Vocals and Piano | 1937-2025

Roberta Flack came to Atlantic Records through a chain of events that could have gone another way at any point. Born in Black Mountain, North Carolina in 1937 and raised in Arlington, Virginia, she won a full scholarship to Howard University at 15, trained as a classical pianist, graduated at 19, and spent the following decade teaching music in schools while playing nightclub sets at evenings and weekends. Les McCann heard her at a benefit performance in Washington in 1968 and arranged an audition with Joel Dorn. She played 42 songs from memory in three hours. Dorn signed her immediately. The debut album "First Take" (Atlantic, 1969) was recorded in ten hours with Ron Carter, Bucky Pizzarelli and Frank Wess, produced by Dorn in a style that blurred jazz, gospel and folk without landing squarely in any of them. "Quiet Fire" (1971), her third album and the one most relevant to a jazz collector, drew on the same New York session pool: Chuck Rainey, Bernard Purdie, Richard Tee, Joe Farrell and Hubert Laws. Flack resisted jazz categorisation throughout her career, but the musicians surrounding her on these early Atlantic records tell a different story. She died on 24 February 2025, aged 88.