8/26/2023 0 Comments Kansas city jazz singers“But I also think that one of her important contributions was that when she got cancer, how open she was to the public.” “Her music career is incredible, and she touched so many lives and she was amazing,” he says. One of the things that stands out to Gifford is how public Hammer was about her illness. Stage Four.”Īll the while, she kept singing, though at one point her vocal cords were paralyzed then, inexplicably, back in working order, she told the Shawnee Mission Post last year. “The cancer was back, and it was in my left lung and several spots in my bones. “Well, my worst fears had been confirmed,” Hammer wrote. Hammer wrote in a post on the website 7BillionOnes that she’d started noticing a tightness in her chest and pains in her pelvis and hips. Music writer Bill Brownlee wrote of Hammer’s performance in a 2017 review of An Evening With George Gershwin: “Hammer’s stunning treatment of ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’ indicates that she’s a worthy heir to torch singers like Rosemary Clooney.”īut in 2016 Hammer learned a bout with breast cancer she thought she’d ended eight years earlier wasn’t over. Proceeds from her music sales, including an album released this year, will go to Midwest Music Foundation for musicians’ healthcare needs. Hammer was known for her support for Kansas City's music community. In 2016 The Pitch awarded her Critics’ Choice for Best Jazz Singer. She went on to release four LPs, including one last month called I’m Feeling Mellow. You can’t just walk in and start doing things.” I wanted to do something like that.”īut she also acknowledged: “Jazz is serious. In 2017, Hammer told KCUR: “I always admired Peggy Lee for being in complete control of her career. “If I recall right, we didn’t have to tell the narrator anything about how to do the job, we just said ‘make sure you stand here, make sure you go over there.’ She was just spot on from the very beginning of the rehearsals,” Gifford says.Īfter years of stage acting, including a five-year stint in Iowa playing Patsy Cline, Hammer devoted herself to jazz and blues in 2005. He says that even in high school in her role as a narrator in the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, she was a musical stylist mature beyond her years. “When we moved to Kansas City, the jazz scene was just so vibrant, and to know that Molly was a big part of that was satisfying and exciting and everything else.” “It was amazing to see a kid go on to make a career out of music. Gifford says he only worked with Hammer during the 1989-1990 school year at Excelsior Springs High School, but she made an impression, and through mutual friends and Facebook, he followed her career.
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