JACKIE AND ROY KRALL

Jackie Cain and her late husband Roy Kral were Fran Landesman’s close friends and staunch champions of her work from the time that they first met in the early 1950s. They were among the first people to sing the songs she wrote with Tommy Wolf and were largely responsible for first introducing Fran and Tommy’s work to the world outside St Louis. Roy also wrote some great songs with Fran, “Stopping The Clock” features on the classic 1963 Mark Murphy album “Rah” and other of Fran’s favourites include “Through The Windows of Cars” “Absent Friends” and “Lost”. It was Jackie and Roy who introduced Fran to Alec Wilder with whom she wrote several songs.Roy was a legendary tough task master when it came to music but his enthusiasm and encouragement for Fran’s new songs remained undiminished right up until the end. He died after a long illness on 2nd of August 2002.

Obituary by Steve Voce from The Guardian August 2002

THE SINGING partnership Jackie and Roy was the longest-lived and probably the best in the whole of jazz. Jackie Cain and Roy Kral began singing together in 1946 (they were married in 1949) and continued to work until two months ago. From their first meeting onwards, their music remained consistently good throughout the 40 or so albums that they made. Kral was a most gifted jazz pianist, a fact sometimes obscured by his need to be an accompanist for the partnership rather than a soloist. He was an outstanding composer and arranger whose job was made easier by the fact that he and Jackie were so accomplished. In a broadcast last April I asked him to explain the constant freshness of his music. When it's interesting to us, it immediately becomes interesting to someone who hears it, because it's good, and we're proud of it. The best part of it is that while I'm working on a number at the piano Jackie can hear it from another room in the house and by the time I've finished one chart she already knows it. The two were agile singers with similar ranges, although they were an octave apart. Kral's songs were composed with skill and taste, given lyrics by him and Jackie working together. Additionally, their skills attracted the attention of the upper echelon of songwriters and they were close friends and seminal interpreters of the music of Alec Wilder. When first the three met at Wilder's home, the composer had never heard Kral and his wife sing. He was overjoyed by what he heard and the three became lifelong friends, Wilder composing music for the duo, and Jackie and Roy responding with one of their best albums, An Alec Wilder Collection (1990). Jackie Cain's singing of Wilder's sad "Remember My Child" was the high point of the memorial concert given for Wilder at Carnegie Hall in 1982.
Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf, another distinguished composing duo,were also friends arid was Fran and Tommy who wrote "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most", an exquisite ballad that, with backing from Kral, became Jackie Cain's greatest hit. Kral's parents were Czech and the family was musical. His sister was the enchanted but ill-starred jazz singer Irene Kral, who died in 1978 when in her middle forties. Roy Kral began studying the piano at the age of five and it wasn't much later that he had a small radio hidden underneath the sheets of his bed so that he could listen to the late-night broadcasts of the Earl Hines band from Chicago. Kral would remember Hines's piano runs and try to replay them in the morning. By the time he was 17, Kral had formed his own dance band, which rehearsed in the basement of his home in Cicero. Just down the road was a huge apartment block which was owned by and home to the gangster Al Capone. Kral approached Capone's brother Ralph about getting work and eventually the band played regularly at the Campus, one of Capone's clubs in Chicago. Soon the band was working across the Midwest. Kral enlisted in the army in 1942 and joined a Military Police band. Posted to Skokie, Illinois, he also organised a dance band on the camp for which he wrote the musical arrangements. He crossed his sergeant and there was a fight, he injuries from which troubled Kral until his death. In retaliation the sergeant had Kral shipped out for
combat duty. At Fort Sheridan, Illinois, where he was to prepare for embarkation, he was pulled out of his unit by another sergeant who was forming a band for the station. It proved to be a good job. "I had my own room, I had a piano in it and it was warm," said Kral. "I went from tar-paper barracks to heated heaven." The band played in the Officers' Club, and Kral had a pass that let him travel home to Cicero almost at will. When the band broke up he was sent first to Detroit, where he broadcast regularly with an army band, and then to Battle Creek, where he guarded German prisoners of war, Demobilised in 1946, he returned to Detroit, where he joined the band at the local radio station. He worked night and day writing arrangements and playing until it became too much for him and he left the job and returned to Chicago. He joined a small band led by a friend, the alto player George Davis. "Another friend brought a 17-year-old girl singer in one night and asked me to let her sit in," said Kral. "I was reluctant. Girls usually sing in the key of Z." But this one was different. She was Jackie Cain. The owner of the club was there and he said, "Hey she's great. You need a vocalist on the weekends." "We do?" asked Kral. "You do." Gradually the new singer was drawn into the band and worked every night. When the band began broadcasting from Chicago, its fame spread. A local disc jockey, Dave Garroway, presented jazz concerts in the area. By now the band was playing polished Kral compositions for alto, his and Jackie’s voices and piano. At one of the concerts, they shared the bill with Charlie Ventura's 10-piece band. Much impressed, Ventura hired Jackie as his singer. In 1948 Ventura broke up the band and formed his seven-piece unit Bop for the People, a group that played simplified Bebop that was accessible to general audiences. He took on Kral as arranger, pianist and vocal foil for Jackie Cain. The two worked out a multitude of numbers where they sang and improvised in the manner of jazz instrumentalists. The band began travelling and recording, quickly rising to win all the magazine polls. Jackie and Roy became the major attraction, and Ventura was not without qualms as he saw the duo attract more acclaim than he did. Kral's arrangement of the 1919 song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", with Bebop vocal lines by the duo, proved to be the biggest hit that Ventura had, and it endures in the record catalogues to this day By now Cain and Kral had become involved off stage and they left Ventura in 1949 to marry. From then onwards they worked as "Jackie and Roy". They had their own television show in Chicago during the Fifties and built up a career working in night-clubs, in concert and at jazz festivals. Occasionally they returned to work as guests with Ventura and Kral continued to write witty and sophisticated songs, often with lyrics by Cain, for their performances and albums. One of their best albums was “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” (1955) which expressively displayed the complete range of their work, from ballads to instrumental singing, and where Kral was joined in the rhythm section by the guitarist Barney Kessel, the bassist Red Mitchell and the drummer Shelly Manne. In 1957 the duo moved to Vegas, where they had well work in the casinos, playing "graveyard shift" from one to four in the morning in a show put on to keep the gamblers from their beds. Looking after their two young daughters too was onerous, and they gave up the job in 1963 and moved to a Los Angeles, subsequently moving on to New York. On one occasion, about to leave for a tour, they were asked to postpone their departure for a date to make a commercial for Halo shampoo. They were amazed by the cheques that began arriving in payment for the one job. "Here is more money than we make for singing in a club for a whole week," said Roy "and it's all for half an hour we did in the studio." They gave up touring and started a very lucrative few years in the commercial studios, writing and recording advertising jingles. Although they proved ideal for such work, they found it dispiriting and eventually returned to jazz. They continued to record, completing a number of individual “songbook" albums featuring compositions of Alan Jay Lerner Harry Warren and Stephen Sondheim, as well as the collections of Alec Wider. Many of these albums remained in the catalogue or are reissued to this day. In later years, as Roy's health declined, the Krals restricted their work to concert appearances festivals, and they made their final concert appearance in June.
STEVE VOCE

Roy Joseph Kral, singer, pianist and composer:
born Chicago October 1921; married 1949 Jackie Cain (one daughter, and daughter deceased);
died New Jersey 2 August 2002.