whatever I’ve been doing. Consequently I sing for the musicians, too, because I need them playing competently behind me, doing what I want them to do for the people sitting there. So it really is a combination of doing it for everyone. If the musicians are good- and they have to be for me to feel good- I’m going to do my best for the audience; so it’s really a combination of musicians, myself and audience.

I want the musicians to like it too, ‘cause if they don’t like it they’re not going to be able to play for me, even if they are competent. If they don’t like what I’m doing and if they’re only playing for the sake of the bread, it’s no good. They’ve got to dig me. I dig them because I’m hiring them. Right?

Of course my main way of earning a living is pleasing my audience, so that I can pay the cats and get paid, too, so I can go home happy. Actually it’s a combination of pleasing everybody. If you can start out on stage pleasing each other, ninety-nine percent of the time you please the audience too. Audiences know who you are, they know what you do and they have come to hear you in person. You have those three things going for you before you open your mouth. You only have to do your thing, ‘cause that’s what they came for. If you do it well and you’re not inebriated or under the influence of anything, you’ll be sincere, which is all you need. It’s such a beautiful business we’re in, A.T. I guess all the arts are beautiful, but I think we have a better chance of feeling good about ourselves, and we have more incentive to go on, because we get confidence from the people who come to listen to us. The music business is one of the finest businesses in the world. You make contact with people immediately, and they tell you what they like and what they don’t like and that gives you a sense of what you’re doing. You might want to go in one direction and they say no, they like the other way, so you go in the other direction. That’s what you’re really there for, to entertain. If I had to sing for myself, I would never hear a note, because I’m not here for that.

That’s a question I have been asked many times. I am jazz oriented; if it weren’t for jazz I wouldn’t be anywhere. I only want to be categorized as a good or a bad singer. I originally started as a so-called jazz singer. I was dubbed that somewhere along the line, and I never really thought about it. I really didn’t start out to be a jazz singer; I just started out to sing. But it was awfully hard, as it is for any musician, to play and not to improvise in some sort of way on the melody. If doing that made me a jazz singer, then yes, that’s what I am. I have also done many tunes that couldn’t possibly be called jazz tunes and made many single records that were not jazz.

Either people like what I do or they don’t. They can say: "She has a good voice, but I wish she wouldn’t do…" I don’t care, but they must not categorize me. I know what people expect when you sing a song, and if you scat, that’s jazz; that’s understandable. I hear people who are not categorized as jazz singers, such as Ray Charles, Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and many others who all making exorbitant amounts of money. I haven’t heard them sing one song the way it was written yet. If they can deviate from the melody, which is categorized as jazz, where does it begin and where does it end? What makes one person a jazz singer and another one not a jazz singer? Is it a question of how much improvising they do? I don’t understand it.

Today we have contemporary music, a lot of which is fantastic. A lot of it is also garbage. I’m very happy about contemporary developments in music, because to keep doing all the rest of my life eight bars and a channel and eight bars, and 4/4-time and3/4 time would have driven me crazy. I’m happy we have 7/8 time and 5/4 time; I’m happy we’re saying something different than moon June and love dove. I love what I’m doing now. I do Beatles tunes. Incidentally, I think they are excellent songwriters. I don’t think they are so great singing or doing their thing, but their songs are fantastic. If they want to call them jazz, I don’t mind just as long as they call me to do it.

I would like to do some acting. I would like to try something else that is a part of what I do, only without music. I wouldn’t particularly want it to be a musical- not that I would turn a musical down- but I would prefer something dramatic or in the comedy field. I don’t know if I can do it, but I sure would like to try.

A lot of people have told me the same thing. First I would like to convince myself that maybe I do have a knack for it, but I’ll never know unless somebody comes along and offers me an opportunity.

Yes, I do. I listen mostly to instrumental music. Being a lover of the piano, Oscar Peterson happens to be my favorite all-around pianist. There are many other pianists I love, but I won’t go into it because there are too many of them. Oscar is my favorite because he encompasses everything. There are pianists I like because of one thing and pianists I like because of another. But overall I like Oscar best.

That’s a hard question. Accompanying someone cannot be explained by a singer to a pianist. He either knows what to do or he doesn’t. An accompanist and a guy who can play the piano are two different things. You have to find someone who is completely sympathetic to the soloist as a singer and not to the soloist as an instrumentalist. It’s a completely different thing. Even if a guy can play his buns off, it does not necessarily mean he can accompany a singer. There are some guys who can accompany a singer and who can’t play worth a damn as far as soloing is concerned. That’s the difference, and it’s a vast difference. A guy must really love to do it. He cannot do it because he has nothing else to do.

Of course, I listen to John Birks Gillespie, and to the Kenny Clark – Francy Boland band; I listen to Miles, to Freddy Hubbard, to Cannonball Adderly, and to Blood, Sweat and Tears. These are my favorite groups I’m mentioning to you, and I know I’m going to leave some out. I love music only when I can communicate with it. If I can’t communicate with it, it leaves me cold.

You asked me about avant-garde music. Well, that’s what the avant-garde does to me; I’m sorry. If there are six people in a group and all six are playing something different there is no way for me to know who to concentrate on or what’s going on. If I go to a club to hear somebody, I’m going there primarily because I believe that they are going to play the kind of music that brought me in there in the first place. I believe if it’s more than one person. There has to be some kind of discipline. If you’re playing by yourself, right on, anything you want. But when you’ve got three, four or five people you start off with a mode of some kind or a set pattern of chords for all of you to play for the first chorus; then after the first chorus, what happens? Where do they go? Why do they all have to go in opposite directions? When I find out how I can get some musical satisfaction out of it, then I might like it.

You have to change according to where you are. If you’re doing a radio show and there’s nobody there but you and musicians and technicians, that’s one thing. If you’re doing a broadcast or a TV show in front of an audience, that’s another thing. Doing a concert with nothing there other than the people you’re entertaining is still another thing. If you’re cutting a record in a studio alone with just the musicians, that’s another thing again.

First of all, TV I can do without. I never feel too comfortable on TV, mainly because I can’t see all those twenty or thirty million people that I’m supposed to be singing to. Consequently it’s like singing to the audience in the studio. Right? Which doesn’t make up one iota of the people you’re being seen by and who are the real judges of the show; that leaves me cold. I don’t mind because eventually I can sit down at the panel and talk, and I hope I can make up whatever I lacked while I was singing with some intelligence.

I really prefer to sing a concert for people who have paid admission to hear me. I think I do my best in that atmosphere. I never do my best recording, because I never know the song until I record it and start doing it, and six months later it’s right. Somebody says to you two weeks from now or four weeks from now, we’re going to do a record; here are twelve songs. You learn them and you learn them, and you really learn them. But you don’t know them until later.

I’ve never had the opportunity, unless it happened to be a song I did with my trio and that I decided to put in an album with a big band. Then I know the song and I can do my thing. But not the songs that we sit down and pick out two weeks before the session. Some of them are utterly unfamiliar. I’ve never heard them before. Some of them I might know, but I have never sung before. It isn’t really done right unless I really dig the song and take out the rhythm-section parts after the session. Then we’ll start doing it in clubs, and by the time the record comes out, I’m doing it completely different.

We’ve been talking for days, A.T.

I think this is a fantastic idea of yours. I love to voice opinions and to be among such people as I’m going to be involved with in this documentary that you’re putting down in book form. I’m very flattered that you chose to interview me. I just hope it will be worthy of all the other people that you’ve interviewed and that I’ll have contributed something to somebody.