What Makes it Real?

What do all of these singers have in common?

Born in the 1920’s or earlier:  Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Hartman, Blossom Dearie, Mel Torme,  Anita O’Day, Helen Merrill, Joe Williams, Ernie Andrews, Little Jimmy Scott, Ivie Anderson, Eddie Jefferson, Jackie and Roy, Etta Jones,Billy Eckstine, Louis Armstrong, Nat Cole, Ernestine Anderson, Chris Connor, Julie London, Lena Horne, Chet Baker, Boswell Sisters, Jimmy Rushing, Jon Hendricks, Rosemary Clooney, June Christy, Dinah Washington, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee...

Born in the 1930’s and 1940’s:  Nancy Wilson, Annie Ross, Sheila Jordan, Shirley Horn, Gloria Lynne, Abbey Lincoln, Keely Smith, Dakota Staton, Irene Kral, Mark Murphy, Betty Carter, Freddy Cole, Morgana King, Jay Clayton, Andy Bey, Nancy King, Grady Tate, Carol Sloane, and Nina Simone...

They all took the pop songs of their day (or earlier) and turned them into jazz standards.  

Are jazz singers today creating new standards?  What would be the equivalent to the Great American Songbook in the year 2013?  And is there objective criteria to determine if what held true in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s still holds true today?

According to the dictionary: “a jazz singer is a singer whose vocal technique is similar to that of a musical instrument, and whose singing has a strong jazz feeling, chiefly imparted through phrasing, melodic improvisation, and rhythmic subtlety.”

Most of the classic singers of the 1930's, 40's, and 50's do all of the above to some degree.  If you conducted a blindfold test, many are recognizable because of their distinctive phrasing, timbre, vocal tone and color, mannerisms, stylistic choices, and overall sound.  

I associate Lover Man with Billie Holiday and Don't Go To Strangers with Etta Jones, Save Your Love For Me with Nancy Wilson, and My Funny Valentine with Chet Baker.  All of these singers are kind of doing the exact same thing.  But they sound nothing like one another.  

 In the classical world, Leontyne Price's Vissi d’arte [Tosca] and Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma [Turandot] are distinctive and definitive.  But jazz singers go further to personalize a song, as the parameters of the music allow for more variation, I'd venture to say, so it isn't enough to say that jazz singers are known for their renditions of the repertoire alone.

I am not an authority.  I am not a historian, (bless Phil Schaap's heart!)  I couldn’t tell you what Charlie Parker told Fats Navarro outside a club one rainy November night in 1947 or salvage and repair priceless old audio reels, archive and document every moment in the history of jazz, every word... every note.  I’m just looking for a way to understand the expectations placed on jazz vocalists today and if these may have changed since Ella, Sarah, Carmen, Betty, et al. were the top singers on the scene.  

Consider these quotes:

“What we play is life..... Never play the same way twice.”  (Louis Armstrong)

“I hate straight singing.  I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it.  That’s all I know.” (Billie Holiday)

“I stole everything I heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.” (Ella Fitzgerald)

“The essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.” (Mose Allison)

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom.  If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” (Charlie Parker)

“I don’t care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.” (Miles Davis)

“The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.” (Count Basie)

“Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.” (Ornette Coleman)

...and this:

“My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being... When you begin to see the possibilities in music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups... I want to speak to their souls.”  (John Coltrane)

More than anything else, the greatest jazz musicians say that jazz is a feeling.  It’s deep.  It’s expressive.  It’s inventive.  It is born from authentic experience.  It doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  It's creative.  It's an inseparable part of life, a part of every day existence...

To my knowledge, none of those musicians and singers quoted ever learned about jazz in a college.  They learned from other players and singers, recordings, jam sessions, the bandstand, and the woodshed.  That was their university, their preparatory school.  They learned from everything and everyone around them and evolved their “thing”.

The world has changed and along with it musical tastes (no comment).  Many of the greats in the jazz tradition have sadly passed on, leaving us with artifacts.  Seeking musical integrity is much harder today.  Do today's singers look to seminal jazz recordings for ballast, to anchor themselves to a master musician or singer, in order to transcribe and imitate to find their way?

Many singers today are well trained proficient technicians with flawless intonation. They scat with facility.  Many have jaw dropping chops.  But how many know how to break your heart like Billie Holiday?  How many make you really feel something profound? I don’t fault the educational institutions.  They are actually a saving grace in a world where music might otherwise only consist of two chords vamping over a synth drum track, without a melody, (embellished by chorus after endless chorus of melisma, sung by someone in a thong and 6 inch stilettos...)

Albert Einstein once said that if you can’t break something down and explain it in its simplest terms then you really don’t know it.  Here is what I believe to be true about the art of singing jazz:

• jazz singing, when done well, makes you feel something other than merely impressed by someone’s vocal chops.  You should feel every song in your heart, soul, and deep down in the depths of your loins.

• It should be authentic, unaffected, expressive, and soulful (a word that is overused in theory but less so in practice).

• Phrasing is the piece de resistance, so know what you're singing about.  Have a point of view. Don't just sing words.  Find a way to live them authentically in performance.

• Improvise on a melody. This can include changing rhythmic values of notes, crossing bar lines, dynamics, adding embellishments, or completely changing a melody (a la Betty Carter).

• Jazz is collaborative and requires interacting musically with musicians. It means getting inside the music, hearing the changes, knowing who is doing what, not just standing out in front like eye candy. You are the band.  Listen.  Respond.  It’s a give and take.  Jazz singers are musicians.

• nuance, subtlety, double entendre, taking space, dynamics...  No need to oversing.  A little spice is nice.  Too much may render the dish inedible.

• scat singing does not make someone a jazz singer, and someone who doesn't scat can be a great jazz singer.

Last thoughts...

As the lyricist Sammy Cahn wrote in 1938, for Mildred Bailey, Ella, Sarah, June Christy, Little Jimmy Scott, the Four Freshman, and Frank Sinatra to sing each in their own way,  Please be kind.