“Here’s to Life” is perhaps the last great American jazz standard, first recorded in 1992 by vocalist/pianist Shirley Horn and since covered by dozens of other vocalists within and outside the world of jazz.
It came out at a time when jazz players were becoming more liberal with what they chose to include in their repertoires, such as popular R&B tunes (Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and “Isn’t She Lovely”) and jazz fusion (Weather Report’s “Birdland”). At the same time, the number of songs being considered “standards” was waning. The database JazzStandards.com lists more than 30 from 1940, compared to eight from the 1970s to the 2000s. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that “Here’s to Life” achieved such popularity. The music leans towards the traditional, far from the stylistic audacity of the fusion-y heads.
Horn had released her debut album, Embers and Ashes, in 1960, but while she was popular among jazz critics and was admired by Miles Davis, it wasn’t until the 1980s that she started to achieve wider recognition. A series of gigs at the Manhattan jazz club Fat Tuesday’s in November 1988 illustrated her success. Despite a flood warning going out on one of the days she was performing, her residency sold out and was heralded by New York media.
A few years later, she was handed the lyrics to “Here’s to Life”. Artie Butler, who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Barry Manilow and Dionne Warwick, came up with the first few lyrics, along with the music and overarching theme: “I wrote the song through the eyes of an older man who was looking back at his life and reminiscing, and yet being totally optimistic about whatever time he had left,” he writes on his website. He enlisted the lyricist Phyllis Molinary to come up with the rest of the lines.
Once it was complete, Butler sent “Here’s to Life” to arranger Johnny Mandel, who provided Horn with the balladic drama and delicacy he had used to enshrine the voices of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Barbra Streisand in decades past. Butler was invited to the recording session. “I sat in the corner of the control room with tears of joy running down my face,” he writes. “I remember when the song was finished the entire orchestra listened to a playback and wept. There stood 50 people listening and crying.” Horn’s reading of the song became her signature track and solidified her legacy in jazz history.
The lyrical perspective is both wise and benevolent, coming from someone at a late stage in life who wants more than ever to keep going, while encouraging this persistence in their listener: “I have learned / That all you give / Is all you get / So give it all you’ve got,” sings Horn in the first verse. Also, the perspective is genderless; even though Butler intended it to be that of an older man, Horn seamlessly made it her own (as did countless female vocalists afterwards).
A close friend of Horn, jazz vocalist Joe Williams sang “Here's to Life” on his penultimate album in 1994, which he named after the song, before his death in 1999. Barbra Streisand opens her 2009 album of standards, Love Is the Answer, with her own rendition. “When Shirley whispers a lyric, she speaks volumes,” Streisand once said. And it closes Patti LaBelle’s standards collection, Bel Hommage, from 2017. It also appears on Eagles guitarist Glenn Frey’s After Hours, his take on the Great American Songbook; the 2012 album was Frey’s last before his sudden death in 2016.
Whether backed by a full orchestra or lone grand piano, singers have used “Here’s to Life” to evoke a quietly transportive, reflective mood. It has served as a meditation for those entering their later years — a musical acknowledgment of all they’ve been through, but that more lies ahead. However, none has delivered this conviction with as much force and majesty as Horn, whose version remains paramount.
Do you agree that Shirley Horn’s version remains paramount? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Decca (UMO), Telarc, Columbia, GPE Records, Polydor Associated Labels
Picture credit: Joseph Del Valle/NBC/Getty Images