Is this a coup? You can Betty - get Carter!

**BLUESNIK'S REVOX** · 28-09-18, 13:44

One hint for JRR, it should "feature" my request for Sarah Vaughan (1954 with Clifford Brown and Paul Quinichette etc) singing "September Song" - "a glorious occasion" four stars and a crown in Cook/Morton.

Twelve stars in the Bluesnik Guidebook of How to do it. Listen to her closing phrases, absolute perfection.

**Serial_Apologist** · 28-09-18, 13:57

Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post

One hint for JRR, it should "feature" my request for Sarah Vaughan (1954 with Clifford Brown and Paul Quinichette etc) singing "September Song" - "a glorious occasion" four stars and a crown in Cook/Morton.

Twelve stars in the Bluesnik Guidebook of How to do it. Listen to her closing phrases, absolute perfection.

"Sep.......TEMMMMMMMM..............berrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrr"

Still got my EP of that, with "Lullabye in Birdland" on t'other side.

**BLUESNIK'S REVOX** · 28-09-18, 14:19

Yep, the entire album is superb. When people talk of "jazz singing" this should be a template. Her phrasing, taste, her harmonic knowledge, the entire package. You don't get *that* at the Guildhall.

**BLUESNIK'S REVOX** · 28-09-18, 15:33

And, at a tangent, why is BBC R3 lately broadcasting an overload of bloody awful choral music? Just when I thought it's output was improving, its now full of God awful choirs etc. This afternoon "singing on trains". If they were on my train, they'd be booted off at Box. Back to France Musique, and some Euro sanity.

**Ian Thumwood** · 28-09-18, 15:55

Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post

And, at a tangent, why is BBC R3 lately broadcasting an overload of bloody awful choral music? Just when I thought it's output was improving, its now full of God awful choirs etc. This afternoon "singing on trains". If they were on my train, they'd be booted off at Box. Back to France Musique, and some Euro sanity.

BBC Music weekend.

For what it is worth, I am not a fan of that Sarah Vaughan record. It is very much of it's time but I just find the piano playing on the record edges it towards "middle of the road." I don't think it has stood the test of time too well. Always thought it sounded really dated and not on a par with say Billie Holiday's 1930's Columbia records which have far more bite about them.

**Serial_Apologist** · 28-09-18, 15:55

Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post

And, at a tangent, why is BBC R3 lately broadcasting an overload of bloody awful choral music? Just when I thought it's output was improving, its now full of God awful choirs etc. This afternoon "singing on trains". If they were on my train, they'd be booted off at Box. Back to France Musique, and some Euro sanity.

I haven't been tuning in to that - just now listening to a very creative DJ called Charlie Caz I've signalled on the "Experimental etc" board - but surely it can't be as bad as much of the happy-clappy stuff I subject myself to first thing on Sunday mornings on Radio 4? Before switching over to the Marr show on BBC1, just to torture myself a bit more - ("it's so nice when you leave off")? I've been tracking the degradation of religious music now ever since I can remember, having been a chorister - "waiting for the spark from heaven to fall" in the words of a Victorian poet who was a bit of a radical in his time. To think that I went to see "Black Nativity" when I was still at school, and at the time thought if religion had been this rather than Hymns Ancient & Modern I could have been Saved. Maybe the sin lies in taking my bath at the same time.

**BLUESNIK'S REVOX** · 28-09-18, 16:10

Ian, everything is "a product of its time", it is impossible to be otherwise without a "machine". This is one of the most banal utterances that (some) people use to attempt sophistication at cocktail parties and undergraduate seminars, where they rightly get a bloody good kicking and a broken nose. But Sarah's record is timeless in that it's artistic qualities do not date. Just because YOU...

Back to sanity, France and France Musique...

**Ian Thumwood** · 28-09-18, 16:42

Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post

Ian, everything is "a product of its time", it is impossible to be otherwise without a "machine". This is one of the most banal utterances that (some) people use to attempt sophistication at cocktail parties and undergraduate seminars, where they rightly get a bloody good kicking and a broken nose. But Sarah's record is timeless in that it's artistic qualities do not date. Just because YOU...

Back to sanity, France and France Musique...

I bought the CD on account of it being so celebrated but I was totally under-whelmed. I believe that Quincy Jones had something to go with the arrangements. The record would probably have slid into obscurity were it not for Clifford Brown. I can take or leave Sarah Vaughan. I respect her technique and the quality if her voice yet I find her singing a bit mannered. She never seemed as spontaneous as Betty Carter . She is a bit like Cecile McLoren Salvant these days - a fantastic musician just not one I would chose to listen to much.

The strangest thing about the record for me is the mixing. The piano is so far in the background that you cant help but think that it was done on purpose. It sounds like a recording by modern jazz musicians watered down by the production values to give it more commercial appeal. I think it lacks the clarity of a lot of jazz records of that time. I am sure that Mercury would have envisaged the record to have a broader commercial appeal. Despite the likes of Brown on the record and the under-rated Paul Quinichette, it doesn't do anything for me.

**Serial_Apologist** · 28-09-18, 16:52

Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post

Yep, the entire album is superb. When people talk of "jazz singing" this should be a template. Her phrasing, taste, her harmonic knowledge, the entire package. You don't get *that* at the Guildhall.

To me, many of the young females taking up "jazz singing" are just a hark-back to times when the female vocalist was there to bring in the punters and sang bygone lyrics non-reflective of women's quest for emancipation. Apart from the radical innovators like (in this country) Norma winstone and Maggie Nicols it was largely the Punk sisters who came slightly later with something different, but musically very limited, which made it such a shame that jazz singers never partook of the spirit of innovation that drove jazz forward in the 60s and 70s. Such is the fixated role of the "jazz singer" any development is bound to be subject to more syncretism than in the case of instrumental improvisation, which had its main influence on scat. Lots of the women singers one meets tell us the shift to draw inspiration from comes from Gospel and Soul singers like the great late Aretha; but there the innovations quickly solidified into cliché, Beyoncé - all those versions of "Amazing Grace", a tune I never liked anyway. What in these circs can't be without significance is the proportion of female jazz singers whose lives fall apart, and thus fail through no fault of their own to realise whatever potential might be realiseable in the music where the models different, and we knew what it was. Folk singers for instance are said to offer another stylistic path that can be brought on board. Male singers, not so different a matter: the role superscription issue. Perhaps someone can come across from the world of Rap and Hip Hop, where there's a meshing of spoken rhythm, periodicy, and (at best, viz Ms Dynamite) social and political radicalism, which jazz also needs to recoup. Cleveland Watkiss, Soweto Kinch??

**Serial_Apologist** · 28-09-18, 17:08

Originally posted by Ian Thumwood View Post

I bought the CD on account of it being so celebrated but I was totally under-whelmed. I believe that Quincy Jones had something to go with the arrangements. The record would probably have slid into obscurity were it not for Clifford Brown. I can take or leave Sarah Vaughan. I respect her technique and the quality if her voice yet I find her singing a bit mannered. She never seemed as spontaneous as Betty Carter . She is a bit like Cecile McLoren Salvant these days - a fantastic musician just not one I would chose to listen to much.

The strangest thing about the record for me is the mixing. The piano is so far in the background that you cant help but think that it was done on purpose. It sounds like a recording by modern jazz musicians watered down by the production values to give it more commercial appeal. I think it lacks the clarity of a lot of jazz records of that time. I am sure that Mercury would have envisaged the record to have a broader commercial appeal. Despite the likes of Brown on the record and the under-rated Paul Quinichette, it doesn't do anything for me.

When judging the contemporaneity of that record one has to be reminded of what jazz came to signify at that period when American politics at large was retreating into cold warism and anti-radicalism. The jazz equivalent of the establishment-supported Abstract Expressionists in painting could not yet be countenanced by the black jazz community, which had its own issues of competitiveness reflected in the music and its modes of performance. In the hands of the likes of Tristano, Getz and John Lewis, jazz retrenched correspondingly, jetissoning some of the impetuousness in the bop era, whose energies were starting to wind down, catching up on under-acknowledgments to classical models

**Ian Thumwood** · 28-09-18, 17:42

Got to disagree. I don't think jazz singing has been in a healthier position. Singers seem to be making a conscious decision to move away from the Standards and the repertoire has expanded considerably. It is true that singers didn't really follow the free jazz trend but there is still plenty of innovation that , for me at least, makes most contemporary singers more interesting than Vaughan. I would also add that there are a good few singers who have taken the baton on from the great Norma Winstone.

Reading your comments, I wonder if you have checked our Queen Latifah who has crossed over from Rap to jazz back in the early 2000's. Most of these Soul / Rap singers come from gospel anyway and therefore the leap is not too great. Sarah Vaughan was probably the first "modern jazz singer" and blazed a trail in the late 40's yet I strongly feel there are singers around today like Luciana Souza or Gretchen Parlato who are manifestly more Jazz and less pop thaan singers of Vaughan's generation. certainly, the "cocktail" "supper club" feel of the Vaughan album is missing from the records I have by these two singers. I cannot see either Souza or Parlato crossing over in to pop. Older singers like Dianne Reeves have similarly come out of a more pop-orientated background and fulfilled the lessons learned form elder statesmen like Clark Terry. For my money. Reeves is up there with Fitzgerald and Vaughan whilst being far more contemporary than either. Elsewhere, Cassandra Wilson has embraced blues and Becca Stevens folk. Today's singers will probably consider Joni Mitchell as a composer of standards and someone like Parlato is using material composed by the likes of Ellington, Shorter and Hancock amongst originals for inspiration - hardly song book material. I just feel that jazz vocals have truly come of age since the 1990s and especially in the last 15 years. Someone like Souza is clearly in the same tradition as Winstone and if you investigate these kinds of musicians, they are simply as engaged in the music as much as the other players as opposed to just providing lyrics. I would suggest that the album Vaughan made with Clifford Brown is probably more akin to the popular music of it's time than many of the singers I have mentioned are to today's pop music.

I feel that there has been a backlash again standards. Everyone is tired of hearing them sung and you are starting to find the repertoire broaden and singers write their own material. Anything is possible, This summer I heard Angelique Kijdo with a symphony orchestra accompanying Ibrahim Malouf in jazz suite. Jazz singing is under going a revolution akin to what happened in jazz in the 1960's but the results are massively different. I also saw the French singer Sarah Lancman this summer too. Interestingly, she has also been mentored by Quincy Jones but her approach with the pianist I heard her perform with demonstrated the kind of stuff NW used to produce but her voice is a lot better in my opinion. I am wondering just how influential NW is - you could make a very strong argument that she has had more influence on jazz than any other British jazz musicians.

**Alyn_Shipton** · 28-09-18, 19:59

I'd have to disagree with you Ian, as so many of the singers we get sent samples of for Jazz Now are lightweight, superficial and banal. Sarah, on the other hand, was not and I'm in BN's corner regarding her early output. Listen again tomorrow https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000kfs
In the meantime, I suspect you won't be coming along to Turner Sims for our "Buck and Billie" concert with Julia Biel on 19 Oct, then.

**Ian Thumwood** · 29-09-18, 08:27

Originally posted by Alyn_Shipton View Post

I'd have to disagree with you Ian, as so many of the singers we get sent samples of for Jazz Now are lightweight, superficial and banal. Sarah, on the other hand, was not and I'm in BN's corner regarding her early output. Listen again tomorrow https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000kfs
In the meantime, I suspect you won't be coming along to Turner Sims for our "Buck and Billie" concert with Julia Biel on 19 Oct, then.

Alyn

I will be going to your gig as both Billie Holiday and Buck Clayton are exactly my cup of tea. Oddly enough, my intention had been to bring my 8 year old nephew along too as he learning to play the drums and I wanted to try to get him interested in jazz. This seemed the ideal gig to pique his interest because of the fact that the group has a singer and the music quickly communicates. Unfortunately the date he is coming down has moved to the 20th so I am afraid it will just be me. Whilst Holiday was a singer that had an immediate appeal to me from the off , I would have to say that Buck Clayton's writing has a big appeal for me too. My Dad was a massive fan of his music and there was something of a renaissance when Clayton produced some really good big band albums in the 1980's. Clayton's writing was therefore something I grew up listen to through my Dad's collection. I think Clayton would have cemented his reputation alone with his sterling work with Basie as the jam session records made in the 1950s but I have always had the impression that Buck Clayton and Benny Carter probably both contributed more to ensuring swing remained relevant in to the 1980's. For me, Clayton's writing is so fundamental to what jazz is about that he belongs in the same category of jazz writers as the likes of Gerald Wilson and Jimmy Heath.

I think that I was probably a bit younger when I first heard live music but it always made an impression on me even though the music was not necessary the kind of stuff I would listen to now. I remember going along to hear productions of Gilbert & Sullivan when I was young. Not something that remotely appeals now. Having introduced my nephew to cricket this summer, jazz was the next thing to explore.

Wondered if anyone else had the same predicament in getting someone in to jazz at a young age and what kind of music you would take them to in order to get them hooked.

**BLUESNIK'S REVOX** · 29-09-18, 08:40

"This is a story about an exchange I had with Sarah Vaughan that day: As we exchanged pleasantries and salutations in one of the backstage rooms, I thought would impress her by playing an obscure Duke Ellington song, “Tonight I Shall Sleep (with a Smile Upon My Face)” on an elderly upright piano. This piece has a sophisticated, involved melody and very advanced harmonies.
Knowing that there was probably not a 21 year old on the planet who knew this song, I assumed that this ignorance applied to all. I asked her, “Miss Vaughan do you know this?” I played it through with very rudimentary piano skills and a few incorrect harmonies on the coda.

(At that time, I didn’t know that she had grown up playing organ in her mother’s church, played 2nd piano and organ in Earl Hines’ orchestra, played 2nd piano in the Billy Eckstein Orchestra that featured Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, Gene Ammons and Art Blakey, AND she accompanied herself singing). She said,“Wow, that’s a great song. Duke! But you played some wrong changes on the coda baby.” She then sat down and played the complete coda flawlessly and with so much technique I thought (Damn! she plays piano like that, but has chosen to SING?)

She smiled and said, “That’s it.” Then went on to say, “When you learn tunes figure out how the melody is constructed and then learn the logic of the supporting harmonies. That way, you will never forget a song. You understand the what and the why.” She finished making her point by playing the entire song with all kinds of alternate harmonies and elegant improvisational responses to the melody, and concluded by saying, “See baby?”
“Yes ma’am. I see.”

Wynton

Posted on October 20th, 2017

Is this a coup? You can Betty - get Carter!

Is this a coup? You can Betty - get Carter!

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