Ella Fitzgerald's death in June formally marked the end of an era that was already over. She was the last of the pioneer jazz singers. (Jon Hendricks and Joe Williams, both later arrivals, have lost their voices, except for the periodic miraculous comeback. Lena Horne has only lately been reclassified from cabaret to jazz singer, for reasons that baffle even her.) So her passing--along with the appearance this spring of New Moon Daughter, the chart-topping disc from 40-something vocalist Cassandra Wilson--renders timely a question that's been asked and re-asked for several decades now:What makes a singer a jazz singer? Is it the material? the approach? technique and range? audience perception?
Although ticket sales for New York's JVC Festival have ebbed the past several years, three younger warblers--Dianne Reeves, Rachelle Ferrell and Kurt Elling--nearly sold out Carnegie Hall in late June. JVC impresario George Wein reports, "There were 2,200 people, about 50 percent of them African-Americans between 25 and 35. These singers are reaching out with their own styles." What makes them jazz singers? Wein says, "The whole scene has changed so much. A jazz singer used to be the equivalent of Ben Webster, interpolating ideas into a melody. Nowadays, a lot of singers go off; the melody isn't as important to them."
The JVC's three ticket-sellers are all signed to Blue Note, as are jazzy hitmakers Bobby McFerrin and Cassandra Wilson. Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall: "It's a healthy time for jazz singing. A couple of years ago, the critics wondered where the young singers were. They weren't as ready to accept a fresh, contemporary point of view--which, along with knowing the tradition and being able to swing, are the only rules I know. They didn't like Rachelle, for example, because she often goes over the top. But that's because she can, and her audience demands it.
But people's outlooks are more flexible now, in large part because Cassandra's changed all that."
Wilson's sultry vocals have set a new standard, and opened new audiences, for the art of jazz singing. Her first disc as a pop-jazz crossover diva, 1993's Blue Light 'Til Dawn, has sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States and 300,000 worldwide-- big numbers for jazz. As of late July, Daughter had moved 200,000 units in this country and 350,000 worldwide--pop-magnitude sales. After touring clubs behind Blue Light, Wilson graduated to 700-and 800-seat venues for Daughter--and last month opened at Radio City Music Hall for no less a crossover master than Ray Charles himself. So, after fifteen years of trying different persons--folkie and blues-woman, mainstream diva, avant-jazz and hip-hop/jazz hybridist --Wilson is now a success, probably because she's combined all of her previous selves within the radical roots-rock/world-music/ blues-and-jazz-tinged hyper-hyphenated backing designed largely by producer Craig Street.
As Wilson tells it, the making of her last record was very much in the jazz tradition: "When we were recording New Moon Daughter, Craig transformed the barn up at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York, into a sensational studio. I was the only one isolated; even the engineer was in the same room as the musicians while we were recording. That kind of intensity is what Craig loves: `We're going to do this live.' It's so risky it's great. You've got to get inside the moment. So, is this a jazz record? It depends on who's listening to it. There's a great deal of improvisation throughout.And it's rooted in jazz traditions like that. But it also reshapes them."
Interestingly, there hasn't been as much jazz-world knife-fighting over whether Wilson's best seller is a musical sellout as you'd expect if she were, say, a famed instrumentalist, a Wayne Shorter or Herbie Hancock. Quite the opposite: Besides popping up in cameos on new albums by younger musicians, from hip-hop jazzers Courtney Pine to the more mainstream David Sanchez, Wilson also performs with Wynton Marsalis. Part of this easier acceptance is probably, if a bit ironically, due to the historical fact that even jazz-vocal icons like Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington recorded pop hits in their heydays.
But Wilson's expansive reach, coupled with the post-Ray/post-Aretha ornamental flights of new-jack and new-jill vocalizers operating in the Quiet Storm pop modes, signals something significant about the resurgent appeal of jazzy vocals, and jazz, to a new generation. Just a couple of weeks prior to New Moon Daughter, Herbie Hancock released The New Standard (Verve), a fascinating attempt to turn fusion inside out by taking post-sixties pop and rock tunes and adapting them to a primarily acoustic quintet and jazz-dense harmonies. Hancock told me one of the biggest problems he had with choosing "new standards" to adapt to jazzy flights was structural: So many contemporary pop tunes are built with melodies targeting specific singers (often the writer) that they don't have the same elasticity as, say, songs by Gershwin or Porter, which were aimed at stimulating any singer coming their way. And he fully expected to be dissed for the recording: Years ago he had employed a young trumpeter who made a name for himself in part by attacking Hancock for his nonpurist outings during and after the great Miles Davis bands of the sixties.
The way Hancock sees it, "At this point, there seems to be a backlash against a lot of music. There are some young jazz musicians steering away from the pop side of things. You know, Wynton is pretty...tight about this. I should start with how much he's done for jazz. He's brought a whole lot of young people to jazz. He's brought a whole lot of attention to jazz that wasn't there. He's brought a lot of intelligence to jazz. He's also brought an interest in the history of jazz. I just think he's gone too far with that stuff. To restrict yourself to studying the past, even if it's Ellington, isn't the spirit of jazz. It's my understanding that jazz has always been very open, that it's always borrowed from different genres and contributed to the shaping of other genres too. Take that away, and you won't have anything I want to hear. It may be jazz, but it ain't gonna feel good. It's gonna be cold, and it ain't gonna have any soul."
The unavoidable surfacing of the mix-and-match trends, from avant types to hip-hop jazz and acid jazz melders, that have done their traditional underground labor, prepping jazz's next evolutionary stages while the TV cameras have focused on the neotraditional Young Lions, means that Hancock doesn't have to worry: The impulse at jazz's heart to appropriate via fusion is alive and well. Albums from singers like Wilson only confirm that. And yet most jazz critics--I include myself-- have little use for singers; unlike the public, which thrives on vocals, we tend to think of warblers as inferior musicians--which, unfortunately, they usually are. And so we give them less weight in the music's history than their instrumental counterparts. Yet right now, the key emerging vocal trends seem to be confirming what's happening on the instrumental side: Jazz is entering one of its once-a-generation breakouts into general culture.
Jazz musicians are even more finicky about vocalists than jazz critics, and for the same reasons--plus, of course, the fact that many of the musicians have to work with the singers. The diva factor (this is not a gender-specific trait) and the lack of solid musicianship among singers can drive players nuts, on and off the bandstand. As pianist Kenny Barron growls, "Get rid of 'em all." Then, grinning, he agrees to reconsider and accentuate the positive: "Being a jazz singer is about phrasing--having a musical personality that's distinct. You have to be able to improvise,and not stick to written arrangements." Adds trio mate bassist Ray Drummond, "It means being part of the band, being able to use your voice like a horn."
That's what was happening in 1926, when Louis Armstrong put down his trumpet and invented scatting on "Heebie Jeebies." Fitzgerald extended his technique awesomely, but never had his bluesy edge. That aching grittiness runs through Billie Holiday's darker textures. The legacies of these two defining pioneers have structured the field ever since. Mahogany (Warner Bros.), which takes jazzy spins on contemporary pop tunes. A fixture at Bradley's, the late-night mainstream-jazz hangout/headquarters in the Big Apple, he's a deft scat singer. Also 38, Jeanie Bryson, who recently released the pleasant if unradical Some Cats Know (Telarc), a tribute to Peggy Lee, isn't. She explains the bipolar lineage of the jazz singer: "There are two camps, basically. One is the Ella camp, which includes Betty Carter, where they create something new every time they open their mouths. Me, I'm in the other camp, the storytellers--people like Billie and Carmen McRae and Shirley Horn, where melody and lyrics are the dominant concerns. I change the time of a line, like Billie, but I never scat like Ella." Nevertheless, people--many younger than she--nearly filled the Village Vanguard all week recently to catch her understated, purring approach. Mahogany, too, drew a boomer-and-younger crowd at Iridium--and this in a week when Carnegie Hall was running a two-night tribute to Ella, when even the most avid vocal aficionado might be deep in OD-land. Although they come from different branches of the jazz-vocal tradition themselves, both singers recognize that Wilson's success is a sign of the times: Jazz's current shift in audience outreach is generational. Others, like Canadian chanteuses Holly Cole (who happened to share Wilson's producer for her pop-jazz noir excursions into an album of Tom Waits tunes) and Diana Krall (a solid pianist made over into an unspectacular Nat Cole-style vocalist-pianist), underline that change in process.
While The New York Times Magazine sighs for those Depression glory days when Berlin was on everyone's lips, something quite different is happening --a generation is coming to know itself artistically. Says Bryson, "When I first saw Cassandra sixteen years ago, she was doing a Betty Carteresque thing. She's enormously creative, and she's just finding her voice, really, now. Show me a great 21-year-old jazz singer--there aren't any. You need experience. Now, is what Cassandra's doing jazz? Certainly not all of it. So what? When I was young I listened to Nancy Wilson with my grandparents, but I loved the Allman Brothers and P-Funk." Mahogany, a sax player for seventeen years before he moved into vocals, came up on the scene as a blues-and-ballad man. His early albums for enja, an indie German jazz label, situated him squarely in the Kansas City big-voiced crooner vein, and showcased his ability to take off. Given that context, his major-label debut is disappointing: The right ingredients to make a working crossover are all here, yes, but they stay too distinct, distant, cagey. Maybe the disc is overproduced. Maybe Mahogany himself didn't get the material warmed up enough before he hit the sterility of the studio. It sounds like his heart's not in it. Live at Iridium, however, was a strikingly different story: He chewed the material up with all his considerable resources, which include a fast, barbed sense of humor. So he has serious credibility when he insists, with echoes of Wilson and Hancock, "This album is a departure for me, but it's still jazz. I'm doing exactly what singers have always done: taking tunes from my youth and reharmonizing them for jazz. Betty Carter grew up listening to jazz; that was pop music then. We grew up listening to funk, soul, rock and roll. Jazz has always absorbed the best of what's around it. That's what we're doing now."
Short Cuts. In this election year, Nation readers are probably looking for political satire. So check out The United States of America, Vols. 1 & 2 (Rhino), by Stan Freberg. The first disc is the 1961 classic that reviews American history through the Revolutionary War; the second to World War I. Then there are the witty Foremen, touring behind Folk Heroes and What's Left (Reprise). Firesign Theatre co-founder Phil Proctor said to me recently, "It's a strange time: Surrealism has to compete with hyperrealism." Or, as the comedy troupe asked years ago, "What is reality?" This year's answer: the part that hurts when you laugh.
Source: The Nation, Sep 9, 1996 v263 n7 p54(5).
Title: Sing sing sing.(jazz singers)
Author: Gene Santoro
