If you want to understand what people mean by 'cool' in jazz singing, June Christy is a good place to start. She wasn't a belter and she wasn't chasing the drama of a torch singer. Her voice was husky, a little smoky, often sitting right in the middle of the note instead of bending around it, and that plainness became its own kind of style. She joined Stan Kenton's band in 1945, taking over for Anita O'Day, and within a couple of years she was the voice most people associated with the Kenton sound — cool, controlled, slightly detached from the orchestral fireworks happening behind her.

What she did well was underplay. Big bands in the 1940s were full of singers who oversold every line, and Christy just didn't. She let the lyric sit there, trusted the song, and didn't try to convince you of anything. That quality made her a natural fit for the emerging cool jazz sound coming out of Los Angeles in the early 1950s, where the whole idea was space and restraint over heat.

Her best-known solo record, Something Cool (1954), is worth hearing start to finish. The title track is six minutes of a woman telling a stranger a sad story at a bar, and Christy never oversings a single word of it. Pete Rugolo's arrangements give her room to breathe, and the record became a kind of blueprint for what a cool jazz vocal album could sound like — moody without being melodramatic, intimate without straining for intimacy.

She married saxophonist Bob Cooper, and the two worked together on and off for years, which grounded her career outside the spotlight of the big Kenton machine. She never became a household name the way some of her contemporaries did, and she seemed mostly fine with that. Her records sold well among people who actually paid attention to phrasing and tone rather than volume.

She's not the singer you put on to impress someone at a party. She's the one you put on late, when the room's quiet and you want a voice that isn't trying too hard. That's a specific gift, and not many singers have it.