On Music

...The notorious "Beware of Young Girls" advises women to keep up their guard...

...He had her out singing and dancing for pennies in New Jersey bars during the waning years of the Depression...

...True, her music represents a departure from the conventions of American pop...

...What they write and sing is much closer to the French chanson than to American pop...

...By the end of the war, still only a girl, she was trying to make it as a professional...

...Yet Dory Previn has a lot to offer...

...Chapin, on the other hand, specializes in the ballad...

...Often, the stories and the emotions are virtually the same...

...I guess two in a row tends to constitute a hangup—but there it is," she remarks in introducing one of them on her Live at Carnegie Hall album...

...My point in delving into this biographical detail is to underline that Dory Previn has been an experienced, working professional for most of her life...

...the American singer is not...

...who ran a dry cleaning store but wanted to be a singer...

...The music she has put them to is bombastic, replete with grandiose crescendoes...

...Previn has to say...

...She has a cult of her own, though as with any cult following, it has probably done her more harm than good...

...Hall's album Beads and Feathers hits a nice groove between conventional American music with a Deep South flavor (she comes from Texas) and more adventurous stuff in a kind of dramatic monologue, "Hello My Old Friend," and in her portrait of a displaced person ("A country soul/Lost in the city") entitled "Uncle Malcolm...

...Dory Previn, by contrast, writes as one who has chosen life, who knows how much nicer things are on the sunny side...

...urges that we maintain contact with the gritty realities of life: curse the mind that mounts the clouds in search of mythical kings and only mystical things mystical things cry for the soul that will not face the body as an equal place and i never learned to touch for real or feel the things iguanas feel MS...

...later, they got married...

...Yes, because by one of those little quirks of cultural exchange, the chanson is passing into extinction as France's younger generation becomes more and more devoted to "Ye-Ye" music, its version of rock-'n'-roll...

...African high-life music is derived from jazz (an example of a cultural double-reverse...

...Chapin comes pretty close to being our Jacques Brel, our Aznavour...

...His latest album is quite aptly named Short Stories, for that is precisely what his songs are, musical short stories —about the errant disc jockey on station "W*0*L*D," about "Mail Order Annie" and the girl called "Easy," and about "Mr...

...Previn into show business...

...In "The Lady with the Braid," she sings of sex as anodyne...

...Her lyrics are personal to the point of being esoteric...

...PREVIN also composed a whole cycle of songs about her father...

...She knew the American pop idiom inside and out before she began to stretch it, to deviate from it and to introduce elements that I think could only have come from the chanson tradition...

...The best of them all, however, is Dory Previn...

...In style and attitude, even in their audiences, they are most reminiscent of the old French auteur compositeurs, like Charles Aznavour and Charles Trenet...

...But T think I have detected one that does...

...These two soloists write well and sing their songs in good comfortable style...

...I hesitate to mention Laura Nyro at all because she's a rather bad example of the type of artist I'm talking about...

...There is a small yet important group of songwriter-singers in the U.S...

...rock-'n'-rollers exist in practically every nation under the sun...

...Indeed, she has written a good many more than two...

...Nevertheless, one has only to listen to any of Ms...

...The cycle begins with the chilling "My Daddy Says I Ain't His Child," and ends with the excellent "Aftershock," recounting how she hears the news of her father's death just after a California earthquake...

...To put it bluntly, the French chanteuse was one of the great performers of our time...

...Previn's five albums to be struck by the originality of her songs...

...And it was my ear that told me the emotional intensity I heard in those French performers, the kind of songs they sang and the general feeling of their music, had its echo here in the work of a cult favorite, Laura Nyro, and in that of three lesser known songwriter-singers, Carol Hall, Harry Chapin and Dory Previn...

...In between she delineates every aspect of her relationship with him—not in the Freudian terms one might expect but in good Active form, with details, scenes, even lines of dialogue when they are relevant...

...I'm talking about Jim Morrison and the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane and a few other heavy groups...

...In fact, the great subject of her work is sanity, its care and keeping...

...Some potential fans, I think, have been put off by this, regarding her with the suspicion media figures commonly arouse...

...In both cases, the melodies are slight and simple, and for the same reason: The emphasis is always on the words, the story and the emotion...

...These are altogether interesting and important pieces of work...

...I am not suggesting that Previn is a second Piaf, or even like Piaf...

...whose work rests only lightly, and sometimes never, on that foundation of ballad, blues and jazz underpinning all music in the American idiom...

...Nonetheless, the liberties she has taken are not really justified by what she has achieved...

...In her way, she does have a sort of genius, but one that has little to do with madness...

...Now, my knowledge of French popular music is very superficial, picked up mainly from a good essay on the subject by Ned Rorem and from hours and hours of listening to the recordings of a few favorites: Trenet and Aznavour and Edith Piaf...

...In other words, I am ignorant enough to trust my ear...

...For it is less concerned with what she sings than who she is—the injured party in a highly publicized divorce case, and one who, partly as a result of her marriage breakup, suffered a collapse and was confined in a mental hospital...

...Whether jazz, or rock, or any of its other forms, our music has been widely accepted, respectfully translated and slavishly imitated...

...Let me explain: At the end of the '60s— that seems a long time ago, doesn't it?—a number of rock stars were writing songs extolling insanity, advertising it, urging people in that direction...

...On Music THE AMERICAN CHANSON BY BRUCE COOK CRITICS OF American popular music (myself included) often seem terribly eager to demonstrate its influence in distant parts of the globe and on exotic musical idioms— something that is certainly not hard to do...

...Carol Hall and Harry Chapin are a different matter entirely...

...from there to here...

...Working night clubs all over the country, she got the kind of experience that singers never get anymore...

...Previn has been adopted by radical feminists, who see in her the epitome of the wronged sister, and by the Sylvia Plath set, who equate madness with genius...

...She takes chances as an artist and as a human being that few would dare...

...Previn's little ricky-ticky tunes...

...it survives today in the offerings of the freak rockers, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Lou Reed...

...and a rich genre of Brazilian music—the bossa-nova— resulted from the collaboration of an American jazz saxist and a Brazilian guitarist on a single long-playing record...

...And "Mythical Kings and Iguanas," a song that sums up much of what Ms...

...Yet performing on the road was such a struggle that she quite willingly abandoned her singing career when she was given the chance to become a staff lyricist at M-G-M...

...They must have been for her, too, because it was her father, a frustrated musician, who pushed Ms...

...There she met Andre Previn, and the two became a song-writing team...

...In songs like "Yada Yada La Scala" (good in spite of its title), she tells us how much time and love we waste, how much trouble we make for ourselves...

...But there is still a more important difference between them...

...Moreover (and ironically), her small voice is not really equal to the demands of the material she composes for herself...

...She is one of the most—perhaps the most—interesting writers of popular music around today...

...Edith Piaf, of course, wrote practically none of her own material (her lyrics were frequently done expressly for her by poets like Coc-teau and Jacques Prevert), whereas Dory Previn writes all of hers...

...The Japanese play bluegrass...

...Tanner...

...The music was associated with LSD, but was symptomatic of the general breakdown of the time...

...The little musette waltzes that provided the settings for most of Edith Piaf's songs have their equivalent in Ms...

...musical influence is so worldwide that we might even be tempted to conclude the currents never travel the other way...