Robeson to Simone

[Lat-Literal]

Obviously civil rights and "Porgy" but they are on one of my "emotional" tracks and, vaguely, I want to invite comment on musical connections. Any way you wish - preferably substantially - but I want to get something concrete to add to the associations acquired over time. This thread will probably be a damp squib but what the heck. Worth trying!

[Ian Thumwood]

Never really listened to Robeson but I must admit to not being a fan of Nina Simone. I don't have an issue with her pursuit of Civil Rights issues within her music yet I always think this was done so much better by Abbey Lincoln. There is the slight impression that Simone was perhaps too outside of the jazz mainstream and indicative of a time when "jazzy" artists could inhabit a more commercial musical world. She lacks the craftsmanship of Lincoln in my opinion and although I am aware that AL could be erratic as a live performer, were studio records from the 1990's are pretty special. I have a number of them and they always really impressed me whereas I am a bit indifferent to Simone.

[Ian Thumwood]

Classic Lincoln and one of my favourite piano solos by Kenny Barron:-

[Serial_Apologist]

A very strong track that, Ian.

I'm not knowledgeable on early jazz singers. Where Lat has started at Paul Robeson, I think more of Robeson as actor than singer per se, possibly because he didn't fit into any particular genre of his time and was a one-off. Would I be right in thinking that most if not all the early great jazz singers were women - Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox - and that they played a big part in injecting the blues or blues feeling into early jazz, whereas the early male singers remained within the province of strict blues? The male singers of the big band and bebop eras were essentially crooners: Eckstein and Hagood on Birth of the Cool today sound quaintly old-fashioned; Chet Baker's singing too. My lineage of great black singers would go from Bessie to Cassandra Wilson, not that her voice qualities appeal to me - she's coming more from Ms Simone than the Ella lineage of (nearly) always looking on the bright side of life - and carries more emotional weight and cred in terms of musical connections than anyone else around at the moment I can think of.

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

You need to read Elijah Wald's excellent "Escaping the delta" to get an appreciation of this kind of singing. There would appear to be no male blues singing movement until after the Blues Craze of the early 1920's where women singers like Rainy and Smith were the inspiration for singers like Blind Lemon, etc, etc. Although there were accounts like W C Handy of blues being performed in the early 1900's, the fashion for this was solely inspired by female artists with the repertoire of the likes of Frank Stokes, etc being much wider than blues. The book is fascinating insofar that it dismisses country blues as being something archaic and replaces it with the notion that this was cutting edge / modern at the time. This is a brilliant piece of research and essential for anyone wishing to read about 20th century music with Wald coming up with some nuggets to debunk the myths.

I kind of agree with you regarding singers. i'm not fussed by any vintage singers bar the likes of Billie and Jimmy Rushing.However, you have overlooked the importance of Louis Armstrong as a singer who I think was probably the most important male vocalist in popular music until Sinatra who I admire technically but don't listen to . Granted that there were a wide array of male singing styles in this era from Cab Calloway (influenced by his sister Blanche) and popular blues artists like Big Bill Broonzy and Leroy Carr. Don't forget Fats Waller too. I think that the singer George Williams is hugely neglected even if he is influenced by Armstrong. He would have been better known had he not died young in a car crash around 1930:-

None of these singers have anything in common with Robeson even though the actor / singer would also have been extremely popular.

[Serial_Apologist]

However, you have overlooked the importance of Louis Armstrong as a singer who I think was probably the most important male vocalist in popular music until Sinatra

Yes, I agree that I have.

[Lat-Literal]

Classic Lincoln and one of my favourite piano solos by Kenny Barron:-

Yes - I like it - and have found the posts stimulating so thank you very much.

One phrase is "negro spirituals", described by some as the only authentic American folk music. I don't agree with that summary but I think when Harry Burleigh began to publish such songs he considered them to be folk music. A pupil of Dvorak - and the "New World" has a significant strand of that form of spiritual running through it - his intention was to adapt them to a classical repertoire. There is a classicism that runs from Robeson through Gershwin to the piano playing of Simone. However, the latter two are much more closely identified with jazz than folk and Robeson is perhaps a balance of the two along with show tunes. I'm just minded of the contrast between the religiosity of the spirituals and the notion at one time of jazz being "the devil's music" - it is sharp - while the main connections are economic and broadly social in that they were about poverty or relative poverty.

If the roots of Simone were in people like Robeson - I accept that both were highly individual - Simone would never sit in a folk music section. Many of her records were on Verve. Arguably some of her more vivid and mildly controversial lyricas - in "Ain't Got No" etc - which seem very liberal/sixties - refer back to Lucille Bogan. I'm just wondering how the spirituals evolved through the decades into being more closely aligned with jazz. Were they effectively absorbed into jazz because much of religion became superseded by politics?

[Stanley Stewart]

I saw Paul Robeson play Othello at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon in 1958, followed by his Albert Hall recital a year or so later - literally a towering charismatic presence on both occasions, capable of getting a mesmeric stillness from an audience from his first entrance.

Born the son of a runaway slave in 1898, Robeson was to become one of the most significant black figures in American history. A brilliant scholar, linguist and athlete, he also courted notoriety through his political activities: a father of the civil rights movement, he campaigned for racial equality in America and was active in his struggles against facism. His commitment to socialism made him a prime target for the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 50s, and the FBI waged a campaign of vilification against him. Robeson was to spend his old age plagued by illness, living virtually in internal exile, albeit acquainted with international figures, from Indira Gandhi, Nkruma and the Khrushchevs to Bernard Shaw and Eisenstein! This fascinating background is fully researched in Martin Bauml Duberman's 1989 biography, (The Bodley Head Ltd), a heavyweight 800pp tome, even the striking cover is magnetic with its close-up of PR.

My shelves also well stocked with Robeson recordings, including Songs of Free Men,(masterworks heritage, vocal series, remastered,) accompanied by one of Robeson's accompanists, Lawrence Brown, - always Mr Brown in his intros - and my intro to Joe Hill, Balm in Gilead (first release) The Purest Kind of Guy, The Peat-Bog Soldiers, Water Boy, The House I Live In etc - all resonate with the glorious bass-baritone voice in its prime. Perhaps my favourite recording is the Moscow Concert, released in the 90s after several decades of restricted constriction - damn it, it is not in its place in my collection so the search begins. You begin to understand why Robeson was also feared as a great communicator by the Soviet regime.

However, I was perplexed to see this topic on the Jazz thread and made a quick reference to to the MBD biography to confirm my belief that Robeson, primarily a folk singer, held jazz in disdain for many years.

"Jazz "reflects Broadway, not the Negro. It exploits a Negro technique, but it isn't Negro. It has something of the Negro sense of rhythm, but only some....The rhythmic complications of (African dialects)...make Duke Ellington's hot rhythms seem childish." He elaborated further the following year: "Jazz which is admittedly negroid in its rhythmical origin, is no longer the honest and sincere folk song in character...Jazz songs like 'St Louis Blues' or 'St James's Infirmary'...are actually nearer to their folk-song origin than they are to Tin Pan Alley, but...most of it isn't genuine negro music any longer" - and as for a jazz piece like "High Water" it was merely "a vulgarized form of 'Roll, Jordan, Roll'"(I would rather get together half a dozen African drummers and listen to them. Their rhythm is so much more complicated") In dismissing jazz as having "no spiritual significance" and in saying it would have no "serious effect on real music," Robeson was expressing an opinion shared by most "serious" composers and critics of the day. The early explorations of the jazz idiom on the part of Copland, Stravinsky, Mildhaud, Weill, Krenek, and others,these critics argued, had just about exhausted its possibilities. Robeson was also echoing an attitude that had existed in the twenties among the black bourgeoisie and some of the Harlem elite - though for very different reasons. Whereas the black upper crust denigrated jazz as the music of their Southern peasant antecedents (an attitude they applied as well to the spirituals), Robeson came to disdain it because it was not a pure enough expression of those folk origins. However, just as the Harlem elite had eventually succumbed to the mania for jazz in the late twenties, Paul also seems in later years to have been able to set aside his theoretical arguments with it and to enjoy it for what it was. Throughout the forties, he frequented such legendary jazz joints as the Apollo and Cafe Society to hear the big bands and some of the jazz greats, like Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. In the fifties, he would go "up to the Savoy Ballroom very often to hear Count Basie...downtown to hear Don Shirley and back up to Manhattan Casino to hear Charlie Parker and get 'twisted around' trying to dance to those 'off beat riffs', down to the Apollo to hear Dizzy Gillespie take flight. And Thelonious Monk really floored me." And, much later, in 1958, Robeson would come around to saying, "For my money, modern jazz is one of the most important musical things there is in the world..."

[Lat-Literal]

I saw Paul Robeson play Othello at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon in 1958, followed by his Albert Hall recital a year or so later - literally a towering charismatic presence on both occasions, capable of getting a mesmeric stillness from an audience from his first entrance.

Born the son of a runaway slave in 1898, Robeson was to become one of the most significant black figures in American history. A brilliant scholar, linguist and athlete, he also courted notoriety through his political activities: a father of the civil rights movement, he campaigned for racial equality in America and was active in his struggles against facism. His commitment to socialism made him a prime target for the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 50s, and the FBI waged a campaign of vilification against him. Robeson was to spend his old age plagued by illness, living virtually in internal exile, albeit acquainted with international figures, from Indira Gandhi, Nkruma and the Khrushchevs to Bernard Shaw and Eisenstein! This fascinating background is fully researched in Martin Bauml Duberman's 1989 biography, (The Bodley Head Ltd), a heavyweight 800pp tome, even the striking cover is magnetic with its close-up of PR.

My shelves also well stocked with Robeson recordings, including Songs of Free Men,(masterworks heritage, vocal series, remastered,) accompanied by one of Robeson's accompanists, Lawrence Brown, - always Mr Brown in his intros - and my intro to Joe Hill, Balm in Gilead (first release) The Purest Kind of Guy, The Peat-Bog Soldiers, Water Boy, The House I Live In etc - all resonate with the glorious bass-baritone voice in its prime. Perhaps my favourite recording is the Moscow Concert, released in the 90s after several decades of restricted constriction - damn it, it is not in its place in my collection so the search begins. You begin to understand why Robeson was also feared as a great communicator by the Soviet regime.

However, I was perplexed to see this topic on the Jazz thread and made a quick reference to to the MBD biography to confirm my belief that Robeson, primarily a folk singer, held jazz in disdain for many years.

"Jazz "reflects Broadway, not the Negro. It exploits a Negro technique, but it isn't Negro. It has something of the Negro sense of rhythm, but only some....The rhythmic complications of (African dialects)...make Duke Ellington's hot rhythms seem childish." He elaborated further the following year: "Jazz which is admittedly negroid in its rhythmical origin, is no longer the honest and sincere folk song in character...Jazz songs like 'St Louis Blues' or 'St James's Infirmary'...are actually nearer to their folk-song origin than they are to Tin Pan Alley, but...most of it isn't genuine negro music any longer" - and as for a jazz piece like "High Water" it was merely "a vulgarized form of 'Roll, Jordan, Roll'"(I would rather get together half a dozen African drummers and listen to them. Their rhythm is so much more complicated") In dismissing jazz as having "no spiritual significance" and in saying it would have no "serious effect on real music," Robeson was expressing an opinion shared by most "serious" composers and critics of the day. The early explorations of the jazz idiom on the part of Copland, Stravinsky, Mildhaud, Weill, Krenek, and others,these critics argued, had just about exhausted its possibilities. Robeson was also echoing an attitude that had existed in the twenties among the black bourgeoisie and some of the Harlem elite - though for very different reasons. Whereas the black upper crust denigrated jazz as the music of their Southern peasant antecedents (an attitude they applied as well to the spirituals), Robeson came to disdain it because it was not a pure enough expression of those folk origins. However, just as the Harlem elite had eventually succumbed to the mania for jazz in the late twenties, Paul also seems in later years to have been able to set aside his theoretical arguments with it and to enjoy it for what it was. Throughout the forties, he frequented such legendary jazz joints as the Apollo and Cafe Society to hear the big bands and some of the jazz greats, like Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. In the fifties, he would go "up to the Savoy Ballroom very often to hear Count Basie...downtown to hear Don Shirley and back up to Manhattan Casino to hear Charlie Parker and get 'twisted around' trying to dance to those 'off beat riffs', down to the Apollo to hear Dizzy Gillespie take flight. And Thelonious Monk really floored me." And, much later, in 1958, Robeson would come around to saying, "For my money, modern jazz is one of the most important musical things there is in the world..."

Blimey!

That's absolutely magnificent.

Many thanks for it, Stanley.

This has to be a very significant pivotal point in music. Your post indicates via Robeson the earlier juxtapositions between folk, jazz and for want of a better phrase world music although, of course, that term didn't arrive until the 1980s. All those juxtapositions also connect directly with classical music and theatre/drama. The social dimensions - ostensibly lyrics - are also interesting. A guy on the radio yesterday was talking about atheism. He said that most atheists in the 20th Century argued robustly for the freedom of religious expression whereas in this century their instinct is often to close it down. I would suggest that when the 20th Century reached Simone, almost the reverse applied. Religion had traditionally been very prescriptive and rigid. Simone never lost the religion in her music but she opened it up in a support for a wide range of liberal causes - eg note her open comments at that time on cannabis. She could quite easily have stuck with political points about race and economics but that was not what she did. I don't think Robeson can be divorced from that evolution. His mother had been a Quaker which was religion in a looser form and he was very political in the ways you have outlined. But perhaps it took a jazz input to bring about a new sixties style spirituality as opposed to religion or secularism, that is, if one approaches such historical developments from a purely musical perspective.

This is the Robeson CD I have - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Paul-Robeson.../dp/B001W7I1H4

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Blimey!

That's absolutely magnificent.

Many thanks for it, Stanley.

[johncorrigan]

Thanks indeed, Stanley. I always saw Robeson as a folk singer with one of the truly great and unique voices in music history. Here he is singing a song from Lat's CD, here with Hattie McDaniel accompanying, from that 2nd 'Showboat'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lIOvZXDUAA

[cloughie]

A very strong track that, Ian.

I'm not knowledgeable on early jazz singers. Where Lat has started at Paul Robeson, I think more of Robeson as actor than singer per se, possibly because he didn't fit into any particular genre of his time and was a one-off. Would I be right in thinking that most if not all the early great jazz singers were women - Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox - and that they played a big part in injecting the blues or blues feeling into early jazz, whereas the early male singers remained within the province of strict blues? The male singers of the big band and bebop eras were essentially crooners: Eckstein and Hagood on Birth of the Cool today sound quaintly old-fashioned; Chet Baker's singing too. My lineage of great black singers would go from Bessie to Cassandra Wilson, not that her voice qualities appeal to me - she's coming more from Ms Simone than the Ella lineage of (nearly) always looking on the bright side of life - and carries more emotional weight and cred in terms of musical connections than anyone else around at the moment I can think of.

I agree with you about Cassandra Wilson, I've often thought her sound very much akin to Nina Simone. Of today's singers Dianne Reeves is more in the Ella/Sarah Vaughan mould and very good too. Another black singer worth a mention is Nat King Cole. I think he started off as a singer-pianist at the same time as Oscar Peterson - one concentrated on singing, the other the piano - both good decisions!

[Ian Thumwood]

For my money, Dianne Reeves is in the same class as Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald. I enjoy Cassandra Wilson's work immensely but the blues orientated stuff on records like "Belly of the sun" and "New moon daughter" are essential records.

Just stumbled upon this track which makes you realise that there were some pretty mature and powerful singers who were already firmly established in the 1920s. This track is terrific:-

[Lat-Literal]

Thanks indeed, Stanley. I always saw Robeson as a folk singer with one of the truly great and unique voices in music history. Here he is singing a song from Lat's CD, here with Hattie McDaniel accompanying, from that 2nd 'Showboat'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lIOvZXDUAA

For my money, Dianne Reeves is in the same class as Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald. I enjoy Cassandra Wilson's work immensely but the blues orientated stuff on records like "Belly of the sun" and "New moon daughter" are essential records.

Just stumbled upon this track which makes you realise that there were some pretty mature and powerful singers who were already firmly established in the 1920s. This track is terrific:-

I enjoyed both those links.

[Padraig]

It is hard to bring Robeson and Simone together in a Jazz thread. But how about putting them at Free Derry Corner?

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/02/3b/9a/aa/free-derry-corner.jpg

If you were there today you would see a picture of Joe Hill on the wall and a slogan to 'Organise'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Kxq9uFDes

Nor would Nina Simone be out of place at that memorial to Civil Rights either - she has also paid her dues.

Yet both Robeson and Simone are more than these limited portraits suggest. Robeson, like John McCormack, could make an ordinary song extraordinary, and Nina's musicianship never failed to impress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6proYaAfwtM