#Vocalese

[jazzdailyblog]

Jon Hendricks: The Jazz Vocal Innovator

Introduction: In the realm of jazz, few artists have left a more indelible mark than Jon Hendricks. Renowned for his exceptional vocal talents and innovative approach to jazz singing, Hendricks redefined the possibilities of vocal jazz improvisation. This blog post pays tribute to the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Jon Hendricks. Early Years and Musical Genesis: Born one hundred and…

[burlveneer-music]

A Fourth World album by Shackleton (!) - The Majestic Yes (2022)

Taking off from Beaugars Seck’s foundational sabar drum rhythms — recorded by Sam in Dakar in February 2020 — Shackleton has constructed a trio of intricately layered, luminous, enchanted, epic excursions. The second is more dazzled and meandering, with jellied bass, insectile detail, and discombobulated jabbering; the third is more liquid, fleet of foot, and psychedelic, with a grooving b-line and funky keyboard stabs, scrambled eastern strings and hypnotic vocalese. The harmonium in The Overwhelming Yes sounds like Nico blowing in chillily from up the desert shore. The overall mood is wondrous, twinkling with light, onwards-and-upwards; an uncanny, dubwise mix of the ancient and the futuristic. Mark Ernestus’ Version is stripped, trepidatious, mystical, and stranger still, with just a snatch of the original melody, extra distortion and delay, and crystal-clear drum sound. Twenty minutes of startlingly original music, with Shackleton the maestro at the top of his game, and a characteristically evilous dub by Mark Ernestus. Mastered by Rashad Becker; handsomely sleeved. Sick to the nth. Love 4 Ever.

[thatrickmcginnis]

BOBBY McFERRIN, TORONTO 1988

Bobby McFerrin was about to have his life changed when I photographed him in the spring of 1988. McFerrin had been developing his unique vocal style for years before he released his first album in 1981, and he had released two more well-reviewed records before Simple Pleasures and its massive hit single was released in 1988. "Don't Worry, Be Happy" would win three Grammy, top the Billboard Top 100 and win gold records in the US, UK, Sweden and Denmark. (It would go platinum in Germany.) But its reputation as a one-hit wonder and a novelty record made it stand out uncomfortably in McFerrin's career, and he rarely if ever performs the whole song in concerts any more.

Bobby McFerrin comes from a musical family - his mother was a singer and teacher and his father an operatic baritone - and he was famous for his vocal skills before the hit that changed his life, bringing a capella and vocalese back into jazz over a decade after it had its heyday in the '50s and early '60s with acts like Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Influenced by Keith Jarrett's improvisations, he has performed and recorded with jazz luminaries like Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, the Marsalis brothers and Tony Williams, and he guest conducts symphony orchestras all over the world. In the last few years he has focused on working with vocal ensembles, on record and at a weekly session he holds at a venue in Berkeley, California.

I still have no idea why Bobby McFerrin was moved to mug constantly during my portrait session with him back in 1988, and with time I have also forgot where this was shot and who I was working for. What I do know was that McFerrin restlessly pulled faces for most of the shoot, and that the memory of being unable to control my subject cast a shadow over this session - so much that I skipped it altogether when I was going through my files for my old blog several years ago. Since then, however, the strangeness of these photos has papered over whatever lingering memory I might have had, and legendary Welsh photographer Chalkie Davies recently told me that McFerrin did the same thing with him. So this is probably the first time these photos have been seen since whoever hired me for this assignment published them, nearly forty years ago.

[onehandtypingb1]

Song of the Day: Eddie Jefferson, "Moody's Mood For Love"

Jazz singer Eddie Jefferson was born on this day in 1918. He was an innovator in vocalese, a musical style in which lyrics are set to an instrumental composition or solo. You might rememnber a week ago Monday, when we talked about Annie Ross and how she was influenced by another singer, King Pleasure; King Pleasure was influenced by Eddie Jefferson, who in turn was influenced by Leo Watson. Annie…

[still-single]

Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante s/t LP (Ever/Never)

You can spend a week with Mattin one night but that’s all in the company kept. Ask Nathan Roche and Paul Bonnet; with his Karpentry outfit, Matt’s transformed them into an inside-out Von Südendfed for about half the runtime of this corkin’ collab, which would make him at least 25% upside down Mouse on Mars (or Mars on Mouse). Anyone into the idea of CIA Debutante who’s been whelmed by the records – and understand, that is NOT ME, I love ‘em – might appreciate the crust they’re buried beneath here, and if you’re already on board, this new perspective of Eurothinkspeak crackle is gonna raise a ghost of MES chokin’ on slimy giraffe tongue all over your present abode. Rent’s going up with this one for sure. Much of it sounds pretty easy to discern the two factions at work (“Medieval Cocaine”) but you’ll know when it starts to turn. Easy to have missed out what with there being two Al Karpenter releases at once (the other, which I’ll get to, features Triple Negative, a project that’s always left me feeling like I was listening to someone else’s record and remembering it wrong), but the joys are getting easier to spot amid these balls of freewheelin’ noise, laptop melt, barometric pressure and thog-trog vocalese. Goddamn this one’s great. “New Puritan” / “Papal Visit” levels of confuse. “No one knows where inspiration comes from,” he says, but this might provide a clue. I’m almost certain you can get caught up in the next week should you want one of these. (Doug Mosurock)

[singeratlarge]

MY SONG OF THE WEEK: “Like a Father to a Son”

“Over valleys over mountains,

Found somewhere safer from the cold

Started drinking from the fountain

Makes you wise as you get bold…”

My lyrics came from dreams I had that were set in the Old West and California. It imagines late night tale-telling around a campfire on the trail, with a father offering sage advice to a son. My Dad was a fan of “cowboy songs” so I’m picking up that thread. I wrote this while I was living in Pennsylvania, on a day I was feeling a tinge of homesickness for California. The song created a metaphor, moving like a fantasy transcontinental train ride. Dreams are like that.

The image shown is a cartoon of Cyrus Dallin’s statue “Appeal to the Great Spirit” (a.k.a. the Brother Records logo used by The Beach Boys). The music and vocal style is inspired by Gerry Rafferty's "Long Way 'Round" and The Beach Boys "Leavin' This Town" (Blondie Chaplin and Carl Wilson for vocalese)--there's a little PET SOUNDS and “Til I Die”-style orchestration in there, too. A Dennis Wilson song is quoted in the second verse. Tim Breon was at the mixing board for this. It’s one of my personal favorite recordings.

https://johnnyjblairsingeratlarge.bandcamp.com/track/like-a-father-to-a-son

#father #son #mother #daughter #beachboys #holland #OldWest #California #Pennsylvania #campfire #cyrusdallin #brotherrecords #gerryrafferty #blondiechaplin #carlwilson #AmericanGothic #americana #denniswilson #johnnyjblair #singersongwriter #singeratlarge

[sivavakkiyar]

Lambert Hendricks & Bavan, an old vocalese jazz group, do Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary”. It’s great

[allmusic]

AllMusic Staff Pick: Kurt Elling The Messenger

On the follow-up to his Grammy-nominated debut, jazz singer Kurt Elling applied his wild vocalese and lyrical inventions to a set of originals and quirky readings of classic material ranging from Eden Ahbez's haunting "Nature Boy" to Dexter Gordon's "Tanya Jean."

- Timothy Monger

[lboogie1906]

John Carl Hendricks (September 16, 1921 – November 22, 2017) known professionally as Jon Hendricks, was a jazz lyricist and singer. He is one of the originators of vocalese, which adds lyrics to existing instrumental songs and replaces many instruments with vocalists, such as the big-band arrangements of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He is considered one of the best practitioners of scat singing, which involves vocal jazz soloing. Jazz critic and historian Leonard Feather called him the "Poet Laureate of Jazz", while Time dubbed him the "James Joyce of Jive". Al Jarreau called him "pound-for-pound the best jazz singer on the planet—maybe that's ever been".

He began his singing career at the age of seven. He has said: "By the time I was 10, I was a local celebrity in Toledo. I had offers to go with Fats Waller when I was 12 and offers to go with Ted Lewis and be his shadow when I was 13. He had that song 'Me and My Shadow'. And he had this little Negro boy who was his shadow, that did everything he did. That was his act."

As a teenager, his first interest was in the drums, but before long he was singing on the radio regularly with another Toledo native, pianist Art Tatum. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[sweetdreamsjeff]

Jeff Buckley: Mystery White Boy (Columbia)

Dave DiMartino, MOJO, June 2000

Posthumous collection of live tracks culled from the singer's '95-'96 Mystery White Boy tour. Released in tandem with 1995 concert video filmed in Chicago.

MYSTERY WHITE BOY is by no means too little, but it is very much too late. A live package bearing the air of intent – to capture a young artist just beginning his too-brief flight, to cement a late singer's reputation as one of the last decade's potential artistic giants, may be both – it too often displays what is simply not there. And that, sad to say, would be a talent as large and far-reaching as his father's.

It's embarrassing to admit, but my sole encounter with the son of Tim Buckley did not showcase me at my most critically acute: midway through his set, in a small theatre in Hollywood, I sat watching him sing most of the songs from Grace and – well, there's no other way to put it – I fell asleep. As one whose profession has involuntarily placed him in auditoriums watching full sets from the likes of Hootie & The Blow Fish, Krokus and Michael Bolton and never shutting a weary eye, I can only shrug and attempt to rationalise why. And I blame my lack of fervour regarding Jeff Buckley on a) my age and b) his genetics.

Genetics first, please. Though precious few escape it – Rufus Wainwright alone comes to mind at the moment – there is an infamous tradition of which Frank Sinatra Jr, Julian Lennon and a growing army of newcomers like Chris Stills are painfully aware: singing sons sound like singing fathers. And while there are indeed patches on Mystery White Boy where Buckley's aggressive yelping sounds less like his father's and more like a cross between Robert Plant's and (God help him) Perry Farrell's, these sections come less often than they would have to signify any sort of unique vocal talent. Midway through album opener 'Dream Brother' one can hear such a yelp, and it momentarily startles – until one thinks a) he would've ruined his voice if he kept singing like that, and b) his father did this sort of thing so much less self-consciously on Starsailor. Even more troublesome for one apparently intent on not following his father's footsteps: the song itself must of course be related to 'Dream Letter', Tim Buckley's extremely moving Happy/Sad track – addressed to a former lover regarding the son they conceived that he would rarely see.

What I remember most from that night in my plush chair in Hollywood was watching a young man conspicuously caught between the clichéd rock and a hard place. When he sang in his natural, high voice, he could not help but sound like the fresh-faced father-to-be who recorded the likes of 'I Can't See You' and 'Aren't You The Girl' in 1966. And when he attempted the vocalese at which his father excelled, perhaps more than any other pop singer of his generation, he was too nasal, lacking the deep bass that would make such songs as 'Lorca' so eerie, sounding forced and not quite there when trying for the chimplike vocal acrobatics that seared throughout Starsailor.

Much of what I saw then is what I hear now on Mystery White Boy,though it must be said that the bands sounds better than I recall – guitarist/ producer Michael Tighe burns throughout, thankfully (for Buckley's sake, if not ours) not sounding like Tim Buckley's long-time cohort Lee Underwood, while the rhythm section of bassist Mick Grandahl and drummer Matt Johnson provides thump-solid bottom on nearly every song. Still, rather than displaying a young singer at the height of his powers, most of this album focuses your attention elsewhere – via the cover versions, on better writers like Leonard Cohen, Big Star or Morrissey/Marr. Not to mention 'The Man That Got Away', once sung by Judy Garland – whose singing daughter, need I add, is not irrelevant here either. And were it possible to forget that Jeff Buckley's father ever existed, such songs as the newly unveiled 'What Will You Say' bear lyrics that make forgetting exceedingly difficult: "Father, do you hear me? Do you know me? Do you even care?"

In the end, fully enjoying the art of Jeff Buckley may simply be a matter of age. Those who have never enjoyed the legacy of his father – never watched his career soar, crash and burn, in real time and not via a stack of CD reissues – can hear the younger singer in ways in which I will never be able. Which is not a bad thing. Because, frankly, along time ago, if someone had pulled out a copy of Fred Neil's Sessions and played it for me, maybe I wouldn't have spent that better part of my adolescence raving about the unadulterated genius and uniqueness of Tim Buckley. And maybe, once again, I would have missed something.

© Dave DiMartino, 2000

[jazzdailyblog]

Annie Ross: A Jazz Legend's Life in Melody

Introduction: Annie Ross, born Annabelle Short ninety-four years ago today on July 25, 1930, in Mitcham, Surrey, England, was a jazz singer, songwriter, and actress whose career spanned over seven decades. Known for her pioneering work in vocalese, Ross’ contributions to jazz have left an indelible mark on the genre. Her life, marked by both triumphs and tribulations, is a testament to her…

[gregpoppleton]

Bop Singers Killed by Cars - Phantom Dancer 10 September 2024

Dave Lambert was an American jazz lyricist, singer, and an originator of vocalese. He was best known as a member of the trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Lambert spent a lifetime experimenting with the human voice and expanding the possibilities of its use within jazz. Buddy Stewart (born Albert James Byrne Jr.) was an American jazz singer. Both Lambert and Stewart were killed in car crashes (1966…

[theloniousbach]

FROM THE SMALL’S ARCHIVE: APRIL VARNER/CAELAN CARDELLO, MEZZROW’S, 28 APRIL 2024, 9 pm set

I tried, I really tried. But, an hour of a singer, even an appealing one who will be featured on Toledo’s Jazz Spectrum this weekend, with an even more appealing pianist got tedious too quickly. CAELAN CARDELLO did a duo gig with Rufus Reid that impressed me and APRIL VARNER’s April by April album works even with the gimmick that all the tunes have April in the title. But I think her programming is what got me.

She opened strong with April in Paris from the album and Miss Otis Regrets which, however, she overexplained. Those were jazz tunes and Cardello’s accompaniment had comping and parallel melodies leading to rich engaging soloes. Lover Come Back to Me’s promise was undercut because she did it in its original operetta ballad format. She has a fine voice and proper jazz instincts without too many of the typical affectations.

It was the programming—a tearjerker song from Toy Story 2, I’ll Know from Guys and Dolls, and a singer/songwriter song before her own singer/songwriter song all were just kind of meh. Capably done but leaving Cardello little to do. I perked up for his solos, but he was working with lesser material. She cleverly did a spontaneous blues based on five words from the audience, but a real blues would have tested her as a singer.

Her album though works. There’s no stage patter and the April gimmick actually works. I Remember April and April in Paris are obvious choices, but she adds a fine vocalese version of an early Pat Matheny tune that I remember plus a Paul Simon among others.

She’s young and relatively new to jazz, coming from opera. But she said, she thought it was elevator music and so she may well approach this as singing songs not using her voice as a horn. That may be what cuts down on the affectations. I just didn’t get enough jazz, like I have from Veronica Swift or Jazzmeia Horn among the up and comers, despite the welcome presence of Caelan Cardello.

But I did try.

[radiomaxmusic]

July 24, 2024: 4pm ET: Feature Artist: Manhattan Transfer

The Manhattan Transfer is an American vocal group founded in 1969, performing a cappella, vocalese, swing, standards, Brazilian jazz, rhythm and blues, and pop music. They have won eleven Grammy Awards. There have been several incarnations and formations of the Manhattan Transfer, with each edition having different styles, with original member Tim Hauser being the only person to be part of each…

[moochilatv]

Tokoname presents: Lost In Vibes

Are you lost or not?

Tokoname is a producer of lofi hip-hop chill instrumental beats music, somethings with a light sprinkling of vocalese, but most often purely instrumental and is part of the Jay's Lofi Music brand including L O F I L U V, distant.face, strewing and Tokoname.

Listen LOST IN VIBES, via Starbust Records, in Spotify:

[singeratlarge]

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY—SUNDAY MATINEE MUSIC VIDEO: “Like a Father to a Son”—I’m paying tribute to my father and fathers everywhere with this “open story-song.” The lyrics came from dreams about the Old West and California, imagining late night tale-telling around a campfire on the trail, with a father offering sage advice to a son. My Dad was a fan of “cowboy songs” so I’m picking up that thread. I wrote this while I was living in Pennsylvania, on a day I was feeling a tinge of homesickness for California. The song served as a metaphor, like a fantasy transcontinental train line.

 The cartoon image shown in the video is of Cyrus Dallin’s statue “Appeal to the Great Spirit” (a.k.a. the Brother Records logo used by The Beach Boys). The music and vocal style is inspired by Gerry Rafferty's "Long Way 'Round" and The Beach Boys "Leavin' This Town" (Blondie Chaplin and Carl Wilson for vocalese)--there's a little PET SOUNDS and “Til I Die”-style orchestration in there, too. A Dennis Wilson song is quoted in the second verse. Tim Breon was at the mixing board for this. It’s one of my personal favorite recordings.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08cur9oHOEw

 #father #son #mother #daughter #beachboys #holland #OldWest #California #Pennsylvania #campfire #cyrusdallin #brotherrecords #gerryrafferty #blondiechaplin #carlwilson #AmericanGothic #americana #denniswilson #johnnyjblair #singersongwriter #singeratlarge