Vocalists

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.

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.

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".

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.

 

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?

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.