With Quincy Jones as her godfather and Dinah Washington as her godmother, there
was always a fair chance that Patti Austin would become a star, and that was
confirmed when she made her first appearance as a four-year-old at the Apollo
Theatre in New York. Stepping out in front of thousands of people, the
precocious young diva noticed that the orchestra were playing in the wrong key,
so she stopped, and - to their stunned disbelief - told them in no uncertain
terms of their error. The child star graduated into one of the most accomplished
vocalists of the 1980s, working with every...