Teargarden had several different tones: a light, nasal one; a gruff, heavy one; and a weary, hoarse one -- a twilight tone he used for slow blues, and for ballas that moved him. He had a nearly faultless technique, yet it never called attention to itself. Opposites were compressed shrewdly in his style. Long notes were balanced by triplets, double-time spurts by laconic legato musings, busyness by silence, legitimate notes by blue notes, moans by roars. Teargarden developed a set of master solos for his bread-and-butter tunes -- the tunes that his listeners expected and that he must have played thousans of times: "Basin Street Blues," "A Hundred Years from Today," "Beale St. Blues," "Stars Fell on Alabama," "St. James Infirmary," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," "After You're Gone." Each time, though, he would make generous and surprising changes -- adding a decorative triplet, a dying blue note, a soaring glissando -- and his listeners would be buoyed again. Sometimes he sank into his low register at the start of a slow blues solo and rose into his high register at its end. Like his friend and admirer Bobby Hackett, he stayed in the bourgeois register of his horn, cultivating his lyricism, his tones, his sense of order and logic. Teargarded was a good jazz singer. His singing, a distillation of his playing, formed a kind of aureole around it. He had a light baritone, which moved easily behind the beat. The rare consonants he used sounded like vowels, and his vowels were all pureed. His vocals were lullabies -- lay-me-down-to-sleep patches of sound.