Raised in the Nashville suburb of Hendersonville, Rachel Price fell in love with jazz singing—Ella Fitzgerald’s in particular—as a very little girl. “From ages five to 15,” Price said 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?” 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 No.18 on Billboard’s Top 200. Their fifth, Free Yourself Up, peaked at No.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-realised 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 skills 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. 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. 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.”
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 realise 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.
