Billie or Ella? Maria or Renata? Technique or feeling?

@skyscraper Both he (Lester Young), Coltrane and Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins are my all time sax favorites, all geniuses in their own right, just like Ella and Billie in theirs.

Prolly going to ignite yet another flame war, but what about Sonny?

At 4 AM in the studio, he announces I'm hot now. To the dismay of the engineer..

@frogman 

I noted a clear distinction in my initial post of “the ‘60s stuff” in regards to Lincoln.  When I think of jazz vocalists, I think of people singing jazz music.  I don’t consider the likes of the masterful pop songwriters I mentioned to be jazz.  They wrote immaculately crafted 3-minute pop songs.  They may be all fancy and stuff, with someone like, say, Ella Fitzgerald exhibiting incredible vocal prowess and improvisational acumen, but it’s often still fancy pop songs.  She ain’t singing the likes of Parker/Gillespie/Davis/Monk/Mingus/Coltrane etc.

This is why I mentioned ‘60s era Abbey Lincoln as an example of a vocalist singing jazz music.  Perhaps others may provide input in this regard.

That’s how I see it.
Perhaps, in apropos fashion, this could all be “boiled down” to a classic Gershwin line: “you say, ‘potato’/I say, ‘puh-tah-toe’”

These categories were invented by the salespeople at record companies so minimum wage store clerks would know into which bins to stick the records. With digital freeing us from physical storage everything can be reduced to two categories: good music and bad music. I vote Lawrence Welk as first inductee to the latter. I cringed when he came on TV and my uncle said You like music. Here's the show for you. And to be polite I had to watch. Prolly there's a Nurse Ratched somewhere saying Lawrence Welk is all some of the patients here have. 

* cultural reference

Ella -straight ahead "Jazz"

But, tylermunns, the same can be said of practically every instrumentalist that played this music.  So, you’re saying that all those great instrumentalists that played, for instance, “All The Things You Are” were not playing Jazz at all?  That all those great performances of “three minute pop tunes” that served as vehicles for Jazz improvisation were not Jazz at all?  Not arguing, just trying to understand your  viewpoint.  Getting back to singers, please name other singers besides Lincoln that you consider to truly be Jazz singers.

In the meantime, how about a little non-Jazz 😉: