Leon Thomas born 4 October 1937

Amos Leon Thomas Jr. (October 4, 1937 – May 8, 1999), better known by his stage name Leon Thomas, was an American jazz and blues vocalist, born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and known for his bellowing glottal-stop style of free jazz singing in the late 1960s and 1970s. He had one of the most distinctive, powerful voices in modern music.

Leon Thomas was born Amos Thomas, Jr. on October 4, 1937, in East St. Louis, Illinois. He attended Lincoln High School. Already guesting with local choirs and jamming with contemporaries such as the saxophonist Jimmy Forrest and the guitarist Grant Green, Thomas was spotted by a disc-jockey who invited him to come and scat live on his radio show.

Having spent a further two years studying music at Tennessee State University, Thomas moved to New York in 1958. The following year, he played the Apollo Theatre in Harlem and toured on a bill topped by Art Blakey's Messengers. Already famous for his vocal acrobatics, Thomas worked with the pianist Mary Lou Williams and the saxophonist Roland Kirk before replacing Joe Williams in the Count Basie Orchestra in 1961. He soon left after being conscripted into the army.

After military service Thomas returned in 1964, he resumed his music career, entertaining Presidents Kennedy and Johnson at their inaugural balls. A move back to New York led to a fateful engagement in 1969. "I was playing in Brooklyn with Randy Weston when Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders came by," Thomas told Straight No Chaser magazine. "They began to visit regularly and often jammed with us. Pharoah had this song called `Pisces Moon' which he was playing every night as a theme in New York and he asked me if I could put some lyrics to it. I came up with `The Creator Has a Master Plan'. A classic was born."

                             

In 1969, he released his first solo album for Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman label, “Spirits Known and Unknown.” Thomas became best known for his work with Sanders, particularly the 1969 song "The Creator Has a Master Plan" from Sanders' Karma album.

Thomas's most distinctive device was that he often broke out into yodeling in the middle of a vocal. This style has influenced singers James Moody, Tim Buckley and Bobby McFerrin. He said in an interview that he developed this style after he fell and broke his teeth before an important show. Some of the vocal style is classified as 'jive singing'. (Ref: Leon Thomas Blues Band album). Thomas saw music as a means of social commentary during this period, saying, "You just have to be more than an entertainer. How the blazes can you ignore what is happening?"

Through the 1970s, Thomas recorded a series of critically acclaimed records for Flying Dutchman, and performed with Louis Armstrong ion 1970 also the bands of trumpeter Freddy Hubbard and guitarist Carlos Santana, touring as a member of the Santana band in 1973. Thomas was voted best vocalist by the readers of Downbeat magazine from 1970 to 1973.He later appeared on recordings with saxophonist Gary Bartz and singer Jeri Brown. In the mid 1970s, he adopted "Leon" as his middle name.  

During the 1990s, Thomas's recordings of spiritually- and African-influenced soul jazz resurfaced among record collectors and club deejays, becoming known as "kosmigroov" music. On May 8, 1999, Thomas died of heart failure, resulting from leukemia, at a Bronx hospital near his home

According to Ben Ratliff of The New York Times, Thomas had begun his career "as a straight blues-jazz singer" with a "stout tenor voice", but by the mid 1960s, he "had begun to spend time with young jazz musicians who were looking to Africa, the East and meditation for musical material … Thomas developed his ululating singing style, which has been compared to African pygmy and American Indian singing 

techniques and which he later called 'soularphone.' He believed that his ancestors had given him his elastic throat articulation, he said, and henceforth always used it." 

Robert Christgau wrote of the significance behind Thomas's vocal abilities in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981)  "He has literally expanded the musical possibilities of the human voice. He is as powerful a jazz/blues singer as Joe Williams or Joe Turner, both of whom he occasionally resembles, as inventive a scatter as Ella Fitzgerald. But that's just the beginning, for despite the generation lag, Thomas beats Turner and Williams in their mode even while singing his own, and he turns scatting from a virtuoso trick into an atavistic call from the unconscious."

(Edited from Wikipedia  & The Independent)