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Post by bassman on Dec 20, 2023 18:50:36 GMT
VocalistsAlthough I often work with them in real life, vocalists for some reason only make up a fraction of my bulky jazz collection. (Some real gems among them nonetheless!)
How about you folks? Opinionated comments welcome.
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Post by DmGrl on Dec 21, 2023 13:26:33 GMT
Vocalists....vocalists for some reason only make up a fraction of my bulky jazz collection. (Some real gems among them nonetheless!)
That's true for me also - can't listen to most of them. Some exceptions I love - Blossom Dearie and June Christie (some Eddie Jefferson, especially when accompanied by Richie Cole)
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Post by gregorythefish on Dec 21, 2023 15:02:43 GMT
I like vocalists that sound as though they are creating, in the same way as an instrumentalist. Ellen Christi, Jeanne Lee, Leon Thomas, Patty Waters, etc.
Lyrics are a problem. Trite love song drivel can make even the best vocalist seem like an artistic infant.
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Post by bassman on Dec 21, 2023 15:20:46 GMT
Vocalists....vocalists for some reason only make up a fraction of my bulky jazz collection. (Some real gems among them nonetheless!)
That's true for me also - can't listen to most of them. Some exceptions I love - Blossom Dearie and June Christie (some Eddie Jefferson, especially when accompanied by Richie Cole)
Among jazz vocalists, Ella was a genius. She could do anything she wanted, like a super professional horn player. Sarah, Dinah … I have often listened to them too. Since you mentioned June Christy – an entirely different department, but interesting. Her album SOMETHING COOL was recorded twice, first in mono, and then in stereo a few years later. One of the most improbable meetings, but a great success: Jimmy Rushing with the Dave Brubeck Quartet! I love it. And then there is that Billie Holiday influence. You know, playing (a fraction) behind the beat is (or used to be) one of those devices employed by all good jazz players from Satchmo to Miles and Erroll Garner and Cannonball and Wynton Kelly and all the rest of them. It can provide that extra punch. That indispensable, relaxed feeling. Billie made it a kind of mannerism, and for some time everybody seems to have followed in her footsteps. You can overdo it. I listened to CARMEN McRAE SINGS LOVERMAN the other day. Singing behind the beat? What beat? She’s singing behind the entire chord structure, lagging behind by some 2, 3, or even four beats most of the time. This is what instrumentalists rarely do, it’s the reserve of (mostly female) singers. And it can be a pain in the neck. Carmen’s fantastic sidemen (Lockjaw, Nat Adderley, Mundell Lowe… ) don’t give a damn though.
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Post by sztiv on Dec 21, 2023 18:37:40 GMT
It's often struck me as a bit paradoxical (not a word I use very much) that lovers of an art form that relies to a considerable extent on interpretations of Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Song Book material should not enjoy vocalists.
Then again vocal jazz only represents a small part of my own record / CD accumulation.
But I love all those old songs.
I even acquired a copy of Alec Wilder's 'American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950', so I could learn about the writers.
Much of Wilder's book goes over my head because I'm not a musician but his pen portraits of Rodgers & Hart, Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter etc etc are very good.
As for vocalists, I listen to Ella, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday but also enjoy Mark Murphy, Dee Dee Bridgewater and a bunch of other lesser luminaries.
In fact now I think about it I also like a few LPs that instrumentalists made with vocalists - Andrew Hill's 'Lift Every Voice' and Donald Byrd's 'A New Perspective'. 'John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman' is one of my favourite records.
So perhaps I'm a bit of a vocalist slut?
Then again sometimes the best track on a vocal jazz LP can be the only instrumental - Harold Mabern's Afro Blue a case in point.
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Post by DmGrl on Dec 22, 2023 0:23:06 GMT
It's rather strange, now that I think about it, that I have many many albums by pop, folk and rock vocalists that I enjoy very much, but have very few by "jazz" vocalists. There could be many reasons for this - the reliance on "interpretations of Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Song Book material," whose lyrics many not be "relatable" in this time, or that what I enjoy in "jazz" music is better conveyed by instrumental sounds than vocal sounds, or the goofiness of singing nonsensical syllables, though I can appreciate the vocal gymnastics of someone like Ella Fitzgerald et al.
And I should add Billie Holiday to the list of the few I do enjoy, perhaps Nina Simone or Abby Lincoln sometimes too. These are artists who all moved beyond the "great American Songbook" lyrically, at least occasionally.
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Post by bassman on Dec 22, 2023 12:50:01 GMT
It's rather strange, now that I think about it, that I have many many albums by pop, folk and rock vocalists that I enjoy very much, but have very few by "jazz" vocalists. There could be many reasons for this - the reliance on "interpretations of Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Song Book material," whose lyrics many not be "relatable" in this time, or that what I enjoy in "jazz" music is better conveyed by instrumental sounds than vocal sounds, or the goofiness of singing nonsensical syllables, though I can appreciate the vocal gymnastics of someone like Ella Fitzgerald et al. And I should add Billie Holiday to the list of the few I do enjoy, perhaps Nina Simone or Abby Lincoln sometimes too. These are artists who all moved beyond the "great American Songbook" lyrically, at least occasionally. All this is very true. You could be in agreement with people like Miles or Bird, who were rarely found in the company of vocalists - in a recording studio, that is. (I could, within seconds, enumerate all of the relevant occasions.) On the other hand, "the goofiness of singing nonsensical syllables" happened to be part and parcel of the be-bop style (Dizzy being king) ... Putting vocalists aside, it has always been my conviction that the very best of jazz - the purest, most genuine jazz - does not have to rely on either Tin Pan Alley or the Great American Songbook. What if we removed all "Alley-related" material from our collections? Just joking, but: Along with loads of blues-based, often dreary, hard bop stuff, the remainder would include Miles's "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud", Blakey's "Carol's Interlude", Walt Dickerson's "To My Queen", Duke's "Ko-Ko", Desmond's "Take Five", just to name a few, plus lots of music by Monk, George Russell, Mingus, Ornette, etc. etc. - enough "genuine" jazz for anyone's lifetime. - Oh, sorry: Add "Kind of Blue".
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dg
Full Member
Posts: 125
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Post by dg on Dec 22, 2023 14:18:53 GMT
The music - the melodies and chord progressions - of lots of "Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Song Book material" - is gorgeous, and has been, and is, used profitably by jazz musicians. The lyrics are more problematic, more likely to become "dated" although there are exceptions to this too - I think of some of the lyrics of people like Johnny Mercer. And yes, many fine, lyric-less "tunes" have been written by jazz musicians too.
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Post by sztiv on Dec 23, 2023 11:15:46 GMT
Ella singing Cole Porter's 'I Get A Kick Out Of You' is the record I usually play when testing my hifi.
I'm not sure that it is the lyrics that make the "Alley" songs difficult to relate to.
Yes they're dated but only to the same extent that pop and rock tunes from the 70s and 80s now sound dated. These were the pop songs of the early 20th Century so don't the same rules apply?
Handel's Messiah and Don Giovanni are both a bit old fashioned but would they be considered dated? Well yes I guess so but as representatives of "high culture" they kind of swerve this criticism.
A visual arts analogy might be that Picasso is modern and ok but Poussin is old fashioned and boring.
Personally I'm of the opinion that Tin Pan Alley was the United States greatest cultural contribution to the arts. Greater than Hemingway, Rothko or Samuel Barber.
It was popular culture because American culture is in a sense egalitarian and accesible. It was created by immigrants (mostly Jewish Europeans) and is influenced by European folk traditions. And last but not least it was mass produced like the Model T Ford.
Then when it met the music of the slaves it gained a unique identity and form all its own.
But all this is immaterial if in the final analysis you don't much like old songs.
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Post by bassman on Dec 24, 2023 10:14:31 GMT
[ ... ] Personally I'm of the opinion that Tin Pan Alley was the United States greatest cultural contribution to the arts. Greater than Hemingway, Rothko or Samuel Barber. It was popular culture because American culture is in a sense egalitarian and accesible. It was created by immigrants (mostly Jewish Europeans) and is influenced by European folk traditions. And last but not least it was mass produced like the Model T Ford. Then when it met the music of the slaves it gained a unique identity and form all its own. [ ... ] Proponents of jazz being "black" music would, of course, see it from a different perspective. I have always been reluctant in taking a stance in this matter. At least I would say that - apart from New Orleans origins - we must not disregard all the exciting things that came out of Kansas City (figuratively speaking) and what Count Basie made of them. Swing rhythm, K.C. riffs, jazz orchestration - these were things where the songbook writers as such had very little influence. Even Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller's orchestras sounded best when they were drawing on that line of heritage. I don't want to belittle a genius such as George Gershwin (whom I adore), nor any of those great composers. But then again, many of those great American songs sound insipid unless given a treatment by people such as Coleman Hawkins or Miles ("The Man I Love" being an example in regard to both artists). Or Gil Evans, for that matter. So colour doesn't matter in the end, what matters is if something sounds cool or not. Even people like young Brenda Lee or the Ames Brothers sound cooler to me than, say, "I Can't Get Started" in its original form. Bunny Berigan was unable to put yeast into it. (I know I'm not being fair, because there's the historical perspective, too - but there were cooler things going on even in 1936 when that song was composed.)
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Post by sztiv on Dec 24, 2023 14:24:03 GMT
Surely its enduring strength as an art form is that it took influences from many different places.
My belief in the cultural significance of Tin Pan Alley has more to do with its influence on Hollywood and the wider entertainment industry than on jazz, which is somewhat marginal by comparison.
I'm not a big fan of Porgy and Bess for example yet Gil Evans and Miles clearly heard something in it that they liked. An 'opera' about African Americans written by white people, performed by a black cast but containing music that was subsequently played by musicians of all shapes and sizes.
So I'm also reluctant to describe jazz as "black music" but surely nobody would deny that without African Americans it wouldn't have developed in the way that it did?
I suppose my throw away comment about the music of the slaves was a reference to the kind of music that Archie Shepp and Horace Parlan covered so memorably on those two LPs for Steeplechase. Which coincidentally are all songs.
As for 'The Man I Love', it always reminds me of Monk.
Some of the original recordings of the Song Book material sounds very dated or insipid if you prefer. But as music hall, theatre and film music it reflects what audiences liked at the time. These recordings exist as a historical curiosity more than any living cultural artefact. But it's where Hawkins and Monk took them that still resonates (to some extent).
I was fortunate to see Herbie Hancock on his Gershwin tour and whilst the LP isn't up to much as a live performance, Hancock made the material come alive.
But I also agree with you, colour's not important.
Nobody has mentioned Chet Baker but there's probably already a thread about his singing.
And I've just remembered Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy, which of you good people was it that recommended this classic?
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Post by bassman on Dec 24, 2023 15:56:25 GMT
[ ... ] As for 'The Man I Love', it always reminds me of Monk. [ ... ] [ ... ] And I've just remembered Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy, which of you good people was it that recommended this classic? [ ... ] 1) Do you mean the session with Miles and Milt Jackson from Dec. 24, 1954? The X-mas date? That's exactly what I was talking about. Monk's solo is remarkable for its silent passages. But there may be some other versions.
2) The good person was me, just as in the case of Louis' 1957 version of "Wild Man Blues" (a Jelly Roll Morton classic) - and I think I remember your laconic comment, "This is bloody great".
A merry X-mas to you and all the other forum members!
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Post by dottorjazz on Dec 24, 2023 21:12:54 GMT
rare love for vocals here with the exception for Lady Day, sorry for all great singers but my love is for instrumentals, greetings to all friends here.
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Post by Rikki Nadir on Mar 22, 2024 23:39:46 GMT
Other than the wonderfully expressive voices of Kate Westbrook, Phil Minton and Norma Winstone, I don't tend to gravitate towards jazz singers. But I do have albums by Donald Byrd, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Ahmad Jamal, Bobby Hutcherson and Jimmy McGriff where vocalists play their part.
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