In 2003, Dance With My Father, in which he dueted with Queen Latifah, Stevie Wonder and Beyonce Knowles, was a number one hit. He recorded an album for Virgin, then shifted to Clive Davis's J Records and scored with a self-titled album in 2001. His last British hit was Endless Love, a duet with Mariah Carey in 1994.Įpic terminated his contract in the mid-1990s. Vandross continued to enjoy healthy sales in the early 1990s, but his glacial pop/soul style became increasingly predictable and he was soon overshadowed by a younger, more hip-hop oriented breed of male R&B singer. They don't lust." Questions about his sexuality annoyed him he refused to comment on speculation that he was gay. He filled the role of "lover man" once occupied by Marvin Gaye and Al Green, yet while they brought a seductive sexual finesse to their performances, Vandross's voice embodied distant grace and beauty, an endless swooning romance.Īcknowledging this, he noted, "People tend to see me platonically, fraternally. Vandross's greatest hits of that era - Stop To Love, There's Nothing Better Than Love, Any Love, Here And Now, Power Of Love/Love Power - established him as the most widely admired male soul singer of the post-disco era. At one point, he had three albums simultaneously in the top 100. British audiences embraced him in the late 1980s: Never Too Much hit the British top 20 eight years after it was an American hit. "The female voice to me is just special, and women's interpretive values seem wider, less restricted," he once said.Īcross the next decade, Vandross would top the US R&B charts six more times - so successful was he, and, at times, so large his girth, that he was nicknamed "the Pavarotti of pop". He relaunched Aretha Franklin's career by writing and producing her 1982 album, Jump To It the following year, he produced an album for Dionne Warwick that included the hit duet, How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye.Ī 1987 album he produced for Diana Ross was less successful. Vandross would prove to be one of the most productive and consistent hit-makers of the 1980s. His 1981 debut, Never Too Much - sung, composed and produced by Vandross - went to number one in the US R&B charts. No company seemed interested in taking the risk, but his lead vocals on the studio group Change's two British hits, Searching and Glow Of Love, encouraged Epic to sign Vandross. He returned to background vocals and jingle singing while cautiously looking for a recording contract that would allow him to produce his own work. In 1976, Vandross formed the group Luther, and released two albums that failed to sell. Commercial jingles for, among others, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pepsi Cola, and the US armed forces made him rich before he launched his solo career. In 1979, he was lead singer on Chic's Dance, Dance Dance, and featured on the Barbra Streisand/Donna Summer hit, No More Tears. Quickly becoming one of the most sought-after background singers, Vandross contributed to sessions by such artists as Bette Midler, Ringo Starr, Cat Stevens, Sister Sledge and Gary Glitter.
Bowie overheard Vandross singing and hired him on the spot to sing and arrange background vocals on the record: he ended up co-writing, with Bowie and John Lennon, the hit song, Fame. In 1974, Vandross's friend, the guitarist Carlos Alomar, invited him to watch the recording of David Bowie's Young Americans album, on which Alomar was working.
His break came when he was asked to sing the alphabet on the first episode of the television series Sesame Street, and, in 1972, his song, Everybody Rejoice, featured in The Wiz, the black musical derived from The Wizard Of Oz. After Taft high school, where he started singing informally, he studied electrical engineering for a year at Western Michigan University, but left to follow a musical career. His father, an upholsterer, died when Luther was eight, and he was raised by his mother, a nurse. The youngest of four children, he was born into a musical family on New York's lower east side and raised in the Bronx. A highly successful session singer from the 1970s, in the following decades Vandross's exquisitely crafted, emotionally intimate tenor vocals sold more than 25m records and earned him eight Grammies. The death, at 54, of the singer, producer and songwriter Luther Vandross, sees the passing of an entertainer who was a bridge between the gospel-rooted, soul vocal style of the 1970s and the more pop-oriented R&B vocalists now ruling the charts.