Rachael Price, Jazz Singer

I asked Price if she's a jazz singer at heart. "Yes!" she said, and laughed, as if her answer had surprised her. Could she see herself singing jazz full-time? "Sure. Life is long."

The whole world, and then some, is familiar with, and feasts on, the vocal chops of Rachael Price, the charismatic, extraordinary gifted singer who fronts the rock band Lake Street Dive. Yet surprisingly few LSD fans are aware of Price’s virtuosity as a straight-ahead jazz singer. In the last half-dozen years, Price and her songwriting/guitar-playing/singing partner, Vilray (that’s ‘VILL-ray’) Bolles have grown an almost equally ardent fan base as Lake Street Dive’s, if only a fraction of its size.

Raised in the Nashville suburb of Hendersonville, TN, Price fell in love with jazz singing—Ella Fitzgerald’s in particular—as a very little girl. “From ages five to 15,” Price told me in a 2022 interview, “all I did was listen to Ella and learn her performances, note for note.” Price was inspired as well by Doris Day, whom America forgets was a topflight 1940s big-band singer before she was Hollywood’s cuddly housewife-next-door; by Judy Garland (“especially as a performer—when I’m onstage, I picture the way Judy held herself”), and by Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, and Aretha Franklin. “Although I used to not include Aretha; it’s like, how can you really be influenced by someone whom nobody can sing like?”

Raised in the Baha’i Faith, which she continues to practice, Price toured the world as a child soloist with Baha’i choirs directed by her father, an established, multifaceted musician. Several of these astonishing early performances have found their way onto YouTube.

Rachael the vocal prodigy and the Baha’i choirs she toured with in the Nineties did not always perform religious music—sometimes, as here, the fare was a Tin Pan Alley standard like the Sammy Cahn/ Hy Zaret/Saul Chaplin chestnut “Dedicated to You.” Which the 12-year-old kills.

As a teenager, Price studied at the Nashville Jazz Workshop, becoming intimate with show tunes and standards. “I learned probably 300 standards when I was a teenager,” she says. “Those songs have never left me. It’s like learning a language in childhood.” Intent on a jazz career, she majored in jazz voice at the New England Conservatory of Music, studying with the influential Dominique Eade. “Until I worked with Dominique, I’d been basically copying my idols. Dominique helped me strip away affectations, see what was left, and build from there.”

Price and three other New England Conservatory students: bassist Bridget Kearney, trumpeter/guitarist Mike Olson, and drummer/percussionist Mike Calabrese founded Lake Street Dive in 2004. The band scuffled until, in 2012, they posted a YouTube video of their sinuous, slowed-down cover of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” which went viral. (It has since drawn almost 8 million views.) Their third, 2014, album, Bad Self Portraits, went to #18 on Billboard’s Top 200. Their fifth, Free Yourself Up, peaked at #8 four years later, by which time Lake Street Dive were headlining festivals, selling out Radio City Music Hall, and, before too long, filling Madison Square Garden. (I was at the band’s Garden triumph, and reviewed it in my September 16th Substack.) Although the band’s cardinal virtue is its highly collective nature, five accomplished musicians in a seamless blend, Price’s thrilling alto and, well, sexy onstage moves are the big draw.  Her jazz background, moreover, is a tremendous benefit, arming her with a sonic palette that’s arguably broader than that of any other rock singer today.

Still, a need was going unmet. Although she only half-realized it, Rachael longed to reawaken her jazz self, to rekindle that once-promising career. And then one evening in 2015, she stopped off at a Williamsburg, Brooklyn dive called Bar Below Rye, where her old pal Vilray was rebuilding his chops after having abandoned not merely jazz, but music, period, for a full decade.

Price asked to sit in. The experience, she says, “reconnected me to jazz. It was one of those nights that was literally life-changing. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do anything except sing with you in this bar for 25 people.’ He said, ‘Yeah, great,’ and we started doing shows, and the vibe was perfect.” Vilray quit his day job and, immersing himself in the songwriters he loved—the Tin Pan Alley masters, for lack of a more accurate term—gradually discovered his own vocabulary. “He showed me a tune he’d written,” says Price, “and I couldn’t believe it,” Price recalls. “We performed it, and it seemed that every gig after that, he had two or three more.”

Due in large part to Price’s star power, the duo rose quickly to the top of the cabaret circuit. Their eponymous debut album, released in 2019, drew critical raves. In November 2022, they celebrated the release of their second album, I Love a Love Song!, with four shows at the ritzy Cafe Carlyle, where Bobby Short, Eartha Kitt, Judy Collins, and others have serenaded Manhattan’s affluent since 1955. That’s when Price and Bolles sat for interviews with your reporter.¹ I’m focusing on Rachael in this piece—we’ll spend time with Vilray in due course. The better part—30-plus minutes’ worth—of my interview with Rachael unspools at the bottom of this post. It’s lots of fun to listen to, a prolonged glimpse into the world of….a great jazz singer.

“Apart from her incredible instrument, she’s a great interpreter,” says Vilray Bolles of his collaborator. “Working up a song takes time for Rachael, which is kind of the glorious thing. It’s not like I hand her the song and we’re there. She finds the theater in it.”

Vilray Bolles pointedly doesn’t see his songs as appeals to nostalgia. “I don’t think of this as a retro thing. I think of it as visiting a space that has certain tenets. There are people who come along and dip into this world and make something of it in their own, original voice. Not to compare myself in any way to Randy Newman, but you can hear his love for this stuff. Tom Waits, similarly. Billy Joel, similarly. I realize I’m talking about a lot of guys from the Seventies and Eighties, but you also have people like Rufus Wainwright, and I’m sure there are others, still younger, that I’m not thinking of.”

Vilray has a special fondness for the great wordsmiths. “Lyricists of that era knew how to write a lyric that feels good to sing. Johnny Mercer was a great lyricist who was also a great singer. [Revel in Mercer’s vocal on his and Harold Arlen’s “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” cut in 1944.] Peggy Lee is another. She co-wrote all the songs on [the '1955 Disney animated movie] Lady and the Tramp, which is an incredible collection. Fats Waller’s lyricist of choice, Andy Razaf, had an absolute understanding of Razaf. That’s the way songwriting worked in the Thirties. Most of the time, you weren’t writing for a musical, you were writing for a musical artist. Understanding their style, their attitude, their phrasing, is what goes into the mechanics of writing a melody. And, on your best day, the mechanics of writing a melody. For melodists, I love Ellington, of course.” (At the Carlyle, Price took a breather while Vilray and their two accompanists, a bassist and an alto saxophonist/clarinetist, played Vilray’s wordless “Fanfare for a Queen,” inspired by Ellington’s “The Queen’s Suite.”)

As steeped as he is in the canon, Vilray takes an impish delight in subverting it, in songs like “Hate is the Basis of Love” (“On your first date I advocate/That you focus on the many things you hate”) or the R-rated “Let’s Make Love on This Plane” (“With clouds beneath us/ And our engines all aflame/Darlin’, let’s make love on this plane”). At the Carlyle, Vilray introduced the latter by announcing, “Here’s a dirty song for you.”

“The law forbids it/But lets do it all the same/Darling, let's make love on this plane”

The masters themselves, Vilray points out, could be just as roguish. “Take Nat King Cole’s ‘Gone with the Draft.’ There's nothing more impish than saying, ‘I've got flat feet, everybody's off in World War Two and I'm cleaning up with the ladies.’ I mean, that’s insane. So I feel like there's permission out there for songs that are a little rascally.”

When he began writing, Vilray worked with a specific, usually iconic, singer in mind.“I’d say, ‘Okay, I'm gonna write a Billie Holiday song, I'm gonna write a Frank Sinatra song, I'm gonna write an Ella Fitzgerald song.’ To feel sure of the authenticity of it. If people came up to me and said, ‘Wow, I didn't realize you wrote that,’ I felt like I was on the right path.” It was a good way to start, but Vilray increasingly tailors his songs to Price’s voice and delivery.

Sometimes a song takes years to nail. “I loved the song ‘Why Do I’ as soon as I heard it,” says Price. “But it kept eluding us. Every time we did it, we’d be like, ‘We didn’t get the tempo right.’ We played a gig with the great alto saxophonist Steve Wilson. Steve took a solo in rehearsal, a sort of Louis Jordan-style solo, and the solo made Vilray realize how this song is supposed to go. So when we recorded it, Vilray told the sax player to play it like it’s a Louis Jordan song, and I was able to sing it perfectly. I knew where the pocket was. It feels good now, it’s one of my favorites.” The sound of musicians putting their heads together.

How does the experience of performing in a cabaret differ from that of putting on a Big Rock Show? “Mostly,” Price says, “because of how exposed I feel with Rachel and Vilray. I feel more vulnerable. I feel responsible for keeping us—Vilray, me, the audience—on the same subtle wavelength. Singing with Lake Street Dive is more of a fugue state. When I get offstage I don't really remember what happened, beyond an overall feeling. Whereas Vilray and I can recount every moment of the show with each other. It's just so intimate, both between us and with the audience.”

Has Price ever commissioned a song from her partner? “Recently, for the first time, I gave him a full prompt for a song. I sketched out the character and the central conceit. It’s a song that Blossom Dearie might have sung, about an older woman trying to get a younger man to go out with her. She wants him to come over to her house because she can control the lighting”—keep it dim enough, that is, to obscure the crow’s feet that age and experience produce. “I said it should be called, ‘I Like the Lighting at My Place.’ Vilray liked it; he was very accepting. He hasn't written it yet, but I think he will.”

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Saturday night at the Carlyle, mid-set. Like the late Betty Carter, Price has a capacious, elastic mouth. Her enunciation is all her own, and is beyond my powers of description. Price, moreover, sings with her whole body, especially her hands, which are in constant motion. A fluent, astute accompanist, Vilray tosses off chords and short runs; his voice, while less expressive than his partner's, gets the job done.

You can count the number of today's vocalists who can get a crowd of 15,000 on its feet and cast a spell over a room of 90 on the fingers of one hand. Rachael Price is in a league of her own.

During our conversation, I asked Price a question that I’d guessed would produce a startled, perhaps flustered, response, namely, if she is a jazz singer at heart.

“Yes!” she said. And laughed, as if her answer surprised her. "I'm going to say yes!"

Could she see herself singing this material full-time?

"Sure. Life is long. And I love this music more and more. My connection to it feels more authentic every time I sing it."

1. The above interview, with Rachael Price, was conducted for my article “Rachael & Vilray: Carrying a Torch,” which ran in the September 1923 issue of Stereophile. Much of this Substack is drawn from that article, for which I conducted an equally detailed interview with Vilray Bolles.