Andy Bey, who haunted the periphery of American song with his magnetically expressive voice, ranging from a foghorn baritone to a tender falsetto, died on April 26 at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 85.
His nephew, the stage actor and singer Darius de Haas, said he died of natural causes.
Bey had a multiphase musical career, with peaks and valleys that had more to do with shifting tastes than any fluctuation in quality. But his style did trace an evolution, from churchified soul jazz to astral jazz-funk to smoky songbook reverie. He was always at home in the blues, and knew how to bend a lyric toward his listener for profound emotional effect.
He was also a musician's singer who collaborated widely with other jazz artists — notably alto saxophonist Gary Bartz, in his early-1970s band NTU Troop, and pianist Horace Silver, on a succession of albums. Bey is often a standout on those albums, as when he gives voice to an easygoing Silver original like "The Happy Medium," on the 1970 Blue Note release That Healin' Feelin'.
Bey made a strong recorded statement of his own in 1974, when Atlantic Records released his solo debut: Experience and Judgment, a collection of spirit-centered exhortations in a funkified soul-jazz mode. But name recognition and commercial success largely eluded him until the mid-'90s, when he reemerged from two decades of obscurity with the sleeper Ballads, Blues & Bey, a live solo recording that met with generous acclaim.
From that point on, Bey settled into an exalted stature as a songbook interpreter with an inviting yet uningratiating style. His influences ran from the baritone crooner Billy Eckstine to the blues and popular songstress Dinah Washington, as well as Sarah Vaughan, whom he knew from Newark. But Bey never sounded like anyone but himself.
From his customary seat at the piano, which he played with exquisite attunement to tone color, he sang with a hushed interiority that could make a listener feel as if he were exchanging confidences. That quality shone brightest on the songbook ballads that Bey often unspooled in a honey-drip tempo, giving the impression of forming each lyrical phrase as a moment's reflection; for example, his version of the show tune "It Never Entered My Mind," from his 2013 album The World According to Andy Bey.
"Mr. Bey's music is powered at the core by his own resources: a strong chest-voice and a deeply interior imagination," wrote Ben Ratliff in 2013, in a review of that album. "He often sings during rests between his piano chords, choosing carefully where to add bits of volume-surging and vibrato, and works unnerving silences into his phrasing. The whole enterprise remains spare but deep."
Andrew W. Bey, Jr. was born in Newark, N.J., on Oct. 28, 1939. Part of a musical family, he began playing the piano at age 3. He appeared in the 1950s on Startime Kids, an NBC variety show that also featured Connie Francis. Later he attended Newark Arts High School and studied piano with Sanford Gold, an experienced jazz and studio player who wrote A Modern Approach to Keyboard Harmony and Piano Techniques.
Effectively self-taught as a vocalist, Bey had strong influences close at hand: his older sisters, Salome and Geraldine. Together they formed Andy & the Bey Sisters, which alchemized modern jazz, gospel and soul in a sophisticated package.
They recorded albums for RCA Victor and Prestige, winning some recognition but little commercial traction. (The producer George Wein, serving for a time as their manager, later recalled that an RCA executive admitted to slow-rolling their promotion, saying: "George, don't you think that they're too black?") Andy & the Bey Sisters disbanded in 1967. Geraldine (Bey) de Haas is among Bey's surviving family; Salome died in 2020.
Embarking on a solo career, Bey found fast rapport with some of the most advanced jazz artists of his generation. He made featured appearances on noted albums by drummer Max Roach (Members Don't Git Weary, 1968), pianist Duke Pearson (How Insensitive, 1969), and bassist Stanley Clarke (Children of Forever, 1973).
Yet Bey was an instinctual nonconformist, if not an iconoclast. "I've always been a loner, and I was looking for nobody's approval," he says in a 2019 episode of Jazz Night in America. "I never tried to follow anybody, musically or otherwise."
Bey came out as gay in the mid-1990s, also disclosing that he was HIV positive. He had never made a secret of his sexual orientation, pointing out that his musical circle knew he was gay as far back as the '70s — a factor that probably had some bearing on his professional prospects at that time.
But being transparent also broadened his base, especially in the gay community. "Once you've found out who you are," he said on a panel moderated by Francis Davis in 2002, jointly presented by the National Arts Journalism Program and Columbia University, "you can express your feminine side, your masculine side, you're not afraid to let it all out, and I think a lot of gay people want to hear that."
Bey won Best Jazz Vocalist a number of times at the JJA Awards, which is presented by the Jazz Journalists Association. His album American Song received a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2004; he received another nod in that category in 2013, for The World According to Andy Bey.
Among the intriguing songs on that album is one titled "The Demons Are After You," an original in which Bey decries the "evil forces" that bedevil a creative artist. "Got to be free to create," he sings, "shedding all those things that have only external value in this world."
He saves his most plangent delivery for a refrain near the end of the tune: "It's an individual journey," he sings. "It will never work for the masses."
Copyright 2025 WRTI Your Classical and Jazz Source
